As someone interested in sound recording in general, I thought it would be a good idea to combine the credits I have to include for the sound effects in each episode with information of why I chose them, plus how I edited them.
Here is the full list of sound effects including where I got them from, plus what the original script called for.
This is the first of four episodes where George Coyne wasn’t present at the recording. Kate stepped in on the day and we recorded George’s lines remotely. This meant I had to include an extra step in the editing to put his lines in place of Kate’s. I think it worked out quite well!
I also had to work out how to do echoes on Garageband for the line that gets repeated by the Witch Princess’s eavesdropping. In order to do this you need to make a new track just for the echo as you can’t do it to one region specifically, but can add the effect to thw whole region.
Mixed sound effects:
Impact glass crash on metal small 01 + Impact glass debris fall to cement 02 (Adobe sound effects) mixed with Glass cracking (Pro sound) – Used this for the breaking glass, it’s not quite perfect as I ideally wanted numerous windows being smashed at once, but combined with the sound of Glass cracking from Pro sound, it gives enough of a sense of how many birds are at the window.
This was always going to be one of the hardest sounds for me to edit in. The cumulation of birds flying into the room, plus glass breaking is a big noise. I left out the flying sounds and went for squawking as it was a bit easier to mix together.
Water dripping in cave (Freesound) mixed with Witch Princess Gamelan Melody Stem -Atmosphere for an ancient dungeon is also surprisingly difficult to find in sound effects. I found this cave effect and mixed with part of the Witch Princess theme from Jean it gives the right atmosphere for the dungeon and won’t be the last time I use this mix in the series!
Wings on glass – Bird feather rustle – crow groom feather with beak pluck mixed with Tapping on Window short bursts then Singles – This was another one that was hard to find. I wanted the rustle of hundreds of wings on glass, but couldn’t quite find it. The tapping works if it’s beaks on the window instead of wings and mixing it with rustling gave the desired effect of there being hundreds of birds outside the window.
I’m not quite sure it works, as it sounds a bit like it’s Orson’s clothes rustling rather than bird feathers, but it works better than the beak tapping worked on it’s own!
The Cast for:
Squawk – Various squawks were recorded for me to use throughout the series whenever Captain Liam needs to speak.
Crew are all birds – Recorded all the cast making bird noises that could be used to show what happened to them under the spell.
This was also tricky to decide how much of this to use. Using it all the time would be too distracting to have in the background, not having it at all wouldn’t work either, so the crew conveniently only squawk when someone pays attention to them!
Orson and Aramelle check if they’re birds – Ep3 – O and A pat down
Fortune teller pulls Aramelle’s hands through the bars – Ep3 Fortune and A Hands – If I had a bigger budget I would have found a eay to record the sound of metal bars, but this works jsut as well.
Aramelle pulls hands back – Ep3 A hands back
BBC sound effects used:
ship – Thames Sailing Barge, Atmosphere Below Deck Under Sail, With Creaking Wood. (Recorded On Board S.B. Pudge.) (Bought) – This is the same sound i used in the previous episode – now just being a good indicator of when the scene is on board ship versus land.
Door opens, closes – Doors: Prison: Cell – Prison Door: Cell, opened and shut. (Bought) – Same sound from previous episode for the locking of the cell door. Just minus the lock noise, this time around.
BBC Historical birds flying – Crew fly away – this sound did take quite a bit of searching as most of the sound I could find was for one bird flying rather than multiple, and was going to leave it out completely. Eventually found this on the Pro sound website.
Adobe Sound Effects used:
object on ground – reversed– Hat pick up – used for when Aramelle picks up the Captain’s hat.
multimedia internet cd-rom flash electronic – Spell – this is the same sound from the previous episode for the spell taking effect.
Freesound used:
Water bubbling – Cauldron bubbling – Surprisingly difficult to find. Needed something for the background of the Witch Princess’s room. I do have some music for the Witch Princess from Jean, but went with this for this episode.
water bubbling by ultraaxvii — https://freesound.org/s/591151/ — License: Creative Commons 0
Cauldron stirring itself – Stirring bowl (Link needed) – Needed early on, so Witch Princess can tell cauldron to stop stirring and we can hear it happen. This ensures that we know later on, whern Aramelle reads a spell out that she’s made a spell happen…
stirring bowl.wav by dynamique — https://freesound.org/s/554557/ — License: Creative Commons 0
Pro sound used:
Rifling through bottles – glass jars baby food – This is the sound for when the Witch Princess is looking for wool of bat. Most sounds found were for one bottle at a time which didn’t work, hence the baby food jars.
Footsteps clanking – Armour footsteps 2 – Tried a few different versions of this before settling on this one. Most of the ones I rejected sounded like soldiers rather than suits of armour, so I needed to search for the sound of metal!
Parakeet bird moves around cage chirps – Captain hops onto Orson’s shoulder – Again I nearly left this out, for not being able to find a sound that worked. It was slightly difficult to visualise what was happening in the scene without it though, so glad I found it!
Music:
There’s quite a lot of back and forth in this episode as Orson and Aramelle aren’t together for a large chunk of it, so the scenes flit between them. Decided early on that the best way to signify the action going to another character was with the Krumhorn Stem from The Village music in episode one. The only time I don’t use this to change the scene is the first time we go to the Witch Princess before Orson and Aramelle are separated.
ChristyESWriter 