The Journey Of a Paper Plain

For creating our sound design journey, we used a rhode mic to directly record into one of our cameras as a movie file. We then media encoder to automatically convert the video files into mp3 so we could edit them in audition. We rendered the final file as a WAV however to upload it youtube so I could post on my blog I re-rendered it as a video as a .mov file. All of the clips used in the journey were able to be recorded in our houses, as they were all activities that took place in a house hold. 

We story boarded the journey out on a piece of paper and went along ticking each piece we had recorded to make sure we had all the necessary files before going onto to edit them. We originally planned on the bulk of the story going to be the paper plane flying and the obstacles it overcomes in the process. However we felt that for the audience to recognise what was going there would have to be a significant introduction to the building of the plane, and when we had listed all these things there was not much room for the actual flight.

This meant we had to make a difficult decision to cut the previous plans and focus on the creating of the plane. Once we had our story board we recorded the sound to piece together. Most of the sound was pretty straight forward to record however there were some sounds that we knew we were going to struggle to record in a high quality such as heavy wind and the sound of children laughing, this ultimately ended up with us getting these sound effects off the internet.

We edited the whole piece using Adobe audition which was extremely user friendly, it also allowed us to transfer the files directly from media encoder into audition without having to render them, which you would have to do if you were sing an external software and takes memory/time. This program had everything we needed to create the piece making it simple and easy for novices to blend, reverse and re-master tracks to fit in the sequence. 

I enjoyed making the sound design project because it made me fully appreciate the technicality of sound in the media industry. I know understand how important background noise and distance of the microphone from the subject can make a huge difference in the quality of the sound and how frustrating it can be to have to re record pieces because of a creak in the floor board or some cars driving past at the wrong moment. 

However it has strengthened my enjoyment for photography and film and reinforced the fact that I do not want to be the microphone guy. 

My main plus I have taken from the project is that it has made me realise how realistic I have to be when filming scenes that involve audio, because a shot with rubbish audio looks extremely tacky and low quality.