Video and Sound Production: Project 1

VSP60104 Video and Sound Production 15.9.2021 -  14.11.2021 (Week 4 - Week 12)

Wendy Seto / 0348805
VSP60104 Video and Sound Production / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Project 1

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INSTRUCTIONS

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LECTURES

Week 4: This week, we started to work on our first project from this module. We learnt about the art of sound design in class. An audio setting is created by mixing different sound element together that supports the action. There are three main sound elements:

1. Speech
One of the most important tool for understanding the story of the film. 
• Dialogue: Conversation between characters in movie.
• Voice over: The voice of an unseen narrator speaking.
2. Sound Effects
• Ambience:
Audio refers to the background noise present at a given scene or a location.
• Hard or "cut" effects: Almost every sound we hear at the movies that isn't dialogue or music is a sound effect.
3. Music
To enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact. Other sound terms:
1. Dubbing or automated Dialog Replacement (ADR)
The process of re-recording dialogue after the filming process to improve audio quality or reflect dialogue changes.
2. Foley
A sound effect technique for synchronous or live effect. Fun fact, the foley technique are named after Jack Foley, a sound editor at Universal Studios.

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PROJECT 1

Exercise 1: Audio Dubbing

Our first exercise is to sync the required audios of a muted scene from Pixar's 'Soul' in Adobe Premiere Pro. Mr. Martin has provided the dialogues through Google Docs and instructed us to record all the speeches with our phone. 

fig 1.1 soul dialogues.pdf

He gave us some recommended URLs to find free sounds we might need for the exercise:
• https://freesound.org/

• https://99sounds.org/

I recorded the necessary dialogues shown in fig 1.1 using the voice memos app on iPhone. It took many tries to really get one that sync well with the characters movement. Also, I am trying to differentiate two different voices because there are two main characters in the scene. For the side character voice, I am just using my normal voice as it does not really hearable. I marked the ones I ended up using with 'voiceover 1' and 'voiceover 2' as shown in fig 1.2.

Moving on, I managed to find all the ambiences and sound effects I need on https://freesound.org/. Thank you Mr. Martin for letting me know of this website, it was really helpful. I used to download sound effects from YouTube but the options were not that wide, sometimes I am unable to find the exact sound I want which makes it hard to finish my project maximally. I renamed all the downloaded sound effects to help me work easier and created a particular folder so I will not be wasting my time figuring out where did the files go.

fig 1.2 sounds I am using for this exercise 21/9/21

fig 1.3 my project timeline sequence 21/9/21

fig 1.4 soul - audio dubbing with music.mp4 21/9/21

I just realized that Mr. Martin assigned us to add only the speeches and sound effects when I was about to turn in my work so I made another one without any music in and submitted both.

fig 1.5 soul - audio dubbing without music.mp4 21/9/21

Exercise 2: Audio Shaping

Mr. Martin provided us 2 audios to choose to shape these voices:
1. Voice through a phone call
2. Voice coming inside of a closet
3. Voice in a big stadium
4. Voice from a underground cave
5. Voice from a bathroom

I watched a video about a quick introduction to Adobe Audition beforehand to get familiar with the interface since this is my first time using this software and I used the knowledge that I got from the lectures to shape this audios.

1. Phone Call

fig 2.1 phone call audio shaping 14/11/21

2. Closet

fig 2.2 closet audio shaping 7/11/21

3. Big Stadium 

fig 2.3 big stadium audio shaping 7/11/21

4. Underground Cave

fig 2.4 underground cave audio shaping 7/11/21

5. Bathroom

fig 2.5 bathroom audio shaping 7/11/21

fig 2.6 Exercise 2.zip 7/11/21

Exercise 3: Sound Design

This is the last exercise for this project, we were assigned to design 3 of the following sounds:
1. Explosions
2. Triple punches (variation)

3. Monster/Alien voice

1. Explosions

fig 3.1 explosion sound designing 14/11/21

2. Triple punches

fig 3.2 triple punches sound designing 14/11/21

3. Alien voice

fig 3.3 monster/alien voice sound designing 14/11/21

fig 3.4 Exercise 3.zip 14/11/21

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FEEDBACK

Exercise 1:
I prefer the one without music for this exercise. Maybe replace the background noise with something less crowded.

Exercise 2:
Cave needs to be a bit echoey.

Exercise 3:
Very good. Explosion is different but good.