Sense of Space- Final thoughts

Throughout this production I have aquired a lot of useful skills for creating a stronger audio piece in the future. I think the influences and inspirtions for this piece have helped significantly in my criticl understanding and progression of the overall idea. Pieces such as Virtual barbershop have helped my with the technical aspect of the piece and 'Beneath the Forest Floor' have helped me progress my original idea of the nightmare scene and find ways to make the audience feel uncomfortable. The planning stages were successful as we considered all the stages that were required and debated them amongst ourselves.

For the shooting side I think we were relatively successful for the first time recording with audio. There were a few problems with levels but we were still able to get all the tracks needed and more in case we needed them. The equipment was checked before we went out on location and we took spare essential accessories such as batteries that could have ruined the tracks without them.

The editing process was done to the best of our ability and we spent a considerable time piecing the tracks together and fine tuning them to sound to the best of our ability. I think our choice to manipulate most of the tracks in editing was a successful decision as it made the fine cut sound much closer to what we initially aimed for.

Altogether this project went well and I have enjoyed experience audio as an element of film and media production.

Sense of Space- Fine Cut

On Friday we completed the fine cut of our Sense of Space project 'Hypnosis'. This blog has been posted 4 days after the fine cut completion and this is due to advice given to me when reading 'In the Blink of an Eye' by Walter Murch. In this book Murch says that the best thing to do with an edit is to complete it to the best of your ability and then leave it for a few days a keep your mind off of it. This helps to have a better critical state when relistening to the piece after a few days. For this reason I am going in tomorrow to have a final, detailed touch of the mistakes or existing problems that I may have missed if I had not left it. On top of this Jennie has allowed audience feedback for our piece by sharing it with her house mates. They have given pretty positive feedback which is a good start to the final stages before Thursday.

I have to comment on the book 'In the Blink of an Eye' as this has been very inspiring for certain techniques during the post production period of my sense of space assignment. Walter Murch is a very experienced industry professional and I respected his advice on the editing stages. I have adopted numerous techniques that he described that have positively contributed to the overall quality of our piece. This book has been an inspiration and influence in the overall technical side of editing in my Sense of Space project.

Sense of Space- Editing

The above images show the different things we did when editing our piece. The top image shows us using an EQ to manipulate certain audio clips to make it sound like we are listening to this sound from inside the characters head. We strived to create a piece that revolves around the character therefore we decided to make the audience listen to the piece from the characters point of view. The images below also show how we manipulated the piece using different frequencies and using reverb to make the piece more dream like and immerse the audience into a different reality. The edit was pretty successful and we have spent a lot of time on this piece. I put a lot more effort into the production and post production of this assignment after 'The Edale project' as this previous project had a lot more negative impact due to less effort being put into the final project. In fact to learn from my mistake I have decided to make a fine cut today (Friday) and re-evaluate the piece on the wednesday after leaving it a while to get out of my mind (This is a trick learnt from the book 'In the Blink of an Eye' by Walter Murch as he says to find something to take your mind off of the project for a few days before going back to critically analyse).

Altogether the post production has been realatively successful due to the careful thinking of pre-production and the over recording of audio effects in production.

Sense of Space- Tutorial

Yesterday was our tutorial. Esther seemed pretty pleased with the rough cut although there were prts that needed desperately to be tweaked and finished properly. She made some useful comments like the clicks and pops made during some of the audio clips that when editing I was unaware of as I was not looking for these problems. She also gave us useful information about what she expected from the ending as this was not finished yet. Things such as a resolution after the nightmare which we had planned to transist out of the dream after however this was good to hear as we were following the expectations of a audience member.

Altogether the tutorial gave us useful information for when we complete our final edit. This will hopefully make sense to the viewers and give a clear storyline as we try to guide them throughout the piece.

Sense of Space- Inspired

2 weeks ago I watched Inception. This film is based around the levels of dreaming a similar concept we have adopted in our piece. The inspiration came to me at the very start of the film. Before the first shot has even begun. The sound of the waves crashing onto the beach. If I close my eyes I can imagine it in my head, which must be purposely done if the whole film is based on the inner state of dreaming. This clip, just that part at the beginning made sense to me the dreamy feel that waves can give in sound. This is why we have used the seaside as the first transition in the dream that we captured for our sense of space.

Sense of Space- Suspense Inspiration

As this is now a hypnotic sequence that involves the character having a nightmare I had to consider how to do this using total audio devices. I looked at the iconography and ideology of the piece and wrote down what I though would be good to inform the audience of the situation. After discussing this scene with Jennie we decided it would be a good idea to add a metronome in. This is when a sudden inspiration struch me. I remebered first watching the INSIDIOUS trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1YbOMDI59k ) that infamously caught the eye of millions of horror buffs due to its creepy sound and horrific images. I realised this trailer was horrific even when just listening to the sound. As well as this the sound of a metronome is heard at numerous times around this trailer and I would even go as far to say the trailer is based around this Metronome sound. Therefore we decided that we will make our sense of space piece very much based around the sound of the metronome.

Sense of Space- Second day of Recording (Jarman's Garden)

Our second day of recording got us through two scenes, the car scene and the beach scene. The car scene was successful and quite easy to get except for the skidding and the crash. However the beach scene was very interesting due to the constant wind coming from the sea front. The rifle mic had to be positioned just right, but when it was the waves sounded great. It had a real feel of the seaside on a december morning. The cold and windy atmosphere and the crunching footprints of the washed up shells and seaweed. This took me back to Jarman's Garden audio sequence by Sherre Delys were the waves approach the recording and this was something that I really want to capture in the editing process. Just like the movement from Jarman's Garden to the sea nearby, in our scene, a nice transition from inside this characters head to a fading in of the sea waves and atmosphere as the narration tells you that a cool wind is hitting her face. This scene will be effective.

The car scene on the other hand is going to pose certain problems such as finding a skidding sound and finding a crash sound. For this I'm going to record a bin disposal truck in action and cleverly cut it into the edit a few seconds after the sound of the skid.

Altogether the recordings from the first and second day have gone relatively well and we are pretty much ready to begin our rough cut. We took more recording sounds than we needed and at an estimate we have around 40 different sounds that we will consider using in the final cut.