Post 5 – Audio Evaluation

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I was asked to complete a piece of foley sound to support a scene from a movie. I chose Luc Besson’s The Last Battle. My initial ideas were to get audio of the footsteps, breathing and atmos as a base sound throughout, this would then mean I can record the added noises such as shuffles, melee attacks and falling over. I believe experimenting with audio and sound effects will help me in the future as I can gain an early understanding of how to create and edit audio to support a movie. Before starting this unit, my knowledge and skills with audio were very basic and had some faults, for example not knowing how to correctly assemble some parts of the equipment.

The initial tasks of audio were to experiment, research and plan. For experimentation we went into a small audio room and recorded footsteps. This was to get an understanding of how loud specific sounds are and how loud they need to be, along with the distance from the mic for quality of sound. We also recorded the breathing to understand how delicate sounds are recorded on different microphones such as consenders and dynamic microphones. This influenced my work as I knew specifically what to use and when to use it for better quality sound. For research we had to find out the difference between these pieces of equipment to find out how they work, and where they work best. We were also challenged to find out how specific sounds are created by foley artists. These are sounds like celery snapping for broken bones and whipping bamboo across the mic for an arrow flying by. This also influenced my work by inspiring how to create the specific sounds I needed to support the clip. We also researched the difference between diegetic and non diegetic sounds. For planning we had to create a spotting sheet, a cue sheet and a risk assessment. These all helped me by reminding me of what to do, how to do it and most importantly what to avoid.

I found Audition a simple and easy to use software as you could edit the audio how you like with many different effects. My final audio has room for improvement however the timing is quite good with the kicking of the can and the strikes of the weapons. The quality of the audio is also good as they were recorded in a quiet isolated room so it was focused on one sound only. The thing that lets my final product down is the realism of the sounds. This is because I couldn’t recreate the strikes perfectly as I didn’t have that type of equipment available. I believe I partly met my original intentions as I created a product with good timing and believable realism.

Feedback: 

Joshua Bunting – The sounds seem to all be in sync with the video, all the sounds are relevant.

Emily Crisp – All the sounds were in sync and matched the atmosphere of the video well.

With this feedback it supports my claim that I reached my original intentions as the sounds are in sync. However, there is still room for improvement as the realism of the sounds could be better. This can be fixed by attempting different methods of creating the sound to figure out which one works best with the clip and then add that to it. Other than that I believe my audio product managed to meet my expectations and original intentions.

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