For this, there are tons of tutorials on YouTube that will show you how to do specific things in whichever program you need to learn in.
Learn to use the editing software as best as you can. These have color correction and grading tools built in, so you will have everything you need to get started making professional-looking short films, and for a cheap price, as compared to the $600+ price range for programs like Vegas Pro, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or Avid.
Sony Vegas Movie Studio starts at $49.95, and HitFilm 2 Express is in the $150 range. Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie can be used to an extent, but I would reccomend something at least a little bit better. We use Sony Vegas Pro 12 right now, but are trying out Avid Media Composer on our next project. You will need some sort of video editing software. Audio editing and mixing is a vast subject, worth many articles of explanation on its own, so we’ll save the rest of this subject for another time. Combined with music (see the first article here), the scene was tense, and I was very happy with the outcome. We added in the heartbeat, and, with some audio-editing techniques, made it speed up as he was cutting his throat, then come to a halt as he finished. To make things more intense, we recorded my heart-beat with our Zoom H4N. For this, I added Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 blood squirt sounds, which I only peppered throughout a bit. Layered in with the edited video, this sound improved the scene drastially, though it needed a little bit more.
The lucky coincidence was it being summer, and we had just purchased some watermelon during the day of our shoot (specifically to eat, so we kind of got two birds with one stone!). The creativity part was a simple idea- record a watermelon being cut into, then subsequently, being ripped open in half.
For this, it was very simple, yet it took a bit of creativity (and coincidence). However, the cutting of the throat is what we’ll refer to here. Most of these are very easy to reproduce, and require very little work or thought. In our case on “The Minute Glass”, we required a phone ringing, a straight razor scraping a neck, a straight razor actually cutting the flesh on the neck, blood squirts, boots walking on hard tile, etc. After the edit is complete, a list of all required sound effects is built, then given to the foley artist to go out and reproduce. Let me explain how it is we did that:įoley is the art of recording sound effects for a film to recreate everything happening on screen, as these sounds are typically either not picked up while filming, or at least, not picked up very well during filming. The sounds include a straight razor scraping against someone’s neck, and the razor actually cutting into the neck, with a bit of a blood squirt sound added here and there for effect. Now, I’ve already gotten a lot of feedback about the “raunchy” and “nasty” and “disgusting” sound effects in our short film, “The Minute Glass” (found here). This time around, we will dicuss the final pieces- sound recording, video editing, and audio editing. In the first two pieces, we discussed music, (some) audio, lighting, shooting, writing, and a bit of acting. We’re back, for the third and final piece in this short filmmaking series of articles.