Hollywood Special Effects with Adobe Premiere Elements 3

Adding Mysterious Music "Under"

By adding just the right music to your night vision scene, you can take a scene from technically interesting to tensely frightening, or at least "tensely interesting." When you add music to a scene so that it plays somewhat below the other elements in the soundtrack the sound effects (footsteps, floor creaks, door hinge squeaks), dialog, and other incidental sounds (radio music, car horns from the street)it is known in the film industry as placing the music "under" the other audio elements in the soundtrack. We'll be doing that here: placing the music "under" enough so as not to overpower the scene, but loud enough so that it's effect can be felt by the audience. On the DVD that accompanies this book, we've provided you with the perfect track, bond.mp3, courtesy of the folks at uniquetracks.com.

Add the Right Music for a Chilling Undercurrent

Click the Get Media from button on the Media panel to access the Get Media from view, if it's not already active.

Click DVD, Digital Camera, Mobile Phone, Hard Drive Camcorder, Card Reader.

When the Media Downloader displays, click the Advanced Dialog button and select the bond.mp3 clip.

Click the Get Media button. Premiere Elements copies the bond.mp3 clip from the DVD onto your hard drive and adds it to the Available Media list for this project.

Drag on drop the bond.mp3 clip on the Media panel onto the Timeline in the Audio 2 track.

Position the bond.mp3 music clip on the audio track so it starts at the very beginning of the project, directly in line with the start of the nightsuspects.avi clip on the Video 1 track.

The bond.mp3 clip is one minute long. We only want to use the last 17 seconds. So, move the CTI to the 43 second point, or 00;00;43;00. (60 seconds minus 17 seconds is 43 seconds.).

Grab the front (head) of the bond.mp3 clip and drag it back until it exactly lines up with the CTI at 00;00;43;00.