Assignment 3 Preview Webpages

3rd Assignment - Preview Website

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

Assignment Brief 3

The brief is changing. After talks with Andrew Bourbon and students, a new brief will be published. The main difference is that you will choose from some clips provided for you. These will be a broad range in order to offer a variety of possibilities of soundtracks. The clips will be silent, a script and precis will be supplied as necessary.

Foley Recording - MIX online

File Hosting Website

I found a website which seems to be ok for uploading files, its very straightforward to use, but comment if you know a better one. Its called eSnips.

As a test for this upload website, here's an Ambient Recording i made outside uni today, give it a download if you get a chance (its 22mb, so might take about 10 mins on a 4mb 'medium' package from virgin media).

Quality: 24bit 44.1Kbps,
Mic: Sony ECMDS70P,
Length: 1:28
Slightly EQ'd + cropped, no other processing applied.
Date: 26-02-08

One last thing, here's a great picture of David Hasselhoff for you to admire.

Cheers,

Tom

Every Student

Make your own Post to say what your practical work will entail:

• The clip(s) you're using


• The Sound Technique(s) you're employing


• The equipment list


• The prop or sound source list

My tutorial idea - Mike

I will be trying to make the sound of someone being hit over the head with a frying pan in a fight.
I'll be using a frying pan and hitting it on the floor, and with a variety of objects to create the oakey timbre of a skull.
Mike Rushton

xxx

Some Flash Sound sites

Check out some Sound Designers web sites:

• iam-studios and select Fullscreen mode.


• Wave Sound Deisgn and Audio Post-production


• Factory Studios Ltd

Sound Technique Tutorials

THIS WEEK (20): Please find and bring the following things to tutorials.

• Clips - small sections of movies that will inspire us to make an alternative sound tracks. We will make a spotting sheet for the clips. You may wish to find clips with Dialogue to do an ADR session.


• Objects to make sound effects and ideas for sound to add to a sound effect library.


• Dialogue or music clips that could be used to accompany movie clips.

Always bring some form a media to which you can save your work, e.g. a hard drive, a USB Flash drive, Recordable CD-Rom or DVD-Rom.
Use the COMMENTS facility here to make further suggestions and communicate to us what you are going to do.

Some More Useful Articles

Interview with three hollywood ADR mixers
Includes Tips and techniques

How to use good sound design in your music post-production work
Includes some sound design techniques and audio examples

Interview with sound designer Scott Gershin
His work includes American Beauty, the Chronicles of Riddick and Shrek

The process of working with sound for picture.
Talks through some processing and editing techniques

Recording the Spoken Word
Guide to setting up and editing for voice over work

Square One: Loud and Clear
More on vocal processing

SoundSnap
Free quality samples for download, includes Wav (Much better than freesound.com)

How to read a book for free on Amazon
This works for the book "Audio Vision - Sound On Screen" by Michel Chion
Type in the word "sound" and it pretty much opens up every page of the book.
Useful if you just want to reference something from it.
(You have to be registered with Amazon)

I enjoyed surfing this site the other week.

From: www.epicsound.com/sfx
Example:

Bones crunching and breaking

I personally like putting things in (cooked) whole chickens and then beating the chicken with a sledge hammer or other bludgeoning device. Billiam Baker

Celery/Carrots/Little Gem Lettuce - try freezing them too. Jacob's melon - melon with jacob’s cream crackers glued on it. Thin triple sheet plywood left to soak outside in the rain then dried in the sun and torn apart, snapped. Real Bones? Dog Chews? Branch snap + filter? Ben Minto

In addition to your regular mic, try using a contact mic on a slightly resonant surface, such as plywood, and crunch things with your boot. Use the contact mic material for the thick, heavy sweetener. Make sure the crunching items are hard enough to transmit vibration to the plywood. Walnuts have worked well for me. Kristoffer Larson

Raw corn. Get it with as much of the leafy stuff still on it as possible - good fresh corn. Works great for wet solid punches. Coll Anderson

I used acorns, small apples and walnuts on wooden parquet surface. Worked nice. Alexey Menshikov

Chris Sweetman told me a good technique for getting a really effective bone breaking noise. Chicken bones in a polystyrene cup, break and snap them together. Patrick Phelan

Crushing plastic drinks machine cups are meant to be good for bones breaking. Paul Arnold

Dried sunflower stalks. Charles Maynes

A few links that may be of use

Here a few links about how to make certain sound effects that might be of use for the last assignment:

http://www.filmsound.org/:
Pretty good in general. Has details of how they made some of the Star Wars effects.

http://www.essortment.com/freesoundeffec_rrhm.htm:
This has a short but quite useful list of effects.

http://www.radiohour.wrek.org/links/uscolosfx.html:
Another short list of different effects.

http://www.marblehead.net/foley/index.html:
Some useful info in the "How it's done" section.


A video of a guy making various swooshing noises.

Film Sound Techniques

Assignment 3

Foley Fight

1. Impacts - Melons, steak, cabbage, carrots, crow-bar
2. Swish - whip, cheese grater to piece of string.
3. Thuds - dropping heavy things.
4. Slapping -
5. Grunts -
6. Splats -
7. Breathing -
8. Breaking Glass -
Foley these using a MIDI keyboard or editor.

Foley Footsteps

1. Shoes - trainers, (hi-heels), flip flops, boots, leather soles.
2. Surfaces - sand, grass, gravel, tile, lino, carpet, concrete
> Recording Foley Footsteps - from Blip.tv
> Foley Footsteps Demo - from Audiolicense.net

ADR

1. Voice
2. Dialogue
3. Movie Clip
4. Script

Sound Effect Audio Processing

Creative use of in-sync and out-of-sync sound/music

Diegetic/non-diegetic music tricks

Music Composition

Pre-recorded music (e.g., commercial music, "classical" music)