Sound Effects, Research & Practise

With filming to commence very shortly, I am already thinking ahead to the editing stage. The more practise and preparation I put in, the better the final product will look and sound.

A large portion of our film will include the child hiding from the 'monster'; creating the monster however is no easy task, and I think considering we will only show glimpses of the girl playing the monster, sound design is very important here. 

Many TV shows and films choose not to actually show the monster straight, but rather to build up suspense with sound, often giving the monster a memorable or iconic sound -

The 'smoke monster' from lost is a perfect example; for the entirety of the first season it terrorises a number of the survivors and yet we never truly see it; we hear stories from victims and begin to envisage our own interpretation of what the monster could look like. More importantly, because we don't see the monster, the noises that it makes quickly become more memorable than usual considering it's the only thing we can associate it with.

 Many films may not use sounds, but choose not to show the monster early on to build suspense and hype for the reveal of the monster - or in some cases (Cloverfield, 2008) barely shows us the monster at all throughout the film.

The sound I hope to create for the 'monster' in our film shouldn't be too big, but needs to sound good enough to aid the illusion of making it seem more like a movie! I plan on recording a couple of conversations between the lead character, Ivy, and Beth, her sister. I'll then manipulate the conversation with various effects such as reverb, delay and whole array of other plugins. Hopefully the conversation will still be somewhat understandable, but the voices will drone over the banging of the bedroom door. Combined with a few undecided sound effects, the end result should work well.

Using two sound bites from Kill Bill, Vol.2 I tried to achieve the effect I had planned using 2 'warped' reverb effects and EQ. I lowered high frequency signals (the speech) and raised the low frequency signals to make the words less understandable. The process was simple, and quick.

Here is the end result - 

EDIT:
After editing together a rough cut of the first 50 seconds of the film (including music), 'monster' sounds are no longer appropriate considering the tone and context that the film has adopted.
Sound effects are however still used to add eeriness and tension.