Music

With hindsight my biggest worry is that the music we found was perhaps not the best it could have been. The rule that only non-copyright music was to be used, was a difficult one to follow. We had made a mistake as a group as at first as we had not understood excatly what that meant. We found music made by users on sites such as youtube. We found three clips that we felt went smoothly with the clip as the pace matched the story and created the atmosphere we wanted. It was perhaps more engaging then the music we ended up using on the final piece.

However, although this created a panic at first, we had manage to find websites which had high quality music clips, and more imprtantly was copyright free! Some of these included freesound.org and soundsnap.com.

Before i had any experience with the editing software i thought it the magic tool that would solve all my problems. As i knew exactly what i wanted, my initial thought that i could finally make it happen via editing. What i found was that it was the complete opposite! Reality finally hit when i realised that it was definatley not as easy as it looked and a lot of hard work was to be involved. I struggled to get the hang of it at first, but after a bit of practice, and a tonne of useless clips later, i had become Hollywoods next best editor! Ok, maybe not that good, but i had got to grips with most of it.

What i found was the hardest part of the whole task was to make sure that the different music clips merged in a way that meant they changed over smoothly. At first i just put them exactly where i wanted them and watched what happened. I quickly realised that this was not at all what i was looking for, so instead i looped the clips together and examined that. This tactic worked better than the other approach but i still felt that something wasn't quite right about it. My solution after several other attempts was to put some sound effects in between to show a change in both scenes and music.

An effective decision of mine was to put the same music at the start and the end of the clip to show that we were back to the beginning. This also helped to make sure the audience got exactly what we were trying to show.

Iqra.