Background Sound Effects Editing of Movies or TV Shows

The 3 main kinds of sound effects we edit in movies and tv shows are referred to as hard effects, Foley, and background sound effects. The big difference between them is primarily their duration. Hard effects will usually short sounds for example gunshots, light switches, a big slap on face, glass breaking, and so forth. Background sound effects almost always begin at the beginning of the scene and carry on all the way to the finish of the scene. For instance, if the scene we editing is staged at a city park, we will almost always include effects like birds chirping and singing from the start of the scene all the way to the end of it even when birds are usually not seen all of the time and in a lot of cases, not seen at all.

Why do we have to have the background sound effects?

If you look at the footage of a film as it was recorded on location you are likely to understand that it's fairly dead as far as ambiance sounds. For example, whenever you see a scene in a bar you will see a lot of men and women talking but you will only hear the voices of the main characters. The way this really is done is the fact that the people who you see speaking are genuinely pretending to be talking or talking in very very low voices. Clearly, this really is fairly unnatural for us humans to view considering in real bar there are a lot of people speaking. If the men and women at the bar have been speaking normally, it would have made it very difficult for the mixer to mix it in a way that your audience can easily comprehend the dialogue of the principal character (which is always the most important).

As a way to make it much more natural, a sound editor will add in a sounds of men and women speaking (sometimes called "Walla"). The editor will also add other sound effectsin order to help the scenes seem much more realistic such as glass cups clinking, mixing drinks, room-tone, perhaps an off stage billiard game and more.

What is room-tones? Inside of pretty much any space you enter you are likely to hear some type of sound. It could possibly be from your air conditioning, it can be because the city traffic outside, it could be from a refrigerator and some thing else. We will not always hear it but our brain is very use to hearing those sounds all the time. So to make our movie as natural to us humans as real-life, we always add room-tones on internal scenes. When scenes are outdoors, you have the choice of including traffic or wind. Additionally to making the movie sound more natural those sounds are very helpful for the dialogue mixer because the dialogue coming to the mix stage may well have times that a background noise in the dialogue recordings have noticeable changes as well as holes. The background sounds are helpful to mask those holes.

However, a main reason you add sound effects is for making a movie or Television show richer. The backgrounds are excellent for setting the atmosphere that the director would like the audience to experience. For example, it is possible to have 2 different films which can be shot at the exact same location in the city, let's say one romantic movie and one suspenseful. Within a romantic film we will place light traffic sounds, nearly no horns, wind in the trees, as well as birds. For the suspenseful movie you can add heavy traffic, other people honking , police sirens, nervous people voices, helicopters, and so forth. Along with the music, the background are amazing instrument for setting the mood for a film.

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