Tag Archives: workshop

Workshop Exercise: Intro To Recording Sound

This week’s exercise included running around campus pointing our trusty zoom recorders at things hoping to produce something resembling a ‘clean’ recording. The initial challenge was finding a suitable place to record the interview part without any background noise – seeing as quiet places in the CBD are hard to come by and there were 20 other students with the same idea. Once we’d find a suitable hideaway, however, another issue presented itself. Namely, how does this thing work? How far away do we hold it from the interviewee? How do we know if it is recording at the right volume?

The answers mostly consisted of ‘I don’t know, but let’s give it a shot.’ After listening to the interview recordings, I feel that the recorder should have been held closer to the interviewee to record clearer sound. Also, the spot where we recorded the interview was a bit too echo-y, and this affected the final recording.

We also had issues recording particular sound in public spaces, such as the noise of a tram, as there was too much background sound, and you can hardly tell the population of Melbourne to be quiet, please. The more successful recording is therefore the interview one, which was recorded in a comparatively more quiet space.

Bringing the sound clips into Audition was fairly straight forward after coming from learning Premiere the previous week. Although I had some what-am-I-doing moments, thanks to some trial and error this was quickly resolved. I layered a few different sounds to create the clip embedded below, trying to keep in mind the figure-ground-field technique. The figure in this clip is the interview, set against some ‘Melbourne’ sounds – casual chatter, music, and the dinging noise of a tram, that create the atmosphere. I had to move around the levels a lot in order to bring forward the interview recording, and I applied some fades to make it more smooth.

 

Week Four: Project Brief Two and Evaluation

 

 

A Girl from Jasmijn van Houten on Vimeo.

My background is a big part of who I am. I also like foreign films, so I thought that for Project Brief Two I’d blend these two. My intention was to create a video that was a parody of/inspired by foreign, especially ‘art’ films. However, to reflect my nationality, the narration would be in Dutch.

I tried to achieve this effect in several ways. Firstly, I shot the footage in the 4:3 aspect ratio, to create a more vintage look than widescreen.

I wrote a short script for the narration and then asked my father to help me record the voice over, as he is more proficient in Dutch and his voice suited the style of narration I was trying to achieve. I wish I could have used better recording equipment to record this, but I was limited to my phone, so the audio quality wasn’t as good as I would have liked. Similarly, I also wanted a higher quality recording for the forest sounds at the end, as my phone’s microphone wasn’t able to pick up on the subtle sounds.

It was difficult to get some specific shots as I was working by myself. If I were to do it again, I’d plan my production so I’d have time to ask someone to help me.

Whilst initially I imaged the film to be in black and white, I changed it to be in colour because it looked better. Whilst this distances my project from the stereotypical ‘art’ film I was trying to imitate, I think it is still an improvement.

Since my first foray into Premiere Pro with the Haiku exercise, I already felt like I improved a lot. The overall production process of PB2 went quite smoothly. I knew what I wanted to do, I created a storyboard, got the shots I wanted, recorded the voiceover, and was able to edit it all together with relative ease. I’m a lot happier with PB2 rather than PB1, and I think this might be because I put a lot more time into planning before I actually started the exercise.