Sound Design - Progression

As the week progressed we spoke with one of our tutors about our project or "journey" they questioned about what we were actually going to record and the amount of time that was actually going to be involved editing the sequence and piece together, although being narrowed mind we were convinced the project was nothing we couldn't handle.

However after a couple of days of collecting separate clips for the timeline and experimenting with how we were going to record and manipulate sound dialogue to make it appear that it was a radio transmission we realised the depth of what we had got ourselves involved in. It was at this point that we started brainstorming again for another story. With the idea that we had come up with, it was something that shouldn't be rushed and spoilt just to fit in with the two week time limit. 

We also felt that the idea we wanted (key moments of the last hundred years) was going to majority made up of things that we couldn't actually record. This kinda defeated the brief of the task as well which could result in some very negative feedback. 

After some thought and floating ideas, I came up with the idea of the journey and creation of a paper plain. So it would start with a child playing and creating the paper plain then progress to throw the plain and the obstacles/events that the paper plain could actually encounter during its flight. This idea allowed us to record multiple sounds that we could make and layer them, sticking to the brief  It is also a slightly unique idea, something that the audience may not understand at first but as the sound plays will let them relate too. 

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. 

Sound Design Task Brain Storming

For our sound design week we have been a set out to create a one minute sequence telling a story completely auditory. After a day of brain storming different ideas, me and ryan came up with a concept of a synopsis of the last hundred years, made up of significant media and political events. 

We had a few other ideas, such as the journey from our houses to college every morning and the experiences we feel and hear every day or maybe the build up to a boxing/martial art fight. The whole process of training and getting ready however after some consideration and playing devils advocate we wanted to do something out of the ordinary and not very predictable. 

Firstly we looked at the music industry and three genres of music we are going to be considering are Hip Hop, Rock and Pop music as these are the most general/popular areas. As the sequence only has to be a minute long I came up with a few artists that represent and change the course of these genres.

For Hip Hop I thought of NWA, Public Enemy, Run DMC and Eminem, each have had huge hits and influences within the genre. For Rock was The Beatles, Nirvana and Elvis. For Pop was Michael Jackson, Brittany Spears and Madonna

Next I thought of a few historical moments in time either political or general that are extremely recognisable from Houston's "We have touch down" on the moon to Churchills "We are at War" and "The War is over" speeches. Then finish on something more recent like the New Year "Welcome to the Millennium" 2000 firework speech.

When constructing the actual sequence we are planning on staging the whole sequence as a radio transmission. As the sequence progresses the quality of the sound will improve to reflect time. We also be able to use this to our advantage as static and general distortion of sound can be used when mixing the individual recordings together. We are also going to be working by the process of elimination. Gathering all the individual parts together and then deciding on what sounds right at the time to whether it will make the final cut, however the main sequence is going to be chronological order of when they actually happened. This will save us a lot of time not having to storyboard the sound to what sounds right. 

Dave Ma

Dave Ma is probably my favourite photographer because of the style of photography he takes and the subjects he focuses on. Ma is an american photographer that bases most of his work on real life scenes across urban US, but then photographs them in a very artistic nature so that they all look real. A mix of set up and street photography Dave Ma is mainly known for some of his video work for bands like Foals and another video called Claire De Lune. I think his cinematographer work reflects also on the framing and style of his photos, for example a lot of his photos are in the cinescope ratio.

Two of my favourite photos (shown below) are taken by Dave Ma. These are landscape photos of the abandoned town near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. This nuclear reactor had a meltdown resulting in an explosion positioning a lot of the surrounding area with high levels of radiation making it completely inhabitable. Within this area is a town called Pripyat, which was evacuated within hours of the incident making it a ghost town. Whole buildings and houses were left with all the inhabitants possessions inside because of the radiation poisoning making it an urban explorers and photographers dream. After years eventually the radiation levels have depleted low enough for people to make short visits and Ma captured two photos which perfectly sum up the surrounding area. 

