#going to have to rewatch blade runner probably. thought it was good but slow last time i watched it.

[three-plums]

i'm not much of a sci-fi person just because i've never really found those types of questions interesting in a fictional context... if that makes sense. as far as narratives go i'm more interested in the old grrm-ism "the human heart in conflict with itself." but. the extent to which dbh pissed me off has made me start reading and watching sci-fi like a lunatic.

[olivifilm]

SOUND PROJECT

IDEAS AND INSPIRATION

Immediately after watching the clip in class I had two main ideas that I wanted to pursue – I wanted to try my hand at horror and I wanted the egg to be something else – or something more – than the egg. After talking to some classmates and groups that started to form I found that Ewan’s and David’s ideas matched mine the best and we decided to form a group. Some of the ideas I had written down are: hospital, chicken factory, egg is not an egg, space station. After meeting up with the group and carefully watching the clip a few times we settled on the idea of a soviet spaceship and the egg being a shape shifting alien that humans eat since their rations have run out. The key mood we wanted out project to have was the instability of the spaceship and the place slowly falling apart.

Our finished project is quite different from the primary idea both because of conscious creative decisions and practical reasons or limitations.

Here is also a link to the clip that first sparked an interest in sound in me that I shared with the other group members. It is from an animated series about the anime industry in Japan and in one episode they talk about the sound effects and foley work for animation, the bit starts at 4:20:

http://kissanime.ru/Anime/Shirobako/Episode-010?id=83412&s=default

It is also probably worth mentioning that because of the new Blade Runner film coming out and me watching the first film for the first time (Ewan also rewatched it) I think our project got quite a bit influenced by these films.

PLANNING

After deciding on what kind of project we wanted to do we started broadly writing down what kind of sounds we will need to record and where we could potentially get them from. After that we created a pro tools session, uploaded the video and created markers for all the sounds we wanted to record or have there. Then we exported the list and separated it into three categories – to record at home, to record in location/outside and to record in the foley room.

RECORDING

Our sound recording didn’t go without hiccups (and at times we thought the project was cursed) and was done in quite a few separate recording sessions/days. The first recordings we did during class mysteriously vanished from the memory card and got lost forever so we ended up getting only one sound out of it – a recording of sas door, which ended up being an essential part of the project. The next time we met up we planned to recreate what we had recorded the precious time as we quite liked the sounds we got, but only upon meeting up we realized that it was a Saturday and that the university is closed. We ended up walking around and trying to think of a place with lifts and then just going home and getting some sounds from mine and Ewan’s flat.

At this point we started bringing the sounds into Pro Tools and editing, but I will talk about the editing process later on.

The next recordings we did were of steps, recorded in Matthews staircase. We were asking around a few days before recording to find who lives in a house with concrete or stone steps as both in our house and in David’s he steps are laminated and sound very different. Matthew’s staircase ended up being perfect. I brought a pair of heels with me replicate the sound as closely as possible and also downloaded the video onto my phone. We would watch the video, pick up a bit that needed recording (eg. Going up the stairs or looking around) and then roughly record it – without trying to sync every step but trying to match the intensity and tempo of the footsteps in the clip. We also recorded a body falling in there – I know how to fall in place without injuring myself (in a way it is done in stage performances and stuff) so we did record an actual body hitting the ground. On the same day we also picked up the rest of the sounds we could record at home – me eating the egg for the chewing sounds, some doors, a chair rolling and spinning.

Our last recording session was in the foley room where we recorded all of the egg rollings using a stone egg (in hindsight it would have been better to record them in the staircase – there wasn’t a good enough surface nor space in the foley room). We also recorded some body movements, mouth noises, celery, and picked up all the remining little sounds we could think of.

For most of our recordings it was Ewan operating the Tascam/sitting at the computer in a Pro Tools suite while I was holding the boom or making the sounds (like running up and down the stairs or doing everything in the foley booth).

EDITING

The first thing we did was what later on turned out to be the scream – after that first recording in class we randomly dropped the sound of the door onto the timeline – the next time we opened the project to put some markers on and plan we noticed that the sound was very close to the woman screaming, so we synced it and I started playing around with it – the result was the sound reversed and different pitches, forming some sort of an unhuman screech. However, it clashed with our concept, so we muted it all but couldn’t bring ourselves to delete it.

Afterwards we started our edit with atmospheric sounds, as that’s what we had the most material for at the time. Ewan brought all the sound into the project, sorted them out and named them. He also started trying to craft some atmosphere. When me and David came in we realized something wasn’t quite working, even though all the sounds we wanted were there. So I picked up on the sound that was bugging me the most – the creaking trash bin – and really slowed it down. And somehow that worked wonderfully and we got motivated to work on the project again and started crafting that world. We all listed carefully at the same time, gave opinions and suggestions, and took turns in front of the keyboard.

A bit later on I noticed that the ominous booms created with that bin were losing their impact around the middle of the clip as you just get used to them. So I decided to take some out and started looking for some other sound that could be used to build up the tension. While going through the sounds we had recorded I found a recording of the fridge that Ewan has done and noticed that it had an interesting pattern to it, almost like some sort of subdued siren. In order to bring that sound out I tried to identify the frequencies that this specific sound happens at bring them up through an equalizer. Then I mixed the the sound I’ve got with the original, to create the notion of the effect getting stronger and more alarming.

Then we got the rest of our recordings done and started syncing up the sounds. David did the most work here as he synced all the footsteps and some other sounds too. Me and Ewan split the rest of syncing.

After the sounds were mostly synced I took over I started trying to embed them in the image and tweak them to sound more fitting to our goals. I layered some celery sounds under other sounds too such as the body falling or the egg falling down the stairs to make it sound a little bit more organic and gruesome at the same time. After testing various things I made a decision to use reverb very sparingly as I did not like how similar and muffled sounds became and also because such recordings as footsteps had quite a bit of natural reverb from the location that worked, in my opinion, really well.

On the last day of editing, when we were pretty much ready to do the panning and finished we realised that we didn’t do anything about the light flashes. After trying out many approaches with the sounds we had we ended up using the sound of the door buzzer as some sort of an electric sound.

THE CRIT AND AFTER

I think the feedback we got was generally pretty good and positive and I’m quite proud of our project. The mix could’ve had a bit more work done on it (like the egg rolls being a bit too low) and I totally agree with this, but I’m not too happy with the recordings of the egg sounds that we’ve got so maybe that’s why I subconsciously put it lower. It was interesting to hear the door sound being pointed out as I had the same impression in the beginning, put the door lower and must’ve put a mental tick on it as the task complete and stopped noticing it. Somehow I didn’t even think about blending it in better and overlooked it completely.