Marianne Webb and Joe Howlett's A Level Media Sound Exercise Video Analysis

Marianne Webb and Joe Howlett's A Level Media Sound Exercise Video Analysis

Our video, known as "It's A Perfect Day", is about a student who goes to her classroom but falls asleep while waiting for her class to start. When she wakes up, strange things start to happen that clearly "put her off". We included all of the sound techniques in our video, e.g. we used diegetic sound where the creepy music on the phone was playing.

We chose particular techniques for certain scenes to make them effective to the viewer, for example, playing "It's A Perfect Day" by Lou Reed as background music at the end of the video when the main character walks away still shocked to portray irony (compared to the beginning of the video). I think our decisions for each technique in the video were quite successful as they did make the scenes dramatic and unnerving, as it was supposed to be for this video.

I believe we did capture the sound effectively and I believe we used the sound equipment effectively because, compared to when the microphone isn't used, the sound is much clearer for the viewer. I also think we did show the difference between each of the sound types. The diegetic sound was used when the Silent Hill theme song was playing on Joe's phone while the non-diegetic sound was used when the opening and ending songs play (The Island Song from Adventure Time and It's A Perfect Day by Lou Reed) at the beginning and end of the video. The on-screen sound was used when Joe's phone playing the creepy music is in the view of the main character's POV shot while the off-screen sound was used when the opening and ending songs play. The parallel sound was used when the opening song plays when the main character is feeling happy while walking to her classroom while the contrapuntal sound is used when the ending song plays when the main character is walking away shocked to portray irony. I think an effective sound-bridge was used when the intense music plays while the main character is walking to the door which then slowly drifts to silence before the hand suddenly appears.

I think the most positive elements of this video were the different music we used for each scene, particularly the opening and ending themes, the black-and-white effect during the dream and the Hand scene.

I think if I were to make improvements, I would have made some of the scenes stretch out longer as some scenes went by too quickly, like the Eye Opening scene at the beginning of the dream sequence.