Unit 5 – Sound design was our 5th unit of work where we had to design sound effects for a clip from a film or TV Show, my choice was Toy Story 2 and the scene where Woody gets cleaned. My intention was to replicate each sound as closely as possible and make it sound as authentic as possible, just like the scene has been taken straight from the film. My initial ideas included also replicating the music as well, with copyright free music to make it as authentic and unique as possible, but this didn’t end up working out and i used the music used in the scene itself.
I think that experimenting with sound effects will help me a lot in the future because i now know just how many possibilities there are for all the many sound effects. You can turn any ordinary object into almost any sound effect weather it needs editing and effects in audition to make the pitch higher or lower or no effects at all. But by making all our sound effects for Unit 5 i learnt that there really are endless possibilities and this will help me when i come to do my Unit 8 work if i need to add in any custom foley sounds or anything that will help me to make my production so much better.
My skills were pretty advanced for audio recording before beginning Unit 5. As a hobby i like to make my own Audio Dramas, due to the low budget i have i can’t make many visual productions, but you dont need any money at all to make an audio production, i’ve made around 3 series of my own Doctor Who audios set in my own universe with myself as the Doctor. I am also inspired by a company called Big Finish Productions who make audio dramas in the world of Doctor Who, Torchwood, Blakes 7, Star Trek, Callan, Space 1999, Sherlock Holmes and many more, These are full cast audio dramas not narrated audio books although they have not shied away from doing them, recently getting Sir Michael Palin to narrate a Torchwood Audio drama. Big Finish brings back old Doctor’s for new stories on Audio. most famously giving Paul McGann’s 8th Doctor a breath of fresh air in a brand new series of Audios that has been continuous since 2001. I have a lot to thank Big Finish for, not only for making me so experienced with how audio works as well as sound effects and that but for inspiring me to make my own dramas and inspire me to write a series of my own, i have made 3 series worth of 8 hour long audios with story arcs, voices and full on foley sounds to make them even more immersive as well as music. Even with all that i have a lot of experience from last year when as a unit of work we made narrated audio books of children’s books. For these we recorded the story, added music, foley sounds, sound effects and made it as professional and immersive as possible. These also helped with my experience for this year’s Unit 5 because they were done in same software (Adobe Audition) whereas i make my audios in Sony Vegas Pro 13.
The initial tasks we made for our research was to watch two clips. One from Mr.Bean and the episode – ‘The Exam’ and the second was a scene from ‘Point Break’ The only thing these two have in common is how little – no talking there is, meaning the sound effects are telling you the story and are the primary focus for the clips. In Mr. Bean, there are no voices and the only sounds are coming from the sound effects or foley sounds of the clock, pencils writing, paper moving around and many others that present the common sounds you hear in an exam hall. This means you focus more on the sounds of the exam hall compared to anything else, The same thing happens with Point Break, the scene had a lot of foley sounds that present what you’d hear as you are chasing someone like in the scene. For the research we sat and listened to all the sound effects and made spotting sheets to make note of everything that we can hear We did this for both Point Break and Mr.Bean. We then replicated these as closely as possible in the TV Studio by getting ordinary everyday objects and recording our own versions of each scenes. We painstakingly recreated everything from breathing at the right speed and pace, to chains being rattled to fenses being kicked down. We had a lot of resources to use and we thought it would help if we took advantage of them all and made a few different versions of each sound effect. This also helped us because if one didn’t sound right we had a few other tests we could use instead that maybe sounded better as we did everyone a slightly different way to add variation and uniqueness to each and every sound effect. By doing this research and making new sounds we of course had to edit it all together and this also helped us to learn new ways of how to edit it as we edited in Audition and compared to Premiere i wasn’t as familiar with the software so every chance to use the software was greatly helpful to me.
I did some research into the microphones to used as well because i wanted to find out which one would be best for our audio recording. i researched into two types Omni and Unidirectional microphones, The biggest difference i learnt from this research was how they record. I found out that to get a perspective on the whole room while recording then Omni-Directional mics are the best to use as Unidirectional mics record audio from the top and very little from the sides and due to the clips i was going to use, i wanted to get sound effects that had perspectives from wherever they were coming from and not straight in front of the mic which could have the risk of taking away a lot from the scene and not being as authentic as possible. By doing this research i found that Omnidirectional mics are the best for giving the perspective as they record at the same frequency all around the room.
In terms of using Audition, i found it fairly easy to use, it follows a similar structure to premiere which im more than experienced with using, I found it useful that due to Audion and Premiere both being Adobe software’s the tools were very similar / exactly the same in some aspects. The range of effects could be more expanded upon and have a bigger range of effects and transitions, due to the cost of the software, you feel a bit robbed when you think about how much it costs but that’s just a personal nitpick at the software. Editing overall was fairly simple but one thing that i along with many people hated is how Audition and Premiere is also guilty of doing this, the software’s randomly change what the output for sound is, so you could be editing and the sound stops coming out the earphones so you have to stop what you’re doing to change it back, This happened a lot meaning that there were a lot of instances where i had to stop editing to change the output of the sound. I overcame these problems by simply having the tab always open so i can easily switch it back, little bit tedious but if you’re doing it a lot then it can save a lot of time having to open the Audio Hardware settings tab.
The final audio went through a couple rough cuts before the final edit was made, The first rough edit was just to assemble the audio and put everything in the right place. At first i was happy with this but with further re-listens to the final product i came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the best it could be and needed to be re-edited. The changes i made were only minor ones for example timing something better or changing some effects little tweaks like that to make out even better. There was an instance where me and Josh came to the conclusion that we both were not happy with a couple sound effects so we went out and re-recorded it and added it back in with new effects and were happy as it made the world of difference as it sounded much better and after adding the right effects we were happy with how it sounded. So, this is how we overcame the issues with editing.
I definitely met my original intentions with my final product as i met every goal i set out to do when i begun, i changed all the sound effects, made my own versions that were very accurate to the original version and also had the music to fit in with it as well, so as my original intention was to make a scene that looks like it had been taken straight out the film, the Toy Story 2 scene that i made with custom foley sounds looks and sounds like i just cut it straight out of the film.
Feedback – This is where i am going to put in some final feedback from my fellow peers about my project and what they thought about it. I asked them to give me some constructive criticism about it and not to hold back on any comments as i wanted to learn the truth about what they thought of my production.
Isaac – You mixed it all in very well, it didn’t seem like the sound effects were too loud and you did a good job at making new ones for every possible sound effect. Well done
Jayne – I like how you incorporated the voices in it, it makes it seem more realistic and very good. The music could do with being slightly quieter so the foley sounds are louder.
Finn – Was really good. I liked how you kept the voices and the timing was spot on.
Josh – Some really good sounds used, i like the variation of some of the ones we recorded, you can tell you took your time to get the timing really close and make it the best it could be. Also the use of effects helps it a lot to not all sound the same, it adds variety to it.
That’s it. Unit 5, Sound Production, i definitely think its helped me to learn how to mix sound effects really well and i think i have learnt a lot of skills on how to record foley sounds that i will be putting forward into my future work. I am also happy its given me more experience in using Adobe Audition as that’s a software i didn’t have that much experience on originally. At the end of the day i am very happy with how my final product has come out.
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