Sound Editing

  • Sound Realistic
  • Music in the background
  • Ambience 
  • Get rid of unwanted sounds (Vehicles-Cars/Planes in the background, someone sneezing/coughing)
  • Allow the word 'Stop' and try to sort the problem out straight away i.e. if a plane passes, what till it passes you, until you continue to record the sound.
  • If you have one chance to get something, i.e. door stepping, make sure you can hear it.
  • If people have and accent, show them on screen as early as possible. If we see their lips with the sound, allows them to understand them better.
  • Have the right music which suits the narrative and pictures that are on the screen, makes it harder to understand from the audience's perspective.
  • If you don't get it straight away, get someone else to have a listen to what you are working on, to see if they can understand what you are working on. 

The following screenshots below are from a PowerPoint presentation on Factual and Fictional sounds, that I done with my peers, Lewis Browne and Rob Batson. I also included some examples of Factual and Fictional sounds, as well as, the legal and ethical issues faced with sound editing. 

I used these examples to show Factual Sounds, because they are all relevant to the genre of the programme, examples of this is Blue Planet. When they show a whale, they don't get some people to go into a recording studio to make the whale sounds, they go out and record the sound of a whale. Another example of this is Top Gear. When they record car the car engine sounds, they don't edit them in anyway to make the car engine sound better or worse than what it actually sounds like. Unlike Fictional Sounds, Factual has no ethical issues, this is because the sounds are naturally recorded, therefore, meaning there is no issues with the sound, meaning that you having to go and re-change the all the sounds, you have previously recorded.    

These are some of the examples I came up with that relate to Fictional Sounds. Fictional sounds are normally sounds that the main sound editor has to go and find which relates to the genre. Because Star Wars is a Sci-Fi, most of the sounds are not real, however, the lightsaber sound was made from someone walking past a television set with a microphone left on and as the person carrying the microphone went past the TV, it created the famous lightsaber sound which has always been used in the Star Wars franchise ever since. Another example of an everyday item being used in a Sci-Fi film is a piece of paper and an envelope. In Star Trek, to create the sound of the Enterprise doors opening it was created by a piece of paper being slipped in and out of the envelope.  

Another example of Fictional Sound is in Lord of the Rings, the sound of the Ringwraiths screeching, was actually made from two plastic cups being rubbed against one another.



When recording Fictional Sounds you may be faced with ethical issues relating to the filming. One ethical issue included Jurassic Park, when they filmed Jurassic Park, the T-Rex had a fierce roar, which showed that it is meant to be scary. However, a recent study suggests that dinosaurs shrieked much like birds. Subsequently, because the film has already been out for decades, they can't go and change the sound the T-Rex makes because that would take away the scariness of the T-Rex making the T-Rex look nice.