Month: October 2016

Sound Meet

 

Friday 21st October 

Planning Ahead

After the tutorial meeting with David, the Sound Team met up to discuss next week’s work. First of all, after the meeting on Tuesday we discussed research that Hannah had set us. Unfortunately, some was slightly irrelevant to us which was no fault of Hannah’s, instead we suggested the research we would do and tailor her suggestions to this (Hannah’s set research were starting-blocks anyway). Therefore, we agreed for Rob to continue his Location Sound research as he has done the most at this stage in time, focussing primarily on boom techniques to start with. Dan agreed to take Microphones. Which mics we will choose to use and why. Finally, I am to look at Lauren’s director notes on sound and use research on film sound to suggest creative ways to use music, and certain license free music that we could use.

Succeeding this, we organised when we would work on what project the following week. As it stands, Rob, Dan and myself are working on three films in Semester A. This includes Location and Post for Cognition, Post for Agriculture, a film made by our editor Tom over the Summer, and Callback, a film directed by Molly Naylor. Matt North got in touch with David for help on this and we agreed to support him. For this project we are in charge of sourcing realistic ambience and atmos tracks, as well as providing the necessary Foley for the film.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday if necessary we have planned to work on Callback, as Matt has set several deadlines for us to follow. Thereafter, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we shall continue work on Agroculture for Tom. Additionally, we assigned Agroculture roles:

Sam + Dan = Dialogue
Rob + whoever is not working on Dialogue that particular day = Foley + Foley Mix
whoever is not working on the Dialogue Mix = SFX + SFX Mix
Final Mix = Complete Team.

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Informal Proposal

 

Friday 21st October 

Week 4 – Project Proposal

Today in our meeting with David, it was time for our project proposal. This was an informal affair, where we discussed the following areas of the project with David:

Working title, project outline, requirements from the client (their brief), our group aims and objectives (directed towards the brief), our own individual learning outcomes, roles and research.

David seemed pleased with our progress so far, but instructed us to alter our learning objectives once again. My individual learning outcomes were too wordy, so David suggested creating succinct bullet points explicitly stating the learning outcomes, instead of a paragraph including context of why these are our objectives. David also suggested thinking of ways to draw out these outcomes – how we would assess them. To that end we could ask for feedback from the clients, tutors and peers. This would allow the reflective summary to examine to what extent our individual objectives had been achieved.

We also suggested a resources that each member of the team had bought, Ric Viers’ The Location Sound Bible (2012) that the library could invest in. As well as the blog being professional through application – this meant not filling the blog with the technical aspects of polar patterns, etc. but instead key relationships between the teams. David also suggested a session with Jack Shelbourn which included problem solving skills such as where/how to boom professionally when working with the DoP.

Work for the following week therefore included fixing up the individual learning objectives, continuing posting and researching for the blog, and collaboration with the film group – additional location scouts, ideas on actors/title sequence, etc.

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Weekly Meet 3

 

Tuesday 18th October

Regular Updates with the Film Crew

As with every week, the film crew attended a weekly meeting to discuss progress and development with the project. Items on the agenda included: The need for Hannah to write the Sound Team an extended, professional brief for our module (which can be viewed here, under Requirements), our blog research to be put onto a separate word document for the media student’s project file, the idea of creating a 15-30 second title sequence for the film and where Tom would complete the edit.

Additionally, during the morning prior to this meeting, Rob, Lauren, Hannah and Jamie went on a location scout to the Drill Hall as they had a potential space for us to shoot the film in. I have created a detailed post which can be found here.

Other than that, it was continuation of research while the team finalised the script and kept searching for locations and actors.

18th oct meet

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Guest Lecture 2

 

Monday 17th October

Jez Riley French

Today, we had our second guest lecture of the semester, led by Jez Riley French. Jez is primarily a Field Recorder, who has more recently been working on the recordings of large surfaces and structures, such as buildings and bridges, as well as spaces. To take a look at Jez’s personal bio, cv and previous work, follow this link to his website, or follow his Twitter and SoundCloud, where he uploads many of his works.

