Adaptation - Creating Sound

I've been working really hard on building my soundtrack recently. Right from the very start I always had the song in mind I was going to use, Hurt. But I found the original Nine Inch nails version instead of the Johnny Cash one, really fitted my piece, especially when I applied more strings and drones to it. 

The song makes for the base of the sound, creating the mood, tension and drama. I have also added some sound effects to make the images come to life, such as the bird qwarking and the breathlessness of the man as he is running through the woods.

My main challenge was the voice over. I decided that the poem was quite dramatically visually and I didn't want to take that away from the piece with my original idea of on screen text. So instead I decided to use voiceover, but as I had my heart set on the music, I needed to record it and edit it to make the two work well together.

I started by recording my actor, Phil reading the poem. It was a good recording, but his tone of voice did not fir the tone of my poem. It didn't have underlying pain or torment or even the haggard emotion I was looking for. I therefore decided to import the song into Garageband and see what elements could be changed to make it work. First I decided to lower the pitch of Phil's voice, my changing it down a major third, then adding a "Southern Voice" effect and slight "monsters effect". I then decided to overlay it with another track. This would be the same recording but changed to a panning echo of multiple voices, that repeat elements of the poem's words throughout. I really felt this added to the atmosphere of my poem, relating to the "listeners" and different voices in the man's head. However I still felt both these tracks overlaid were missing something, they were fighting each other, and didn't seem rounded enough. I therefore decided again to take the original recording and use the "male to female" effect, so that I was actually left with a reading of the poem by a "women".  I feel this really completed the voiceover, and all three tracks work well together, creating a three dimensional voice, similar to what the alcoholic would hear, "himself, the need to stop and the want to carry on"

I was also happy that the new tones, had slowed the pace down slightly, and created dramatic tension and sadness at the key points in the poem and song, so in my mind all elements are in harmony, the score, voice over and visuals. 

Here is what the tracks looked like on garage band: