Sound Analysis - Where's Shannon?

The Story
Where's Shannon is the story of two school girls who meet up at the school gates and make their way to class together. Once they arrive they realise that nobody is there yet and assuming that they are just early they enter the classroom and wait for the rest of their class and their teacher to arrive. But their wait for the rest of the class is interrupted but not by their classmates but by books falling from shelves on their own. They get up to investigate which is when one of the characters, Shannon, disappears. The other student looks towards the door which closes on it's own and she is left alone in this room with these strange paranormal happenings.

Use of sound
We used; diegetic, non-diegetic, on-screen, parallel, off-screen and contrapuntal sound. We tried to use the appropriate sound at the best moments and I believe we achieved this although in some places the sounds cuts in or off too quickly perhaps or is too quite although we made good use of the microphones in our first time using them.

1. The first shot is from inside and is meant to suppose to the audience it is a point of view shot although it is never certain. But we used an off-screen sound of heavy breathing to create this assumption that someone is watching these two girls from the window. The sound of breathing is to create fear within the audience as to what is going to happen to these girls as they are being watched.

2. The next scene is quickly switched to a panning shot of one of the girls walking towards the other and within this scene the off-screen breathing has disappeared but what we use is on-screen dialogue as the girl is on the phone. This sound is a diegetic sound and contrasts what we hear in the first scene as there is nothing for us to fear from the sounds within this scene. Although it creates tensity and the audience are aware something will happen but the characters clearly are not and the audience will be waiting for something bad to occur.

3. These two first scenes constantly switch between eachother so we are getting both the story and an increasing dramatic moment in the running up to what is going to happen.

4 We then see a long shot of them walking down the corridor towards the classroom. This is again, more dialogue, in the build up to what is going to happen but unfortunately the dialogue in this scene is not very clear and we also have the unfortunate sounds of people talking and moving out of shot but this was unavoidable. But then within this scene we get the creaking of the door as they enter the classroom which adds to the tense and eerie atmosphere we were trying to create.

5. We then tried to use contrapuntal sound when the girls were listening to music but I dislike how the music within this scene does not sound at all muffled, as I wanted the music from the headphones to. Unfortunately we had to place music over the sound of the music coming from the headphones in this scene as we focused more upon getting the dialogue from this scene and so the music was very hard to hear. The music did then work with being a contrapuntal sound, as it did not match the atmosphere we made when the crash of the books interrupted suddenly to frighten the audience, although may have been slightly too loud over the sound of the bang of the books.

6. The music then fades as they get up to investigate the fall of the books but it does not fade smoothly and it would have sounded better if we'd have stopped it suddenly at the crash of the books.

7.  We then get the second sign of paranormal activity as the chairs appear to move on their own making a large crashing sound as they clash against the table to again make the audience jump as it catches them off guard. This is on screen and as it matches the atmosphere now is also parallel.

8. The moving of the chairs moves over onto this scene although it would have been better if both these scenes the sound have overlapped and created a sound bridge. We do this so the audience then see the characters reaction to the chairs moving. We then have more diegetic dialogue coming from one of the girls as the other, Shannon, has no disappeared and she frantically panics as her friend has now vanished.

9. The next scene in which we use sound is of the last sign of paranormal activity as the character is now both scared and very panicked from what has since occurred since she entered the classroom and she watches the door begin to close on it's own. As the door closes we included a piece of non-diegetic music that carries on as the scene disappears to black to create a cliff hanger. We also made the closing of the door very loud to match the rest of the paranormal activity.

Conclusion
In many cases our different uses of sound had to be improvised or we had to accept a lower quality as to what we would have expected as we didn't have endless amounts of time but despite this we used the different types of sound appropriately and you can see evidence of how we tried to use every type of sound as we expected to do. We used both different cuts and filming techniques to match our sound , using both techniques on ways we filmed and what sound we used based upon the types of shot used.  The sound could have been improved in places although overall our technique was good.