Sound was the last major element to come together, and it was also the thing that made the single biggest difference to how the film felt when everything was assembled. Going from a rough cut with no music to the same cut with the score underneath it was striking because the genre became readable in a way it hadn't been from visuals alone, and the emotional weight of every scene increased significantly. Sound is not decoration in film, it is structure.
Finding the Music
From the very early stages of planning, Nicole and I knew we wanted a soft indie instrumental for the opening sequence. The tone we were going for was warm, light, and slightly romantic without being heavy-handed and established the rom-com register without announcing it too loudly. We had a specific reference in mind: Slow Dance by Clairo, whose sound is exactly the blend of upbeat and relaxed that we felt matched Audrey's character and the energy of the opening sequence.
The problem was copyright and Clairo's music could not be used in Premiere Pro without significant restrictions, and the legal and technical complications of using commercially licensed music in a student production made it an unrealistic option. We needed royalty-free music that captured a similar quality.
We found what we were looking for on Pixabay, which has a strong library of free indie instrumental tracks. The track we settled on has the light, contemporary feel we were looking for as it builds naturally toward the title card moment. It is not Clairo, but it serves the same narrative function, and sourcing it from Pixabay meant we could use it without any copyright concerns.
How the Music Enters
One of the more considered sound design decisions was when and how to introduce the music. Our initial instinct was to bring it in while Audrey is still in voiceover, but when we tested that it undermined the intimacy of her narration. The voiceover is the audience's first real contact with Audrey as a character, it's where she establishes her voice, her personality, her interiority, and laying music underneath it too early pulled the focus away from that.
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| Adjusting voiceover on montage |
The solution was a fade structure. Audrey's voiceover fades out as she finishes speaking, and the music fades in as that fade completes. The transition happens at the moment she leaves the house and the film moves into the park running sequence. This creates a sense of crossing a threshold from her internal world into the external world of the story and the music entering at that exact point reinforces that shift. The music then comes back in more fully and warmly during the falling scene, where the emotional register of the film reaches its highest point.
The Record Scratch
The record scratch was my idea, and I felt strongly about including it. In the crash scene, during the moment where both Audrey and Mattias suddenly crash into each other and then realize who it is they crashed into, I inserted a record scratch sound effect, a classic comedic device borrowed from the language of comedy editing, which signals the sudden tonal shift from aloof to surprise in a way that is both funny and visually clean. It tells the audience that what was happening has paused, and something new is about to begin.
I found the record scratch sound effect on Pixabay for free, the same source as the music. It sits at exactly the right moment in the cut and lands with the comedic impact I wanted. Small sound design choices like this one are what distinguish a film that feels considered from one that feels assembled, and this particular choice is one of the ones I'm most happy with in the finished product.
https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/sudden-stop/
The Audio Cleanup
The wind noise from the park filming day was one of the most time-consuming problems in post-production. Outdoor dialogue scenes are always vulnerable to wind noise because wind sits in the same frequency range as speech, which makes it difficult to remove without also affecting the dialogue. I used the Enhanced Speech tool in Premiere Pro to clean up the worst of it, which significantly improved the clarity of the argument scene. I also made manual frequency adjustments to reduce the harshness of the wind in sections where Enhanced Speech alone wasn't enough. The goal throughout was to make the dialogue sound as though it had been recorded cleanly while not making it sound processed.
The Small Details
Beyond the music and the record scratch, I layered in ambient sound throughout the park sequences background park noise, distant sounds, the texture of an outdoor environment. These details are invisible when they work. Without them the park scenes would feel like they were filmed in a vacuum, which would undercut the realism we built through location scouting and careful framing. The sound of Nadia's string headphones being knocked out during the collision, the ball on concrete during the scramble sequence, these are small additions that ground each moment in physical reality. Sound design is largely the art of adding things the audience doesn't consciously notice but would immediately miss.
Links Used: https://pixabay.com/music/search/indie/ https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/sudden-stop/ https://nofilmschool.com/how-to-reduce-wind-noise-in-premiere-pro https://www.masterclass.com/articles/sound-design-guide
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