Sound research

We watched the clip 'The descent - theatrical trailer' without any sound, to see how the images in the clip made us feel. The images made us feel distressed as they are sudden and the pace of editing is slow which makes the images discouragingly long. The brightness messes with the audience as one minute it is dark, the next minute it is bright. The effect it had on us was, that we fear for the protagonist and want to know what/who the antagonist is as it is unclear because of the confined location of the caves. It also made me ask a lot of questions of the thriller as the story-line was shown but the antagonist was not and the escape from the cave appears impossible.
One can relate to the characters as they go through a lot of stages of fear, like claustrophobia and hallucination which the audience know of but it is put into an extreme concept where most people would not be able to cope, but the protagonists, in this case a bunch of girls try to cope. 

Then we watched the clip again, but this time it was with sound. The sound had a much bigger impact on the trailer, and is uses empathetic sound.
The trailer has a combination of both diagetic and non-diagetic sound, at the beginning of the clip there is the diagetic sound of one of the girls talking and taking the pictures, then soon after there is a sharp sound that appears when cutting to the next scene to build up the suspence of the film. This has an effect on us becuase, it makes us feel trapped almost and contorolled.  The sinister music in the back round ties in with the thriller convention, which makes it a thriller/ horror, the dark none diagetic scream  every now and then in the trailer also helps to portray the genre, of the trailer.
There is also the diagetic sound of the crawlers in the backround also makes the spectators unsure of what is around the characters in the film, even if there are glimpses of the creatures.
In addition to this, there is a scene where Sarah is trapped in the cave, the use of sound in this part of the trailer helps to portray the characters feelings, and also plays on the audiences fears of clostrophobia. The use of Sarahs voice, and her not being able to breath, and the none diagetic slow music in the backround helps to portray how she is feeling during that time. Then there is soon the diagetic sound on the rocks falling infront of her, and sharp music after that helps to portray panic within the character, and worry for the audeince.   

In conclusion, we have drawn that the sound is very important to create suspense before a new clip is shown in order to make the audience feel uneasy about watching the film. This makes the audience want to watch more as they fear for the characters, especially Sarah, as the diegetic sound shows her struggle. Another way in which sound is important is that the sound effects, ie breathing carry the pace of editing and accompany the clip to show that the characters are in trouble. We discovered therefore, that in our project, diegetic sound could be more important than non-diegetic as for the thriller conventions, the lack of music creates suspense which is what is needed.