Foley Evaluation

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Research

The main idea that I found while doing my research was that in order to get a coherent and convincing soundscape you should layer your sounds together. I tried to do this in my film by layering different tracks of the car noise I had on top of each other to fill it out and make it sound less like a can but I don’t think it worked as well as i’d hoped. It definitely sounded better than just on its own but not to the standard I wanted. Looking back it might of been a good idea to use a library sound as it’s one of the most prominent sounds in the film, although i’m glad that I tried to make it myself as it was good fun and showed me how attentive I need to be with the sounds i’m making and how I can layer and combine them after.

Another area that I tried to apply the idea of layering sound was in my atmospheric noise. I had several tracks of wind noise that I faded in and out of each other and combined when I wanted it to be more prominent. Overall I think this worked reasonably well although I still wasn’t happy as I felt there was still too much space between the sounds. I think the reason I struggled here was firstly because there wasn’t many natural sounds that I could replicate to represent the dessert and also the film is quite fast paced so there wasn’t much time to build the atmosphere. Another option I could of used was having a music track to provide a more solid base, but I thought that it would be very difficult to find a track that matched well with the clip as it’s already timed with another track. Also I liked the idea of trying to make all the sounds I used myself.

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Planning  

I started the planning process by watching the clip through and listing every sound that I heard and began thinking about how I could make those sounds myself. This gave me a strong idea of how many different sounds I might need and made clear the ones that were the most important.

Next I began to go through each scene and think about each sound individually, talking about what they had used and weather I wanted to mimic that or use something different, if so, what I would use and how I might go about making it.

Finally I then put together a clear list detailing each sound I needed for each scene and how I was going to make them.

The first problem that I came across was how I was going to create my atmospheric sound. Looking online I discovered that the way wind noise is often created in foley is with a ‘wind machine’, this consists of a piece of cloth pulled over a wheel which is then rotated, creating a convincing wind noise. An easy way of doing this at home would be turning a bike upside down and using that, this is the way I had planned to do it. But when I came to record I found that simply blowing past the mic and moving the dead cat gave me a good enough wind noise and was much easier to control and record.

Another sound that I was unsure how to get was the sound of the car engine. Trying to record direct from source would of been impractical and dangerous so I managed to find an alternative. I found a youtube video describing how you can use an empty beer can to achieve a relatively realistic sound. Squishing the can about halfway and then mimicking the sound of a car into it vocally turned out to work much better than I thought it would. While looking around for how to make this sound I discovered that a surprising amount of sound in film isn’t from what’s being filmed. This surprised me because it was something I haven’t thought about before as it is often blended seamlessly together and so well matched to what’s on screen.

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 Production

Overall my recordings went quite well. I was able to get clean isolated recordings of each sound. I did have to lower the input level and time when I did my takes because of background noise outside such as cars and dogs but working  with the list I had made it was quite easy to work through them track by track, making sure I had a clean take before moving onto the next.

I did however run into a few problems while recording. One being that I only had a pistol grip which meant it was difficult in some cases to direct the mic and make the sound when it required two hands. I managed to get round this though by resting the mic on the side of the bed, because it’s soft I found that it absorbed a lot of the vibrations and didn’t add any background noise. If I record by myself again it would be a good idea to get hold of a stand to support the mic giving me more control over the sounds i’m making.

Another problem I encountered was that when I booked out the sound equipment there weren’t any headphones available meaning I had to use a pair of my own which aren’t very good at canceling in out noise. This meant it was sometimes difficult to tell what the mic was picking up and what I could hear. In the end it worked out ok though as none of my clips had bad background noise in them, a few however such as the wind noise were a little quite but after adjusting the gain after they worked fine.

For the majority of my sounds my plans didn’t change much. I think this is because I had gone round and found each prop I needed before hand and made sure they could create the sound I wanted. Except however for the ‘meep meep’ sound that I needed, I couldn’t find anything that I felt matched well enough with what I wanted so ended up recording a sound vocally and then adjusting the pitch later. This worked better than I expected and was adequate for what I needed.

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What stood out to me the most from this is how important it is to build and layer your sound so that everything sounds like its suppose to be there. Making sure that you have enough of a variety of sound to play with in order to create sense atmosphere, doing this I feel is key to avoiding your film sounding flat and empty. Also I realised just how much sound can be edited and combined together to create incredibly realistic sounds.

I think sound is important because it’s a key part in influencing people’s emotions, we know that different music can have a very strong impact in how we feel, this idea can then be used to portray the themes within a film. Also I think that it’s simply another sense that you’re able to manipulate meaning you have twice as much control over what the audience experience. Therefore I think supporting the opinion that sound is half of the film.