In “Anne Manx and the Ring of Minotaur”, Anne recently found out that her love, Jack Reynolds was killed by her arch rival, Jean Richmond. Still angry over the death of Jack, Anne is found shooting some canned vegetables in an open field while Charlotte Miller tries to convince her to help find the Ring of Minotaur.

Thinking this was a fairly straight forward scene, I used a standard gunshot sound for whenever Anne fired her weapon. After laying in the proper ambience and Foley sounds, I thought I was done.

While listening to the completed work, I noticed that Anne’s conversation with Charlotte was really about how angry Anne was about Jack’s death. With each discharge of her weapon, Anne got more agitated.  I then realized that the standard gunshot sound was not properly representing Anne’s emotion in the scene.

With that in mind, I decided to use different sounds as she fired her weapon. I started with the original gunshot sound then as Anne’s anger grew, I used the sounds of incrementally bigger guns from handgun to shotgun to cannon! You’d think that would be too extreme of a change, but when I listened to it I barely noticed a change from one gun to the next. This informed me that I captured the “emotion” of the scene correctly.

I learned from this experience that sound, like music, often has to build to support the emotion of the scene.