Task 1
For this task I had to record 10-15 different sounds/sound effects from one location. I decided to record the hallway right outside my class. The reason for this is mostly because of the familiarity of my environment. That familiarity allowed me to easily pick up on where to record and what to record. All in all, the true purpose of this task was to, familiarise myself with not only the equipment involved in recording audio, but also the process of recording the audio itself. Through this process, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of how many factors can affect the audio recording process. From aspects such as how gain affects the amount of sound data that's recorded, to the placement of the mic in relation to the subject. For this task I was able to borrow a variety of equipment from the University that is used on professional sets.
This equipment includes:
-Boom Pole
-Sennheiser Shotgun Mic
-Rode Collar Mics
-Zoom H6 Recorder
The process started with testing out the equipment, learning what it's used for, how it's setup, and how it's used on sets. With that done we put all the equipment together put in some headphones and walked around recording, adjusting settings on the fly or stopping and restarting to adjust other settings.
Task 2
For task 2 I had to create a sonic landscape to establish a certain location. I decided to link this with a task I did for VFX (link here). For that task I decided to use images and visuals of a cityscape, specifically a bus stop with a waiting cat. With my visual in place all that was left was to add sound.
Typically, I prefer to edit in Davinci Resolve, however when I had exported the visuals and tried to edit it there I was having issues with timing the sounds to the actual visuals. It clashed far too much and sourcing audio that matched the visuals did not help either as the mismatched timing made everything sound unnatural, as sounds either ended too abruptly or dragged for far too long. Due to these issues, I decided it be best if I added sound to the original file in Premiere Pro. My preference for Davinci made adjusting to Premiere quite a struggle at first, however I resolved to adjust to these changes to make a better product, rather than editing in something I felt more comfortable in for a weaker outcome. This turned out to be the better decision as I was able to freely adjust the visuals as needed to make them work best for the sounds I had chosen.
Task 3
Task 3 asked to create the soundscape for an existing piece of media. I decided to use a Nike advertisement since it had a wide variety of audio elements including, narration, music and ambient noises.
I started the process by firstly making a list of whatever sounds I could hear and looking them up on artlist.io where I sourced all my sound elements from. I then brought the video into Davinci Resolve and sliced it into three sections as to make it easier to edit. Firstly I chose what background music I wanted to use as the rest of the sounds would be based around that. Once I had that in place, it was a matter of playing the source on audio on solo and pausing to insert a new sound element whenever I heard one. Once I was done with one of the cut up sections I would review the new sounds and adjust their volume and timing, I repeated this for all three sections. The only major element left to add was the narration, which I decided to record myself using a rode lav mic and my phone.
I wanted to get a bit creative with this task, instead of recreating the original audio one to one with the original I wanted to have the freedom to change up certain sounds and take some creative liberties. An example of this can be seen in my music choice. I could have easily chosen a track that gives off the same, almost cold, motivational tone as the original. Instead, I went with a track that gives off more of an uplifting, hopeful tone. It gives off the same effect as being motivational but seemingly changes the connotation associated with motivation. This change in the style of music also meant removing certain sound effects, otherwise their inclusion made the whole thing sound too cluttered. I'm referring in specific to the heartbeat sound that can be heard whilst the runner is in his room.
One challenge that was fun to approach was when the runner would constantly change the surfaces that he was running on. It was simple enough to source Foley sounds of shoes running on different surfaces, after that it was a matter of timing the sound to when the shoes would hit the ground as well as adjusting the volume level. However, after doing this and listening to the playback it became abundantly clear to me when one audio would stop and another would start. Having the two sound file right next to each other was not fixing the problem, so after some research I decided to add a cross-fade effect between the two audio tracks and that sounded a lot better to me. I feel the reason for this is that the audience almost gets eased into the change in audio making it feel less abrupt.
With all my sound tasks and this one in particular, some of my flaws when designing audio have become quite clear to me. Firstly I'm not very confident in my audio mixing abilities. In my opinion there are a lot of areas where certain elements should be louder or more quiet and certain elements have not been layered properly. An example of this is seen throughout the entire video. Since there is background music throughout the entire video, it was a challenge figuring out the audio levels of the music compared to the rest of the elements. That being said I did purposely keep the music louder in an attempt to hide any noticeable mistakes. I also feel my usage of sound effects was too stale, reusing the same one or two sounds. For example the sounds used for when the runner is running on grass, I was not sure how I could change it up without adding a completely new sound element.
