critical writing

In Harry O'Donoughue's most recent sound piece he takes us into one of the most relatable scenarios there is, which is that solitary battle with your alarm. He uses diegetic and non diegetic sound within the piece to grasp the audiences attention especially in the scene where he incorporated non diegetic soundtrack from narcos to connote a gangster attitude when a gun is drawn. O'Donoughue invites the audience into the room of boy who just can't get away from his alarms. From a first person spectator camera angle emphasising on all different sounds within the room that are involved in this battle of boy and his many alarms.

We are given early signs of O'Donoughue's intentions when he follows in the footsteps of Ben Burt who was one of the original pioneers of sound. After he recorded the sound of him breathing in an old scuba regulator to achieve the sound of Darth Vader it is clear that O'Donoughue obviously had similar plans when recording himself blowing up a balloon to simulate the sound of snoring/sleeping.

Ever since the early creativity shown by Jack foley the possibility within sound has only been on the uprise, and with access to a foley studio O'Donoughue hasn't held back. Even the slightest sounds within the piece such as when the boy tries to grab his phone to switch off his alarm sound would go unnoticed unless pointed out. The clear and crisp sound that is produced from a foley studio is what keeps sound in film unnoticed. While people are quick to praise a film's cinematography, music, special effects and editing, the art of sound effects creation, or Foley, usually goes unnoticed.

However, unlike those other aspects of filmmaking, Foley artists don't want their work to stand out . And whilst the concept of O'Donoughue's piece may seem simplistic it is the magic of foley that keeps you from knowing the true complexity of it.

The ending of the piece should be specifically highlighted as in the clip all three alarms go off at the same time, during this scene the camera focuses on each alarm one at a time and O'Donoughue has managed to smoothly blend each of the sounds together by fading in and out of one another whilst keeping them all playing at different volumes, giving you the impression that you are as close to the alarm as the camera is. The camera then pans out and all of the sounds increase in volume heavily to express what the boy in the clip is hearing and the laziness of the boy is almost contagious as the three alarms at top volume give the viewers the same feeling of annoyance. The clip is then ended with the boy drawing his covers over his head which brings an end to all the sound completely by cutting to black.

Whilst O'Donoughue has a unique range of acoustic sounds and transitions he has achieved that of which to give the audience the illusion of that they might not be hearing what they think.


http://www.techradar.com/news/video/foley-the-art-of-movie-sound-effects-1301281

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Burtt

piers presentation

editing final part

On the left is the final part of my editing process and id say the it was the trickiest it as all three alarms are playing at the same time. However the camera zooms into each alarm individually at different times, so I had to fade each alarm into the other whilst they all still play at the same time. Then its one big clash of sounds at the end until the boy eventually gives up his battle with the alarms and draws his duvet over his head, which I achieved by waving a shirt infant of the mic.

And below is the finished result of my edit.

foley studio

So this was our session in the foley studio and we learnt how to set up the microphones and link them to audition so that we could record our sounds. you had to make are that the input and output were connected to the right mic before you started recording. You could then have your video in the studio and watch it while you recreate the sounds in your own way.


I found the foley studio very helpful as it allows you to capture clear a crisp sounds as apposed to sounds with background noise in them.

Also below you can see my results from the foley studio which I will proceed to labelling once I determine which ones Im going to use.

On our second visit to the studio we had an issue with connecting up the proper microphones as we forgot to activate them, however we used the standard microphones and still got a good result, and learnt from our mistakes.

editing part two

So heres the second part of my sound piece and as you can see added the first alarm sound which I recorded in the foley studio off my phone. In the video you can see that the volume button is slowly turned up so I have edited the volume to gradually go up as well while matching the video.










On the right you can see part three of my editing process and in this part I have added the second and third alarm the second alarm is a phone alarm which I again recorded in the foley studio. I also had to include where the boy reaches for his phone and for this I have simply recorded myself reaching for my phone but when recording it I needed to put the mic quite close as its a quiet sound. I then added the third alarm with some added sounds of me snoring to add some comedic effect but I had to change the pitch on the snoring to a bit of a lower one.

I then added the soundtrack from the film narcos when he pulls the gun out to shoot the third alarm.

editing part 1

 So as you can see on the left this is my first sound which is the sound of the seagulls I recorded down in Brighton, the yellow line represents the volume and I have faded it in by starting off quiet.






Here you can see I have edited the the sound of the sea gulls by changing the pitch. I have done this as I felt the pitch of the seagull was a bit too high so I changed it to a bit lower. I also turned the volume down on the clip so it would bend in with the other sounds I have for the opening scene.

So these are the sounds of my opening clip and as you can see I've been playing around with fading the volume in a and out and layering them over each other so they contrast and recreate the sound of a neighbourhood by the sea.

starting clip and labelling layers of sound

So I've started my project off by first trimming the clip to 2 minutes, and then labelling each layer of sound so I know whats going to go where.

planning for final sound clip

00:00-0:14 - I n the opening 14 seconds of my video it is a the camera coming in from outside into the boys room, for this I wanted to try and record the atmosphere of outside so I'm thinking some seagulls which I could achieve down at the beach along with some recordings of the sea as I feel it will be a nice contrast, I was also going to use a aeroplane fading in and out from left to right. Finally I wanted a dog barking.

00:14-00:32 - In this part of my clip it consists of the boys first alarm going off and for this I was going to play a song off my phone into a mic, also in the clip the volume slowly turns up so when editing I was going to have the volume of the song slowly increase.

00:33-00:36 - In this scene the boy hits the alarm to stop it playing so for this I was simply going to get access to the foley studio and record me bang something similar along with my hand hitting a soft mattress like object to retreat the boys arm hitting his bed. I also wanted some ambience to avoid silence in the room so I was just going to get that off BBC sounds.

