AICE Media Sound #1 and #2

                         Sound Projects This Week 

Sound Project #1 - Werewolf Soundscape 

 In our AICE Media class this week and last we’ve been working on the process of sound design for tv and film. We discussed synchronous, asynchronous, and diegetic sound. Our first assignment was to create aa soundscape to tell an interesting story through just sound with no visuals. My partner and I got together immediately and began brainstorming possibilities for the project.

    We decided to tell the story of a man transforming into a werewolf as it gave us an opportunity to utilize a lot of different sounds. Our first scene was a couple named Bella and Jacob lost in the woods at night, calling for each other as they had been somehow separated. Next, Jacob would look into the night sky and realize the moon was full, about to begin his transition. Finally, he would painfully change into the wolf and begin to hunt Bella, his friend turned prey. 

    Something really important to us was that Jacob’s transformation came across well through the sound as we were unable to include any visuals. The sound of t-shirts ripping, rubber being stretched, and snapping celery were a few common sounds we used to simulate skin stretching and breaking bones. A shout or groan of pain every few seconds and a single long howl at the end left us pretty happy with our final product. 

    A fun challenge was layering background noises and main audio to realistically set the scene. The cricket chirping as well as owl hooting did a great job communicating woods at nighttime and distant wolf howling was almost foreshadowing the story’s climax. We also created a lot of this ambience noise ourselves, going outside to snap twigs and crunch dry leaves to simulate walking and moving around the forrest. 

    However a less fun challenge and something we struggled with was the editing process. My partner and I split the editing work evenly by having me do the first two scenes, and her do the last two. Our editing program, Clipchamp, struggled to save or load our work when both of us worked on the same file. In the end, we had to work on our respective halves separately and save both before stitching them together for our final product. 

    Here is the link to our final product soundscape: PopescuCofino_soundscape_Per5

    Sound Project #2 - Adding Sound to One Word Film    

For our next sound project, our class was sent back to another project of ours, the one word film from last month. We took the previously silent video and added whatever audio we felt appropriate for each scene. This project felt much easier than our last sound assignment, we didn’t have to come up with a new idea and were able to build off what we already had in our original video. We had to work on the editing of this project independently so my partner and I created a list of required sound effects and set off to edit the same video in our own styles. 

    I downloaded necessary sounds such as footsteps, generic background chatter, etc. and a few more stylistic such as a dramatic note for the climax of the video. The editing was done on Clipchamp, same as the first assignment and only took about half an hour to complete in its entirety.

    This is link to my final One Word Project with sound: OWFSound_Popescu