Reviewing Psycho Shower Scene Lesson

Psycho , ' Shower Scene ' using Foley sounds
During our first couple of weeks with college, before starting the Carousel, we were given a task to recreate sounds - aka Foley sounds - and use these sounds to replace the actual sounds into the psycho shower scene.

An example of how foley sounds are made

To start off, we watched the psycho shower scene without sound and we had to record several ideas that we could use to recreate these sounds - i.e. the stabbing was recreated with the sound of a cabbage being chopped. So using a cue sheet, we had several sounds recorded and ready to recreate. Now the idea of foley sounds is to use different objects to try and make a similar sound to the original. This is where the creativity was released ! For the shower running , we used a packet of rice hitting the bottom of a plastic container; this sounded like the water hitting the base of the bath. Beth volunteered to recreate the scream sound effect. The other sound effects, like a door being opened or a curtain being pulled, proved very simple and self-explanatory.

Once all the foley sounds were in place and finished we used the editing software, Premiere Pro, to edit these sounds into the scene and make it seem as realistic as possible. Which is what we spent our lesson on Monday the 2nd of October doing. There was some effects which we had to find online as we couldn't find this footage ourselves, e.g. some backing music. This is known as ' found content ' due to the fact it's content that we didn't produce and we had to obviously go and find it. This software is fairly new to some of us students so there was some effects that we have liked to edit further , but due to our lack of knowledge, it wasn't possible.



How the footage looked on Premiere Pro

With the lesson finishing, we all knew that there was several things that we would have to add for the next time. One of the main things was the fact we didn't have a stabbing sound ( it had completely disappeared ) so next lesson we will have to find an online sound effect, or potentially borrow someone else's effect from our group. There were several other effects that we would like to add like the shower curtains being pulled or some tension raising sound effects. On a whole, this lesson provided very useful in our understanding of how to use Premiere Pro and the whole concept of using foley sounds. It's definitely developed my skills in using the software and the editing side of things.

- Owen Bowra