Film Reflection 5

February 19 2009

This lesson, my group and I continued to work on the "How to be a Sound Designer" project, creating and exploiting soundtracks that would match with every detail of the comic strip. I learnt that the reason for creating the soundtrack was to increase our understanding on how sound effects, music and silence are used to create meaning overall. Our group members split parts, Benny and Kevin were temporarily in charge of the documentary while Clare and I worked mainly on planning the soundtracks for every scene of the comic strip. The most common used soundtrack for the overall comic strip was the sound of blowing wind, we decided to create the wind sound by using a piece of thin paper and letting it flap around wind outdoors. In some scenes, we decided to make the "wind" soundtrack softer and in some scene louder, depending on the overall theme of the scene. If the scene was dark, gloomy and frightening, we wanted to create the creepy feeling to the viewers, and also increase the tension in the atmosphere. We also used a lot of "walking" soundtrack, we decided to use a rock and scrap it through some pebbles on the floor to make it seem like someone was walking; this would make the scenes very realistic. We decided to work on the volume of the soundtracks as well, because we learnt that if something was far away, the sound it would make would be faint, and if we didn't adjust the volume for that, it would seems very unrealistic. For the dialogue, there were only a few people included in section 4 of the comic, the young prince, the hero and the two shepherd-looking men. Because there consisted of two boys and two girls in our group, we thought it would be unethical and unrealistic if girls did the voices of the characters, since they are all men. Though Benny and Kevin felt reluctant of taking the parts, therefore we needed to find someone's voice that could match the voices of all the characters, which we will be doing next lesson. At the end of the lesson, we were able to finish planning out all the soundtracks for our comic strip, we also planned out how we were going to create those sounds, which I found very helpful because it expanded our range of creativity. Overall, I found this lesson very useful because my group got a lot of this done, Benny and Kevin started a little bit of the documentary, which will continue you develop throughout this assignment. I thought this lesson was very entertaining, it tested our creativity of creating sounds, which I found very interesting.