The first is of the town gymnasium and swimming pool completely empty and overgrown. The second is a rooftop view from the hotel overlooking the edge of the red forest and other council flats surrounding the area. The images connote an idea of peaceful destruction and these are the main reasons which lead me to urban exploring.  

Ma also has a clever photos from scenic shots of city everyday experiences like the park and markets. Each one of these photos share a story and experience with the viewer making them but visually and theoriticallly attractive.

http://www.davema.tv

Animation Production

With our animation we chose to do a story of how a poor girl stumbles across a magic wand, which had fallen out richer persons pocket, and uses it to get all the things she wish she had. However in the process realises that the rich boy she originally saw and turned poor himself and was using it for the same thing. Even though the animation is only supposed to last 30 seconds with the story we are going to do and the platform we are using to create it there was a high chance it would last longer. 

The animation was made using adobe photoshop and adobe after effects. Firstly we made sketches and drawings by hand on paper which were then later redrawn in photoshop using a bamboo graphics tablet. I then imported the .png files into after effects and animated it from there. The only problem with this was that I was the only one who knew after effects well enough to make the production. However the majority of this was key framing positions, scale and rotation which meant I could do it relatively quickly. 

The final piece came out ok, however if I was going to improve upon this and had my time again there would be a number of things I would change. Firstly I would include some sound, both background music and effects as this would make a big difference for the audience to know what was going on (Eg footsteps for walking). Then I would draw the backgrounds up as did you other artworks as the background and also focus more on little details to make a better animation like the time spent on each frame and the camera angles of shots etc. 
  
I did enjoy making the animation because it let me brush up on a program that I hadn't used it for a while. It also reinforced how complicated animation is and how much I appreciate special effects and motion graphics. 

Animation Ideas

So for our animation project we have been grouped and set the task of creating a 1 minute animation of some kind. Either stop motion, south park style or computer animated etc. The story has to fit the theory of equilibrium and the protagonist has to occur some sort of battle to ultimately be better off.

We were set off to think of different animation stories separately and then meet the next day to share with the group and choose which seemed the best. After discussion the best story we decided to do was one of a small poor girl in face. She looks into a cake shop filled with wonderful bright and colour cakes. Then a little girl walks up to her which is also poor and the girl shares her last piece of bread with her. After this she sits down on her own and eventually the shop owner invites her into the shop where she is allowed to eat as many and what ever cake she chooses.

However then the camera cuts to a shot outside of the cake shop and the audience actually see that the girl has died outside and gone to heaven, which in her case the warm cake shop where she is happy and has all the food she can eat.

Although quite a dark story I personally thought the twist was quite unexpected and good. Tom didn't agree with us calling quits there and asked us to explore further with lots of different situations that could occur. We came up with the idea that the shop owner could turn out to be her long lost grand father and the family is re united, or the girl sees the story in the future and then refuses to share her bread and survives. There were plenty of weird and wonderful ideas. 

Animation Practise

After a couple of days of looking at different forms of animation and the different techniques used in the production, we were split into groups in which we were going to create our own. We were asked to draw a photo of something that had some sort of significance to our lives recently, therefore I drew the logo of a festival I went to with my friends in croatia called Hideout. We then passed our drawings to the person next to us and made a tracing of their drawing.

These were then our start and end point, our task was then within 12 frames animate our first picture to change and morph into our last one. My last frame was a picture of a foam hand which had no relationship to my logo. Therefore I chose to draw an animation of the hideout logo peeling off the wall, as it was a sticker, and then fly into a wall causing an explosion. This explosion would expand to reveal the foam hand.

After a day of drawing we each had our animations and realised that these then linked together to create one longer and potentially constantly looping animation. The video is below. 

We produced the video by setting up my camera on a tri-pod. We then placed the paper under neath and took a photo of each drawing individually, which would be a frame of the video. We then imported these into istopmotion, a simple program easily designed for this type of video. We set the pictures to take up 2 frames as a cart of a 30 fps (frames per second) video and rendered from there. We had a problem with time and the end of the video ended up not rendering correctly cutting out the morph back into my logo. 

(My part is the first scene of the sequence)