00:38-00:49- In this scene The boys second alarm goes off however instead of a radio its his phone so I was going to record my actual phone alarm to recreate the sound. He then goes to grab his phone but misses but he eventually slides it off, as this is a sensitive sound I will be recording it in the foley studio and I will just record myself trying to grab my phone off the side. He then turns it off so I was just going to use a beep of a phone I recorded in class.

00:50-00:55 - The boy then drops his phone which I will again recreate in the foley studio and then I wanted to add a clock ticking as shortly after his third alarm goes off and which is a classic old school clock which I can record going off in the foley studio. He is also asleep just before so I thought it would be funny to record myself snoring into it.

1:00-1:25 - He then rolls back over in his bed and for this I was going to bring in a duvet and record various different sounds to see which one could work the best with the clip, however the boys third alarm goes off and he pulls out a gun to shoot the alarm clock so when he pulls out the gun I was going to add the theme song from narcos to add a bit of. comedic affect to it along with a pop instead of a bang for the gun to show its not a real gun.

1:30-1:45 - In this time the boy is just about to drop the gun and fall back asleep so I was going to have the seagulls once again as an atmospheric sound and then record myself slipping my hand down some metal to recreate him slowly dropping the gun along with a thud of the gun dropping.

1:50-2:00 - So finally all three of the boys alarms go off at the same time but the camera zooms in on each alarm one at a time. So for each alarm when it is highlighted in the camera I will have the sound at full volume and then as its switches I will fade the sound out and fade In the sound of the next alarm and then they will al get louder and louder to represent the battle between the boy and the alarm clocks. To end it with climax of all alarms at full volume I will have another sound of the boy pulling the duvet over his head to show he has lost the battle, once he's done this I will end the clip.

chasing clip for final idea

So the clip I have decided to use is an animation called 'Alarm' - I have chosen this clip as I think it has a lot of potential regarding sound as the plot is about a boy who keeps getting woken up by all is alarms and in a way its a battle between the world wanting the boy to get up (the alarms being the world) and the boys persistence to keep sleeping. in todays lesson I'm going to start a list of all the sounds I'm gong to need in the foley studio.





Ben burt

I have decided to use Ben Burt as inspiration as I like his style as a sound designer and feel I can try and recreate his style of editing in my final sound clip.

Benjamin "Ben" Burtt, Jr. Is an American sound designer, film editor, director, screenwriter, and voice actor. He has worked as sound designer on various films, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), WALL-E (2008) and Star Trek (2009).

He is most notable for popularizing the “Wilhelm scream” and creating many of the iconic sound effects heard in the Star Wars film franchise, including the "voice" of R2-D2, the lightsaber hum, the sound of the blasters,Chewbacca’s roar, and the heavy-breathing sound of Darth Vader.

presentation

This is our presentation on Walter Murch and Ben Burt, we were the first to present so I feel we made a few errors when presenting in terms of reading off the slides but I feel I gained a lot of first basis knowledge from researching these different artists that I can incorporate into my final sound design project.

editing (draft)

So we were given the task to create a draft sound clip using an old fashioned video clip, to do this I used the sounds that I have been recording in the past couple of weeks and I feel the end result came out quite well. and I'm looking forward to starting on my final edit.






As you can see from the screenshot I have different layers of sounds that of which I got from recording with the various different microphones, I tried to play around with some sounds; for example I used the sound of a moaning cat when the man wakes up in my clip and I feel that this has allowed me to understand you can use any sound to recreate anything as long as you make it fit in well.

week 2 (senheisser K6)

This week we used the senheisser K6 to go round campus and record various sounds so that we could get an understanding on how the mic works, we used this specific mic as when put close to something it records a clear sound as apposed to a standard mic. We recorded sounds such as: walking in gravel, smashing glass and dripping water, once we retuned back to class we uploaded the sounds onto the computer so we could then listen to them and the outcome was very interesting.

field test

Today we took the hydrophone out to the beach and casted it out into the sea so that we could get various different sounds caused by the sea, we also used the senheisser K6 to record various sounds around the seafront which we could then incorporate into our sound piece, as the senheisser K6 gives us the ability to get clear and crisp sounds that of which we could not obtain with a standard mic.

testing mics in the classroom

This week we started to test different mics in the classroom, specifically we looked at the hydrophone which we put in various liquids to see the what sound we could achieve from it, we also looked at the contact mic which involved sticking the mic onto electrical appliances and then seeing what different sounds we could get depending on what electrical appliance we put it on.

chosen film clips

I have chosen the film clip from 'Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets' as at 0:12 the sound technique is used where the two scenes are linked with sound, this is referred to as a bridge. A bridge is where you hear the sound before you see what is making the sound, for example in this clip you can hear the train coming before it switches scenes to the train coming head on into the car. This is done to add effect and the suspense of the train coming.






I chose the film 'The Grudge' as a good representation of sound as at 2:36 you hear the classic sound of the grudges voice and this is an example of symbolic sound as when you hear it you immediately resemble it to the antagonist.

introduction

synchronous sound - lip syncing

dubbing - dubbing English over a Spanish film for example

diegetic - background music that the characters would be able to hear

non diegetic - a backing track that the character would not be able to hear

bridge - linking two scenes together for example: having a sound playing before seeing what that sound is

sound motif - sound associated with a specific character or thing, for example: jaws

dub - sound recorded after filming



other key words:

- symbolic sound
- direct sound
- wild sound

'The Jazz Singer' - this is the first feature length motion picture with not only syncronised but also lip synchronised singing. This is where the silent film era started to decline and more dialogue started to make an appearance




- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jazz_Singer