Soundscape Project
Sound is an aspect of film that can make or break the viewer's experience, yet it often goes unnoticed. The sounds we hear on screen, music included, all work together to immerse the viewer into another world. Sound design in film is a hidden art that includes many techniques that provide context, texture, and realism for the world in which the film takes place in. Foley sound effects, created sounds that are added into the work in post-production, are essential to painting the canvas that is the film, with each sound a brush stroke in the overall painting, the soundscape of the film. This is what we sought to explore in our Soundscape Project.
For this project, we were to create a soundscape of a scene of our choosing using a combination of foley sound effects recorded ourselves along with sound effects from online sound databases if needed. The true challenge of this project was that we could only use sound to tell our story. What instantly popped into my mind when we were given the instructions for this project was "alien abduction." My partner had no qualms with this choice of scene, so we began as soon as we could on planning.
The idea was for a man to be walking through a field at night and hear a sound in the sky. After an exclamation of confusion, the character is left to ponder on what he has just heard. But the hum of what could only be an alien spacecraft approaches, and the man yells as he is taken into the ship by a tractor beam. The ship flies away, and the only thing that can be heard is the sound of nature.
This scene allowed for a combination of both Foley effects recorded by us and sound effects from a sound database to be used. For the Foley sounds, we chose to create the footsteps, wind, rustling of the grass, and the dialogue of the character. The rest of the sounds would be found online. It was important to plan this ahead of time in our outline as it would streamline the recording process.
The recording process went exactly as planned and we were able to record and gather all the sounds needed for the project in one class period. For all of our sounds, we made sure to get numerous takes so that we could select the best one.
One thing I find while working on film projects is that when filming on location and reviewing footage, many mistakes often go unnoticed and are only realized in post-production. For this reason, getting multiple takes and recording more than you have planned is essential to the creation of any film project. This is one thing we did extremely well on. I also believe the sound effects we recorded and selected for the scene were perfect and gave a lot of options on how I could edit the final project.
The only weakness in our project was that there was background noise in most of the Foley effects we recorded. In a school environment, you cannot control for external sounds like that of the wildlife and the cars driving by on the road. We controlled what we could control for; doors opening, people talking, the sounds of students in classrooms, etc. However, there was only so much we could do. For this reason, the background sounds in our Foley effects had to be incorporated into the soundscape of the scene. However, this ended up being a gift to post-production jd as it allowed for even more texture in the soundscape.
I ended up using GarageBand for Mac to edit the project as I am more familiar with it when it comes to editing sound. GarageBand is a powerful program, despite what many people might think. For being a free program, it has a lot of great tools such as complete EQ control, automation for different effects, panning, the ability to use plug-ins, etc. Also, as a musician, I have used GarageBand to make all of my music, so I felt more comfortable bringing an audio-only project into this program rather than Adobe Premiere Pro. I strongly urge anyone with a Mac to experiment with the program as it is totally FREE!!!!!!!
Listen to it ---> here!
-jd
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