Sound

    Hi blog! During the lesson prior to the creation of my own project, I learned that sound plays a massive role in how productions create stories through sound. One thing in particular that I found interesting was the use of sound in the background and how it can create the tone of an entire film. For example, the clinking noise of cups at a cafe can better convey the setting of a scene without having to use an establishing shot or have to physically say where the characters are. I also learned a lot about the foley process, and found it especially intriguing that they can make almost any sound with things that have nothing in common with the item its portraying, such as using rice to make rain sounds. I took interest in this career because it is overlooked in the production of movies, but in reality is among the coolest and most creative jobs in the entire field in my opinion.

    For the project, we were asked to create a 1-2 minute production solely using sound samples from several online sources such as Pixabay or Youtube's audio library. After choosing an appropriate scene, and planning out all of the sounds that you would hear in that environment, we could begin searching for the online sounds that worked best and arranging them in Adobe Premiere Pro to fit our story. We were also instructed to use foley techniques to create 4 of the sounds that we utilize in the end result, and record ourself making the sounds to ensure that we understand the foley style. The assignment could not include any visual element to it, but still must be a clearly understood storyline despite being told solely through audio. We could not include any dialogue either, and could use a maximum of 7 individual words.

    When it came to creating my personal sound project, me and my partner started brainstorming ideas, and decided to base our storyline on the things that happen right before a spaceship takes off. We landed on this idea because there are so many background noises that would make the context clear. For example, the buffering of the static from the ship, the countdown to lift off, etc. We used all of the sounds that we had planned directly from the outline, which helped  a lot because it made us establish a vision of how the story was going to go before having to create it. It made the research stage easy as well because whatever sounds that we couldn't find because they were too specific, we knew we had to make using foley. For example, we couldn't find a sound of sitting down in a spaceship, so we created that sound by recording sitting down in a car to get a similar sound. We arranged all the sounds by overlapping sounds in different tracks in Adobe Premiere Pro, which made having white noise like air conditioning in the background easy to import. 

    I think that me and my partner did a great job of making an easily understood, but still thoroughly detailed project. We incorporated many sounds that overlapped each other to create a busy environment similar to what we were trying to exhibit. One thing I think we could have done better is made more creative foley recordings, as we ended up doing some that were on the simpler side like zipping up a spacesuit or opening a heavy door. If I did this project again, I would enhance the foley techniques I used to better express understanding of the style they use with using random objects instead of just recording the actual sound itself. However, I am proud of the project me and my partner created, and believe that it was very well produced.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JDjLvN4fwQiz5_TLksTJFKlRQl8JXX_T/view?usp=sharing