E-mail: Assignment Brief 3

Dear Students,

Following discussions and feedback from students and staff, it was felt that the Assignments and the modules needed adjustment to enable a more efficient marking and a smoother delivery. There will be no distinction between the brief for the 3rd Assignment for Sound For Visual Media module and 3rd Assignment for the Music & Sound For Film & Video module, although there will be a slight change of emphasis in the delivery of the module to account for your particular course's outcomes.

You will be required to produce your own soundtrack, utilizing a selection of film sound techniques from a provided list. This objective remains the same.

But, rather than choosing your own clip, you will be provided with some clips from which you may choose. The clips will be between 4 and 7 minutes long. You may use sound library sounds, but only 3 sounds may be used, these must be referenced, crediting the source. A script will be provided in cases where a dialogue is required via ADR.

I would like to give you 'silent' clips with scripts so that your choice of sounds is not flavored by the commercial final version, but this is a question of my time in being able to write out the scripts, so we'll see. The selections from films of different genre which offer you the opportunity to make imaginative and creative soundtracks.

These changes address some of the concerns expressed by students and will speed up the process of beginning work on the submission as the clips will be ready to work on.

The brief also requires you to provide all your source files and working sessions, submitted on DVD/CD-ROM as a DATA disc. The files on these discs must work, i.e. no files should be 'orphaned' from their 'parents'. There were many submissions with the Shark video, for example, in which Cubase Projects, ProTools Sessions and Logic Songs could not find audio files. This meant that the disc was useless for marking purposes. It is also an essential 'real world' discipline that you are able to transfer your work from one machine to another successfully. Sometimes, plugins are only available on the original computer. In this case, all processed files must also be submitted as processed files. It is vital that I am able to follow your project workflow from the evidence provided on your DATA disc for the purposes of assessment and feedback.

We will go over the requirements this week before we recess for Easter.

I am going to change the 3rd Assignment Brief and you will receive the full document this week with the supporting clips and scripts. These will be the basis of our lectures and tutorials until my teaching finishes on the 2nd May.

Regards,

John