Review on the Creative Projects course

Gareth and Jose taught us a lot of new techniques in this course, including software such as Cecilia, Ableton Live, Paulstretch, Sound Grain and plug-ins such as Granulator II and Max 4 Live. Unfortunately, I haven’t quite mastered most of the techniques, but I will continue to explore them in the future. I actually had some problems with this assignment, I wanted to make the vocals blurred. I wanted the voice to be presented in such a way that we couldn’t hear what the voice was saying, but we could feel that the person was speaking. I tried a number of plug-ins in Protools but couldn’t get the desired effect. So I asked Jose and he suggested that using Cecilia to make this sound. I used the module that came with the software to debug it. And then I got a sound that fit the bill, but it had reverb, which I didn’t want. As I’m not familiar with Cecilia, I didn’t know how to get rid of the reverb in this sound. I gave up to use the sound I had made in Cecilia. However, I was inspired by the debugging in Cecilia, and I found the appropriate plug-ins in Protools to get the sound I wanted.

Regarding new technologies, apart from the software mentioned before, Gareth also introduced some new recording and playback technologies, such as 5.1/7.1 channels and Binaural concepts. Unfortunately, I can’t use these technologies at the moment. I will try it if I get the chance later. In fact, I have some ideas now. Using binaural microphone to record and create sounds for game world, it would give the player a sense of immersion. Players of first person RPG games would get a great gaming experience. The sound I’m submitting for the film is in stereo, but I’ll be mixing a 5.1 channel version for my friend later. This was requested by him, as most cinemas are now set up for 5.1 channels. Gareth also talked about sound production for animation and games, mentioning foley technology. I thought I would have the experience of going into Foley Studio to record this time. Unfortunately, the director told me they didn’t have time to record ADR and told me to record all the sounds I needed during the shooting stage. So many of the missing sound effects I recorded on set directly after all the shooting was over.

In addition to these new techniques, Gareth and Jose also imparted a lot of their understanding of sound and a lot of sound theory to us in this course.

In the first few sessions of the course, Jose tried to get us to think about what sound communicates to us. Is it an emotion? A picture? It made me think about the term audiovisual language and why cinema is an art that combines audio and visual. Sound helps the audience to enter the screen, why? Because sound can stimulate our brain more directly and powerfully and drive our emotions. On the other hand, Gareth tried to make us experience different ways of listening and to explore unusual ways of making sounds of our body and different objects. I knew that the reverberation in each space was different, it depending on their size and the different materials of the walls. But I had never really listened to these differences. This listening has given me a better understanding of the relationship between space and reverberation. This helped me a lot with this assignment. Because we actually filming the size of the space differed slightly from the space presented in the film, I need to change the reverberate of the sound recorded on location.

When we returned from spring break, Jose’s sessions gave me a sense of freedom of audio. The performances in the first and last sessions, and the sound examples shared in the middle sessions. These were the freest forms of expression of sound, and the audio was pure in this way. What Jose told me most in the performance sessions was to let me free to make sounds. These classes gave me a sound experience that I hadn’t experienced before and it was great to feel that way. Most of the sounds I’ve produced before have been short film sounds. Short film sounds serve the picture and are limited by the storyline of the film. So I really like these freedom sounds.