EDITING

STRANGER THINGS

As a final assignment for Sound for Visual Media (MTECH 125) in Fall 2024, the class on film audio that is part of the MiraCosta College Film program, I produced a completely new audio track for a scene in the limited science-fiction series Stranger Things, “The Bathtub” (Season 1, Episode 7).

The voices were provided by the students, as were the recorded sound effects. In addition, the footsteps and bicycle sounds were among the things recorded using Foley methods. The engine sounds and tire squeals, the car door slamming, and the sound heard when Eleven uses telekenesis to flip a van through the air came from a sound effects library. The chase “music” was produced from the XPand2 plug-in for Avid ProTools. The editing software was DaVinci Resolve 19.

Some of the elements of my sound design that Prof. Dave Drexler especially liked were my mixture of tire squeals and engine sounds, and how I raised and lowered the volume of the chase music in accordance with the amount of tension I wanted in the scene. The car sounds are a mixture of sounds recorded from four cars: A Dodge Neon, a 1950s classic sedan, a late model Jeep and even a Ferrari.

The music consists of only drums and bass. Because I had trouble recording sound from ProTools, I could not change the rhythm pattern, tempo, or bass melody during the recording. Instead, I set up one pattern and recorded the line output from my computer to the line-level input of a Tascam digital field recorder. However, by varying the loudness of the “chase music,” from loud to silent, the viewer feels immersed in the exciting chase scene.