STUDIO: 1800 to midnight.
The studio element of project brief 3 is a narrative, which, thanks to the absence of visuals, has ambiguous content of conflict, tension and action, represented with Foley sounds. The piece is a recreation of a story told to me by the bouncer of my location The Brunswick Hotel of a patron who frequents, “Punter”. The aim was to portray this barfly character in Punter’s home environment and show the motives behind his journey to The Brunswick. It is not a concrete narrative, in the sense it is neither of a specific event nor a symbolic generalisation. I feel the finished piece has a higher standard than previous work, thanks to the strong reflective and development aspect of this course. There is still much room for improvement in regards to technical ability, editing skills and story development – for our next assessment I plan to integrate the three of these into a consistently engaging piece.
I tried to express characters’ voices through volume, pitch, inflection and intonation rather than scripted dialogue; this is to allow greater disparity in the listener’s interpretation of the piece. A challenge was to maintain a sense of atmosphere while using studio material for a field setting. Sounds made in a studio have a controlled sound that can’t emanate the feel of an on location recording. We’d found in reading that producers can “use incidental noise as a means of filling a three-dimensional space” (Smyth, T. 2009) so I combined sounds from control environments – room, studio etc; with semi-control – street, barroom to build authenticity. Hopefully this effectively curated quality clips with ambient response from the atmosphere.
I have noticed some development in my reaper editing skills, and I am striving to produce higher quality, realistic and aesthetic sound clips. Naturally, with practice, I feel more comfortable setting up the ZoomH4N, shotgun mic and lapel and am able to gage proximity and direction to compliment movement. I used direction and distance to place the listener in the shoes of Punter, as in a first person view. This could have been shown with more conviction had I a greater knowledge of panning, looking forward I hope to develop from static pans to incorporate some flowing movement. I found it hard to bring abstract elements into the piece, using manipulated sounds or representations to compliment plot rather than interject. Focus and interest of the piece revolves around the actions and movements of character, maintained on foreground material through closer, clearer sounds supported by background noise captured on the H4N on surround 2 channel. The combination of recording styles makes the texture of the piece, though I would like to create richer soundscapes in the future by investigating the ambience of settings.
Project Brief 3 has guided me through the affordances of studio recording and shown me to piece together sounds that are not necessarily active to create a story with a narrative flow. The aspects I’d like to work is time-lining and writing a structured piece from a strong creative idea – this would maintain the listener’s attention and strengthen their engagement with a story they can engross.