Sound Exercise: The Accusation analysis

The Story
The Accusation begins on a young man whom is strolling through school, listening to music and unaware of whats happening around him until he hears the sound of a large crash. The student follows where the noise came from and discovers another student in a room and an object laying in pieces on the floor. This is obviously an object of some importance to the male student as they begin to argue and the female student denies his accusations. The camera then zooms onto a male figure in the background who is hidden from the two arguing, who is the real culprit of the disaster.

Use of sound
We used; diegetic sound, on-screen, off-screen and contrapuntal sound. We we're unable to use all of the sound techniques because we couldn't see a way in which we could appropriately interpret them into the piece. We tried to input as many different uses of sound as we could but were unable to use non-diegetic, parallel and a sound bridge.

1. In the first scene we use a low angle shot to film a male student making his way up the stairs. The sound in this shot is coming from both the boys headphones and his footsteps as he walks up the stairs. The sound from his headphones is both diegetic and on screen as we can see both the headphones and the audience and character can hear the music. The sound of his footsteps is again the same, it is both onscreen and heard by both the character and the audience.

2. The second shot carries on from the first as a panning shot and the same sounds are used again. Both the music and footsteps carry on as the sound and so the sound in this shot is still both diegetic and on screen.

3. The next shot is of the back of the boys head as he makes his way through a corridor, this could be seen as a close up of the back of his head. Both the sound of the footsteps and the sound of the music carries on and the sound of the music becomes louder in this scene to signify we've come closer to the character who is listening to the music. There is an offscreen sound when we hear a large banging sound in this shot and this is when the music then becomes parallel and the music suddenly does not match the mood.

4. This then carries on into a long shot in which the character is running towards the sound he had just heard. The music has been cut off at this point and the only sound used in this shot is the sound of the boys footsteps.

5. The next shot is a point of view shot, from the male students point of view, of a female obviously in distress. There is dialogue in this scene but this is coming from the male student and the camera is focused not on him, but the other student. This would make the sound an off-scren sound as it cannot be seen by the audience.

6. We then used a mid shot of both of the characters arguing over the destruction over what is was that was obviously broken, signified by the large crashing sound. All the sound in this scene is on screen and diegetic as it comes from both of the characters who are both onscreen at this moment.

7. The scene then cuts to them still arguing but the shot is focused on a figure hiding somewhere behind the female student and zooms slowly into the figure in the back. This makes the sound of the arguing become offscreen as we can no longer see both of the characters arguing.

I believe that the types of sound we chose to use suited what was happening within each of the scenes. We used all of the types of sound we were able to use, except from non-diegetic sound. The music we used would effectively match what we were trying to do. Like when we used the sound of the crash from the scene but we had the boy listen to his music before the crash to make a parallel sound, we wanted the parallel sound to create an effect upon the audience and to make the audience unsettled by the sudden change in sound.

Critical assessment 
As for the camera work, there were plenty of places in which it was wobbly and unsteady when we required the camera to move. We tried to keep it as stable as we could but in some places due to the shot type we wanted to use it was difficult for the shot not to be slightly shaky. As for the sound we both used sound we recorded, used microphones and input sound. When it came to the music coming from the boys headphones we input the sound in and I think this was more effective that just recording the sound from his headphones, although the sound was not as muffled as it perhaps should have been. But we chose the better option to put the sound in rather than record in in this instance. However the crash sound we used wasn't as magnificent as it should have been. I think that our uses of sound were very effective and we used them in the right places and at the right moments.

Conclusion
I think that what was positive about our piece was the way we appropriately used both shots and sound together. Our downfall was the shaky shots and that sometimes the sound was out of place, for example we change shots near the end of the piece but we made the sound overlap so that the sound from both the shots would fit into one another but the sound increases. Our final shot was a zoom and this was very shaky and didn't work as effectively as it should have, we could have used a different shot for this. We were trying to make this a dramatic moment but it was ruined by the wonky zoom.