Week 7 - Technical / Conceptual issues

Issues that have occurred

While recording

In the past week I have been gathering many external sources as well as my own recordings. I even used some of the recordings that were done at the beginning of the module, like the 'gate closing' sound effect, this was recorded with the Seinnheiser K6 microphone. 

In the clip, the lightbulbs blow on multiple occasions which produce the sound of glass smashing, due to many health risks, I chose not to record the sound of real glass smashing. This has been replaced with prerecorded sounds from the BBC Sound Archive.

Here is the link to all of the sounds I recored for my soundscape.

When listening back to my recordings, I was disappointed to hear that some of the sounds did not turn out how I wanted them to. For example, the 'loud wooden bang' did not have a massive impact, which is what I was aiming for. Fortunately, I can edit this sound on Adobe Audition and make it louder. As well as this, in you can also edit sounds on Premiere Pro which is also what I plan on using for editing my soundscape. I found out that you can manipulate ambience on Premiere Pro; you can make it sound like its closer or further, louder or quieter - these can be found on the 'audio mixer' panel.

I chose not to edit my entire soundscape on Adobe Audition as I am much more confident using Premiere Pro. Although I will use Adobe Audition to edit individual sound effects to make sure they sound pristine.

I used many different objects when producing these sound effects. In the Light's Out scene you can see that the location is an underground basement with a lot of metal shelving units, so I used a radiator, a chain, and a few other objects that produced 'metal sounds'. In the scene there is a lot of smashing and crashing; whilst watching the scene with no sound, I tried to recreate the sounds so that they would be in time with the video.

As you can see here, I am presenting the candle, the bag with the chain and the radiator. These were the three of my most commonly used objects when recording the sound effects.

A lot of the sound effects that have the word 'metal' in the name (which you can find on my SoundCloud) were created using these objects.

As well as this, I also recorded doors slamming and myself hitting wooden drawers and other wooden objects such as a door in order to recreate some of the sounds from the clip, for example, when the blind man hits a surface to figure out where he is in his basement.

Here you can see I used a metal doormat to record the sounds of the footsteps. The reason for this is because the doormat makes a crackling sound when you step on it. 

I thought that this would be the perfect recreation of the footsteps in the bacement because the floor is probably old concrete with things laying around on the, meaning that while walking around, there would probably be a distinct sound.

I learnt that it is important to focus on the small details when creating a foley soundscape becasue it creates a more realistic scene.