Sound Project

    The sound project assigned to me seemed simple at first glance but proved to be more complex than imagined. It showed me the true importance of editing and gave me insight into the job of a foley artist, and how when they do their job well, the audience won't even notice their work as everything will fit perfectly into place. Overall, it allowed me to notice and appreciate the importance of sound in telling a story, and how much work people put into providing a full, immersive experience by utilizing the power of sound.

    The project instructed us, my given partner Faye and I, to create a scene through and only using sound. With the help of editing software such as Adobe Premiere, we had to brainstorm an idea for a scene that could take place in 1-2 minutes. After doing this, we had to dissect the idea of our scene and break apart possible sounds it may include. This would be put into action, with the sounds being either created by us as "foley artists" or by being gathered from online sound effects databases. Some specifics of the project included the time frame (1-2 minutes), the fact that we had to create at least four of the sounds as foley sounds and that we could only use up to 7 words in the duration of our project. After having created/gathered and edited our project, we had to submit it along with videos of us performing our foley sounds along with a display of our editing timeline.

    To help us with the process of our final sound project, we had to complete a "Sound Project Outline" assignment. In this assignment, we separated our story into different segments and listed all of the possible sounds that would be in the scene. For example, we chose our scene to be that our character's goal is to go buy a book. In our scene, our character is in an outside mall where it begins to thunder and rain. Our character walks past some public stores/attractions, including a restaurant and a music shop, and even walks past a fight. Our character soon walks into the quiet library which she is already familiar with, where she buys a book.

     In our outline, we took all of these slight atmospheric changes into consideration. For example, we considered specific sound changes like our character opening her umbrella when it starts to rain (implying she saw the weather forecast earlier and saw the expected thunderstorm) and how that affects the rain sounds respective to her. Another example is the consideration of the contrast between the outdoor noises found in an open mall to the feel that comes from the noises of a library, ultimately determining factors in our sound choices/creations.

    The way we approached our project was supported by the outline, with the division of sound creations between my partner and I. I did two foley sounds (a broom swooping using paperclips and a paintbrush and a bathroom hand dryer using a microwave) and Faye did two more (cash register noises with a toy car and footsteps with a book).  While we both came up with specific timing of the editing together, Faye contributed more to the editing aspect of this project, with the utilization of Adobe Premiere Pro to have full control over creative decisions.

Sound Project Outline   

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hWg-DNa4UV_C52CJsB5HrjGanMt_vtbv/view?usp=sharing