SOUND INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

Professional Tool-Kit



The project was to create a soundpiece 30 to 60 sec long and to create two versions, one with narration and the other without based off a piece of text.

The text could be from anywhere. Advertisements, books, poems etc...

My first idea was to create an aquatic underwater scene based off the Greek mythology of Atlantis. As grand o fan idea it sounded I had to put that aside as it was far too much of a challenge to perfect in such a small amount of time and so had to be a little more realistic. The next idea was creating a warm busking fire burning in a large fireplace and the sounds of family cheer and merriment as a lead up to Christmas. As perfect as xmas as this sounded again i had to dismiss this idea as the deadline was way before this. So going back to what I know, I began to revisit some of the previous work I did, in particular my first soundpiece about a painting called 'Dulle Griet'.' This painting in short, is the depiction of a thunderous horde of angry women plundering hell and sacking it of all its treasures.

Dulle Griet by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562.

My intentions, now was to continue this painting in a sort of part two, to my first piece.

This subsequently lead me to the idea of creating a marching army that was hell regrouping just outside the plundered town in the underworld and getting ready to march forth into battle again.

The text used was an extract from a longer piece of text created by me in order to immerse myself in the moment.

Narration

Their march shook the ground, 
Thousands upon thousands did they go, like a swarm of a locusts.
Their cries soared high up into the sky thundering a monstrous roar.
Clouds and lightening coveted the sky in shadow as the rain fell down, 
calming the fires that engulfed the lands below.
As, the legions proceeded to the front of this war. This fight was only at its dawn.
But who would win? 
No one could tell.

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Research

Overtime I came across various clips from movies that had marching armies and then came across one that was from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, It seemed almost perfect that a fellow sound mixer had overdubbed a scene in which thousands of creatures begin marching out of a castle and onwards to the enemy settlement.

It gave me the idea to use pots and pans and cutlery for the clanging of weapons and further reasearch into other videos gave me more ideas and techniques i could do in pro tools

I now had an idea and inspiration to begin myself off with and so began booking the Foley room out as much as i could to give myself suffcient time to collect all the necessary sounds required to create my piece and finish in Pro tools.

All sounds were made and created by me.
Some of the sounds made were created with the following;

Lightening : paper and tissue ripping and being torn up.

Rain : Rice falling down onto paper

Marching boots on the ground : Soccer boots in a box of rocks and dirt

Clanging of metal armour : my house keys on a metal reading stand used for music

Chanting and roaring: all done by me


Post production

The voices themselves took a bit of time and work and will say it that it was the hardest sounds to get right. Trying to make them sound like a thousand was harder but eventually with enough time in tutorials such as Lynda.com and techhow sites as well as vimeo and youtube i resolved the issue by overdubbing the sounds and then using a reverb and adding an echo to give it that church hall effect.

A lot of the others were enhanced in protools effects and some I had to change the base or or pitch in order for them to sound like the real thing.

 I also used garage band in order to help me get the sound of the horns at the beginning and at the end the celestial voices fading off and ending the piece. All sounds were created by me over the digital piano and I also had a casio piano keypad in which I used to create my music for the piece.

The beginning of the piece I began first positioning the sounds in order to make them sound accordingly how I imagined it to be.

This is the what the end piece looked like in pro tools looked like before bouncing the audio onto my hardrive. Unfortunately I wasnt able to return to it to give it a polish off but alas....twas not meant to be.

The entire piece was worked at and completed in approx two days, however due to technical issues during post editing I couldn't complete and finish a clean cut version of my piece. The error was, the software, consistently! kept rejecting my saved projects or would not load up the media required to do the editing on and so personally I was distressed at not being able to polish off my final piece but in all I was proud of the soundscape.