Sound 🕪

Hey Blog!

During this lesson, I learned about the importance of sound in film and the different techniques with which it can be created and used to convey meaning. We worked on two different sound projects to learn this. In the first we had to create and tell a story using only sounds and other auditory techniques. In the second, we had to provide the necessary sound elements to a previous project we worked on that had lacked it.

For the first sound project we worked on, my partner and I decided we wanted to do a more fictional story than we were able to do for the previous project we worked on (the editing project had to take place in a school setting), and we thought that a sci-fi narrative would have the most interesting sounds, so we made the story of an alien abduction. Making an outline to plan the project before we started working on it helped us understand the ideas that each one of us had and work together to come up with a single story we were both happy with. It also allowed us to have a clear timeline of the way the story would go—where our first scene would take place and what would happen leading into the main plot of the alien abduction—so we would know what sounds we needed to find online or record ourselves through foley. Since I don't have extensive knowledge on digital editing, it was recommended we use a simpler program such as Clipchamp, a program that has all the basics you could need when editing a project of this style including adding multiple sound layers and being able to shift each one's volume and their fading in and out. I think that our story may have gotten slightly overcomplicated near the end, and having a simpler plot would have allowed for a more detailed soundscape than what we have, however, I like the layering we do have. We included many sounds that, on top of one another, make for a cool background sound that does make it sound like the character has been abducted by aliens.
RosenbergChavez_Soundscape_per4.m4a

The second sound project had a bit of a different approach when completing it since we already had a story and we needed to come up with sound elements that fit this specific story. Our first step for this was to think about what background sounds are present in a school hallway that are usually ignored but are necessary for a video or a film to sound realistic. After, my partner and I simply needed to think about what sounds we made as the characters that the story would focus on, from sounds made by our shoes or clothes to actual sounds we made. Similarly to the first project, the outline made it easier to determine what specific sounds where present in each scene so that we could know what we needed to find or record. It broke a minute long project into 5 different scenes where each scene had a list of the sounds that should be heard based on what was happening on screen. Clipchamp, having proved itself to be effective for this style of project, was used again to put our sound clips together, though this time my partner and I edited each our own project. I am very pleased with how this second project turned out. I think our soundscape was very well executed, from adequate sound elements being used to the way I edited it, making it seem very realistic. Something I would have like to have done differently was the use of music since we have none. A sting or some type of "cartoon-y" sound effect in between scenes where we go into and out of our character's imagination would have added a more clear distinction between reality and imagination that could have been more fun.
OWFSound_Chavez.mp4