Secret Garden Sound Design

Originally we had intended for the piece to contain a frenetic build up showing a busy city, quickly cutting between traffic, crowds and construction work and building to a crescendo before revealing a peaceful garden hidden in amongst the chaos. Whilst an element of this was retained in the first fifteen seconds of our final edit, much of it was dropped for several reasons. Whilst we did intend to a show a marked contrast between the two settings, the footage we shot of the city did not blend well with the garden footage and the tracking shots that introduce this. The garden is also situated behind a dual carriageway and this is noticeable in the interview segments, so a wild track of traffic had to be included to make the voice-over blend in more seamlessly.

A wild track of birds in the cemetery was also included but did not quite have the same tranquil effect as originally intended.

The traffic and construction sound build up in the beginning was still included and the crescendo effect was achieved by layering several clips of passing cars whilst gradually increasing the volume and then cutting the volume of suddenly when the acceleration was at its peak. A filter was also on one of the tracks as we were hoping to emulate the 'drop' used in electronic music.

The interview recordings themselves required a lot of editing down. There was around 40 minutes of dialogue that had to be cut down to just two minutes, and to do this I first reduced it to segments covering the different topics discussed and from that removed the most concise sentences that best summarised the story.
The contributors responses to questions were very conversational in nature and there were a lot of 'ands' 'ums' 'sos'  and word repetition which didn't suit the voice over narration we had in mind for our piece. These were removed however some words ran into one-another and it was hard to establish a clean cut off point with some sentences.

The sentences "It really started last year in this form, but getting all the funding and permissions through the council has been a long game' and 'we could do with more cash to actually pay people, otherwise its all voluntary' required several trims to make a concise quote.

A minimalistic score was used consisting solely of notes plucked on an acoustic guitar which compliments the scenic beauty of the garden and the David Altobelli inspired cinematography.