The Soundtrack for 'Legal Alien'.

I was in charge of finding relevant music to go with our film opening sequence. I used a variety of different resources to choose our music from, but because we were not authorised to use just any music, we had to find websites that allowed us to use their music for free without needing a licence.

I heard about the website 'www.freeplaymusic.com' from my media teachers, this website is where i decided to choose all of my playlists from because it had such a huge variety of different genres, moods, tempos and beats to choose from that i felt if i researched the website thoroughly, trying to find the perfect soundtrack for our opening sequence i could carry out this task well.

I found a huge variety of songs that related to our sci-fi genre however i could only use a few of them when it came to importing them onto our final project because our opening sequence consists of only two mintues and we also have a voice over to fit in. I had to narrow it down to using just five different playlists, ensuring that i was chosing the most relevant and effective sounds to maintain our mysterious, dark, sci-fi theme. I then imported them on to our project and decided which ones go in where. For example, at the begining of our film we have a shot of the camera tracking across the grass and then tilting upwards for the titles which appear on each tree. We edited this into a fast foward pase however when the camera reaches tree, the pase gets slower until the titles disappear. The music i decided to put with this scene was a mysterious and exciting sound that i discovered from http://www.freeplaymusic.com/, the music was called 'Wasteland' and i feel that it has many conventions of the sci-fi genre that we are going for.

Treeva and I decided to to create a soundbridge for the end of this scene because towards the end of the shot, we introduce our character (Ivan) and the atmosphere changes dramatically, the 'Wasteland' sound we had chosen did not match the next scene so we did a soundbridge, mixing another playlist into the shot. I feel that this worked well and matched the up coming scene. The other sound we decided to use for the soundbridge was called 'Evil Curse'.

We showed our completed product to the media teachers and our class, everyone was asked to fill in a marking criterea form and to give their opinions about our film. This was very useful because it allowed us to gain somemore auidence feedback and we could improve our film using their notes. We were very impressed with the marks people had given us, we recieved very positive feedback. However some people did feel that there was things we could improve. For example, one of the groups said that our editing was a bit jumpy in some of the scenes and there were a few obvious cuts. We agreed with this comment and decided to make alterations to our film.

There was one scene that i thought could have been improved. It was the point of view shot, which then moved to an over the shoulder shot. It was difficult to edit this cut to make it look less jumpy, however using the blink effect on the new iMovie helped us create a creepy sequence which was not very noticeable when changing from the two shots.

Another improvement our audience felt was nessesarry was the sound. When moving from reality into a flashback it was not very recogniseable that the scene was changing into a flashback. Our auidence stated that to make it more obvious maybe we should add a sound effect to represent the flashbacks.

I searched onto the internet for a 'whooshing' sound to fit into our film. I found the perfect sound effect on http://www.freeplaymusic.com/, i then imported it onto our final piece. I had to consider timeing of the whooshing sound because the scenes i wanted to fit it into consists of only 0.5 seconds, therefore i needed to trim the whoosh clip into 0.5 seconds for all the flashbacks where i had imported the whooshing sound into.

The voice over is of our actor (Ivan) talking in Russain, we decided to have the voice over in another language also using subtitles because we felt it would bring a sense of multi cultural aspects to our project. We also wanted our audience to see that our actor who is alone in the deserted woods is from another country and he has been travelling to find aliens; doing a voice over in Russain will make it more obvious to the audience that he is foreign. Not only is our actor not from this country, he is also no longer from this planet because in our film he transforms into an alien; this also represents that he is from another place and it suggests to our veiwers that he is from out of this world.

We used the media departments camera to carry out the voice over task, when editing, i imported the sound from the tape and exported the video leaving us with just the voice over. I had to make sure the subtitles were matching with the voice over. It was difficult to get the timeing perfect, however we carried this task out well by using the new iMovie to make sure the writing stays on the screen for a longer period of time until Ivan had stopped talking. This was to allow enough time for the audience to read the writing as it is being spoken.

Mariam Nikpour.