Brief

For the major project this semester we have to create a sound design from a short clip of a film. We could chose our own clip or pick on of the clips of blackboard, we have to create the sound design for one of the three minutes clips creating, atmosphere, tone and emotion, using midi keys boards and Foley sounds.

The clips we could choose from where: The Road, Oblivion, Solaris, There Will Be Blood and finally Delicatessen. I haven’t seen any of the films, which I though would be a problem, however not seeing the films means I’m not influenced by any of the decisions the sound designer have made. After first glance there are two films that I really like, The Road and Delicatessen. 

The road I see, as been a very atmospheric film, capturing the emptiness of the post-apocalyptic world. I think the clip really opens it self up to off screen space, old radio playing/crackling, dogs, wolves, crows and so on.

Delicatessen is quite different with the road you have the chance to be quite experimental while Delicatessen you need quite a realistic sound design meaning that everything needs to sound like it would do in real life, the knife sharpening, the machinery, the footsteps and so on. 

Ben Burtt sound designer

Ben Burtt is a sound designer that has worked on films such as Star Wars, Blue Planet and most recently Wall-E. This video shows some of the techniques he uses on Wall-E, its incredible to see how sound designers work on animated feature films, as they is no sound from the environment/location or characters, all the squeaks, buzzers and atmosphere have to be created by the sound designer. Wall-E is an incredible film as there is little to no dialogue from the two main characters Wall-E and Evie. They can just about to say each other’s name, but mostly use buzzers and mechanical noise to communicate feeling and emotion, yet we fall in love with these two characters.  

Reaction to week 3 Booming and Mixer .

In this weeks workshop we partnered up with the cinematography group and practiced booming. We had been taught how to boom previously but never using a Wendt Audio Mixer as well. I had used mixers before when recording live music.

We split into groups of 3 and was then partnered up a group from the cinematography class, who where taking it in turns to act out a scene on Pulp Fiction while the rest of the people filmed or directed. Our job was to record the sound using the zoom. We took it in turns to boom, check the levels on the zoom and the mixer.

The Canon fx100 allows you to plug microphones directly into the camera, this provide its own problems as we had follow the movement of the camera and make sure we weren’t getting in they way but still making sure we where getting clear and crisp sound.

Foley Sounds

My second workshop of the year was all to do with Foley sounds, which is possible my favorite section of sound. We started by looking at a couple of different clips including clips from Black Swan, Breaking Bad and Games of Thrones. Looking at where Foley sounds are used, I was quite surprised at how much foley was used, even sounds that could be synced E.G footsteps the sound designer or director opted to use foley instead.

We where then given a Zoom, Sennheiser 416 and a hydrophone (underwater microphone) then a random bag of stuff including, cornflower, slinkies, music boxes, umbrella, fruit/veg and other random stuff. We then split up into groups of four and started to record the different sound.

The Sennheiser 416 was great at capturing the high quality sounds and was very precise when it came to capturing quite delicate sounds like the music box and the crush of the celery. The hydrophone was great at capturing them quite abstract sounds that we often cant hear with our own ears, we attached the hydrophone to the end of a slinkly which created this very abstract Sci Fi sound.

It was really important to have an imagination when recoding these different sounds as with out the visual images it was easier to picture the sounds as something eles. snapping the celery could be breaking someones arm, cornflour could be someone walking on snow. The strangest sound we came across was the toy screwdriver I'm not sure why but to me sounded like a baby dragon crying, not everyone would agree with me on that one but i think having an imagination when doing foley is really helpful, as one sound can be changed and manipulated to sound like something totally different.