Project 1: Audient B Session

This week, I booked some studio time in Audient B to get started on our project, as we've been project planning for the last couple of weeks. One of our group members, Brea, edited the trailer of Inside for us to use and the video was 1min 20secs long. We originally thought that that time wouldn't fit the criteria of the project so we checked with our lecturer and we got the all clear which was a huge relief. Having a small duration to work with also means we're able to focus more on the individual sounds of the entire soundtrack, to get the perfect sound to portray the feelings we want the audience to feel.

In the studio, Brea was available to join me and because we didn't have the whole group with us, we couldn't really start recording or doing anything major so we decided to just create the Pro Tools session, import the video, and to just start collecting foley samples that we aren't able to record in the studio. Before we started searching for sounds, we went through the arrangement plan chart, (it shows where we plan to add certain foley sounds and instruments for different locations of the video), to get an idea of what sounds we're looking for.

Snapshot of Arrangement Plan Chart (X Axis: Time Locations of Video Y Axis: Instruments/Foley Sounds)

This arrangement plan chart helps us visualise our whole project and because I'm a visual learner, I'll be able to understand much clearly which sounds go at which time and also plan how long these sounds will play for.

For our foley sounds, we plan to have some recorded in the studio and some sounds from sample libraries online or YouTube. The sounds that we collected from YouTube so far were rain sounds, a van's running engine, a bird's wing flapping, and sounds of crickets. We also downloaded the audio of a gameplay walkthrough of the entire game from YouTube (which goes for more than an hour), so if we have any trouble finding specific foley sounds, we'll be able to find some from there.

On Pro Tools, we began allocating the sounds to their locations in the video. I also added a low, underlying synth in 2 octaves which played for the entire video. Brea and I thought it suited the video well as it helps to identify the chord of the soundtrack (Dmin) and also adds an eerie feeling. As we played the video with the sounds we added, it sounded surprisingly good and it was enough to give someone the idea and theme of the project, so I can't wait to hear the final composition after we add and edit the rest of the sounds and instruments.

For next week, we've booked the Neve for 7 hours, which is a lot of time to get all the recordings done and hopefully start getting into the editing stage before the end of the week. We plan to record strange sound effects as well as melodies from an electric guitar and also recording some melodies from a keyboard. From then, we move into adding more synth instruments as well as the rest of the foley sounds into our soundtrack.

I think our project is going well and we're learning a lot of things along the way, which is important. Yeah we might be a bit behind as we only started recording/creating our project this week, but we've got a good plan and I'm working with a great co-operative group so we'll make sure to get this project done in time.

So far, so good!