Editing Blog: Adding Non-Diegetic Sound

Editing Blog

Today was round two of editing. I worked on editing our second and third scene. These are also the last two portions of our film. First, I had to cut, trim and merge the section of Jenna arriving at the home. This process was nearly identical to how I edited the first scenes. I did an action match for the shots of Jenna's arrival and her getting out of the car. One issue we ran into was the audio of the line "I think this is it... here goes nothing." Considering, we filmed this scene outside when it was windy, you can definitely hear an overwhelming sound of wind heating the camera's mic. There wasn't much I could do to fix it, reshooting would not change the fact that we've had a never windy week. So as the editor, I decided to best option was improving the volume as much as possible. I simply lowered the volume on this particular scene. Though it isn't perfect it's no longer a weird distraction in the film. Coincidentally, I had to turn the volume up on the scene prior to this one. This is was that looked like:

    

As a default, the volume starts at 100. For the quiet scene, I turned it up to 109 and lowered the other scene to 61. Another editing technique I used was adding non-diegetic sound. It was used to cover sound effects that would not have been picked in properly in the film. These sounds were the sound of Jenna's call dropping when she loses signal and the knock on the grandparents door. We actual planned to use do this which I'm super impressed by; the fact that we took that into consideration prior to film was smart on our part. A simple YouTube search provided me with these non-diegetic sounds. I screen-recorded the videos and unlink them in our editing app, then placed them on the needed section of the film. This is want the looked like, the audios bordered with white, is the non-diegetic sounds:

the first one is the sound of the phone call dropping and the second one is the knock on the door. For both of these I lowered the volume, as you can see, so they weren't too loud and unrealistic.