Jez began the lecture by talking about contact mics, what they are, how he uses them, and that he creates his own and sells them on his website. He demonstrated the use of contacts mics with his first piece, Teleferica, where he had connected contact mics along a piece of tensioned cable in Italy. The contact mics would then record the sound of insects, leaves and the wind interacting with the cable. I found this piece very interesting, as Jez explained that Dr Alan Lamb had discovered a similar sound when recording an abandoned stretch of telegraph wire. This was particularly interesting because Lamb was contacted by the sound designers working on Star Wars no less, who wanted to use this sound for the laser blasters in the original film. I have embedded Jez’s piece below to illustrate the sound of the laser blasters:

After this, Jez continued by demonstrating his use of hydrophones and coils through other pieces of his work. In one piece, Dissolves, Jez attached hydrophones to the inside of a beaker, filled with slightly acidic water and recorded the sound of dolomites dissolving into this substance, which strangely sounded similar to birdsong. Furthermore, Jez illustrated how he uses geophones, which do not typically record sound, to create sound pieces. He played us an example of what the Earth turning on its axis sounds like, and followed this clip by questioning whether humans could ever perceive infrasound (infra-: sounds below our frequency threshold, ultra: sounds above). Additionally, Jez suggested that ever since the creation of technology and the technology to record sound, ironically our hearing has decreased vastly in the past 100 years. This is due to compression in everyday life, and the fact that sound is presented to the audience, instead of the audience (of whatever – music, film, TV, etc.) having to seek it out for themselves via the use of critical listening. Jez finished the talk by telling us to constantly challenge what we accept to be correct, acceptable or appropriate as sometimes sounds that we do not expect to work can have the biggest impact.

I found this lecture very insightful, as it taught me the excellent, creative uses of unconventional mics to produce sounds we would otherwise not hear. It made me want to go out into the field and record sound, which is reflectively something I do not do enough of, and now that Media Loans has recently purchased hydrophones, we can experiment with these.

 

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Record Producer

 

Thursday 13th October

George Shilling 

This week, George Shilling, record producer, recording engineer, mastering engineer and musician, visited the university to give a talk to the (BA Hons) Music students. Luckily enough, a handful of AP students were allowed to sit in on the session with George. To visit George’s website, follow this link.

George separated his lecture into two parts: the first was regarding himself, how and why he got into the music industry, where he was (or not!) schooled in HE, how he landed his first recording engineer job with Livingston Recording Studios, and where he went from there. Throughout the lecture, he would refer to ‘Lightbulb Moments’ during his career. These were positive moments in his career which allowed him to develop and progress. One such moment was when George was called to produce a track for Coldcut, who used a certain type of PC to program their sounds. Even though he had not produced a track before, George accepted the job and went out the next day to buy this same PC ad spent all of his free time studying how to use it before this session.

George also talked about diversity during his career, and highlighted the importance of this. For example, he was an excellent Cellist while growing up, but left it behind when he got into the recording industry. However, when he built his own studio later on in his career and could afford instruments within it, he bought a Cello so he could play again, and now offers to add accompaniment to tracks he records and produces – expanding his skill set. Another example of that is doing the lecture itself in order to generate money, or playing live shows for artists.

The second half of George’s talk was strictly ProTools based. He opened up a few sessions and showed us several tips and tricks he had used in order to achieve a certain effect in his recordings. Of these effects included both compressing the signal multiple (4 to 5) times to mimic analog tape recorders, and others included a way of creating a reverb processed twice, both of very long durations, in order to add an underlayer to the vocal performances. Finally, he explained that he enjoying muddying his music when recording on ProTools as it seems too clean for him in this day and age, so use many processors in order to achieve this with his music, to create excitement and life.

This talk was very interesting, but I felt it was perhaps more suited to a student recording an EP this Semester, unlike myself doing Location and Post Sound. Also, I felt that he talked about the past a lot which wasn’t greatly helpful for students of today, who want to know what’s going on in the industry right not, and how we can get into that industry successfully.

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