Late night Brainstorming Session and a New Idea for Proposal

 I don’t know why but in the last couple days I really struggled to write anything meaningful for my soundscape sound design project idea. I also can’t seem to come up with a valid rationale for an academic project like this and all I can seem to think of is personal development which is just not good enough.

 Anyway, I really can’t sleep tonight. I am really stressed, depressed and generally feeling down because of my lack of progress. Since I couldn’t sleep I decided to a brainstorming session. I know it sounds weird, but I decided that if the Uni is stressing me out so much I need to fight it head-on, so that’s why I decided to have this impromptu brainstorming session. I began by thinking totally outside the box. I thought about sound design but from a different perspective. Normally the way we do sound design is done in a DAW like Pro Tools, and for example layering of sound effects is carefully thought out process. I thought, what could happen if you turn this idea on its head and if I could create a sound design tool/plug-in that could randomise the process to hopefully create some interesting sounds. I thought it could be a good idea to apply this technique to generate a certain type of sound, like a gun-shot, a punch, or a cinematic trailer hit. Below I present some notes that I took down during the brainstorming session:

• The hit generator: Create a VST like software (or plugin) to generate customised ‘bigger-than-life’ Hollywood style punches and hits out of a library of pre-recorded and synthesised sounds and based on a set of user defined parameters.
• Combine elements of real-life recorded sounds (newspaper hits, vegetable abuse, face slaps etc) with synthesised sounds (like bass hits and claps for add low end and crack to the attack)
• [All samples would be phase aligned and matched to remove possible unwanted cancelation]
• Every punch or hit would be different than the other because of randomised sample selection and could range in scale from small hits to big cinematic speaker shattering knock-outs
• That can be used in low budget film productions and or video games, where there are budget limitations in hiring a professional foley stage and to not to rely on stock sounds.
• Demonstrate the use of the created software on a series of clips from existing films, and re-design fight scenes in film examples raging from Raging Bull, Indiana Jones to Ted.

I will proceed to expand and flesh out this idea and send it to Kenny for feedback by the end of the week.

Proposal Meeting with Kenneth. New ideas - Soundscape sound design and Recording guns

 Today, I had my second meeting with tutor Dr Kenneth McAlpine. It was a rather lengthy meeting that I really enjoyed. I prefer one-to-one meetings like this with less time constraints, rather than the ones with the class where you only get 15-20 minutes maximum. Because of this, we managed to discuss pretty much all of my ideas that I had up until this point. I started off with the gun-shot recording idea that James previously wasn’t very fond of. Kenny had said that there is some potential there, but again I had big problems trying to justify the idea and in no way “wanting to photograph myself at a military base recording gun-shots” was going to be a serious rationale for an academic piece of work.

 We ended up talking at length about my film sound idea. The topic of that changed to ‘Hyperrealism in Film Soundtracks’ after the last meeting with James. However we have soon abandoned the idea of ‘hyperrealism’. I really like the way Kenny makes you really think and really questions all of my ideas and makes me think even harder! We backtracked a bit and talked about film sound design in general and last year’s Audio Production Methods module. I brought up the idea of sound modality in film and Kenny started enquiring what about ‘modality’ makes it so interesting to me. My reply was that is a very fascinating new concept that can totally change how a scene in movie plays/sound completely affecting the mood. I gave examples that I discovered while doing last year’s blog. I also said that I really like how dynamic modality and the way sound modality can gradually change depending on the scene/storytelling requirements. It can be very effective when used on ambiences and having dynamic sound design in ambiences can really affect the way a scene plays out and I think that’s another reason why I find ‘modality’ so interesting as it has tremendous sound design potential when used well. Having heard all of this Kenny asked me why I don’t focus on film sound ambiences in particular. I said that this could be a good idea. I like the way we can sound design a place, time, or a particular setting with just sound, and most of the time ‘setting the scene’ with sound is done over a very limited time, like few seconds, when the establishing shot happens. The end result of this discussion was that we established that it could be a good idea for a dissertation and at the end of the meeting the draft question proposal was:

Setting the scene: Soundscape sound design in film.

Halloween weekend

 I am taking the weekend off to go out and take time off stressing about Uni work. It’s Halloween weekend and I deserve a night out with workmates and few drinks.

Feedback week and time off

 We have been given a week off Uni with no classes to focus on dissertation work. I have decided that I will do some reading this week. I am going to start with “Sound for Film and Television” by Tomlinson Holman. It has been given some very positive reviews and comes highly recommended by other sound designers. I will report back in the next few days.

Progress Presentation with James

 Today I had attended the progress presentation with James. I came in fairly prepared –Last night I’ve had compiled a list of things that I would possibly like to be doing this year. The meeting was fairly short. We got around 15-20 minutes each to talk and I found that was way too short to talk about all the ideas that I’ve had so far. Also, other people presenting at the meeting had projects that seemed very well developed already and they had formulated their aim, objectives, tasks and deliverables while I still haven’t got a dissertation topic. Anyway, in the short time that we had to present I have run my ideas through James. Straight off the bat he rejected my sound design for games in FMOD/WWISE idea. He said it was not feasible for me to do that. I would have to outsource a working game/game engine and generally advised me not to do a project on video game sound. He seemed to like my film sound ideas more. My idea of recording cool sounds like gun shots for example, was met with a mixed reaction. First of all, while not impossible, it could be hard to obtain permission to record on military grounds (as that what I wanted to do). Secondly, James didn’t like my rationale behind this project when I told him I want to have photos using expensive field microphones inside a military base. I understand his reasoning that this is simply not a good rationale for an academic project like a dissertation. At the end of the very short meeting we have settled on my ‘modality in film sound’ idea, but James altered it slightly and asked me to possibly focus on ‘hyperrealism in film soundtracks’ and asked me to do research in that subject. Overall, I don’t seem to be making much progress at this stage, especially considering what I have seen of other people’s work so far...

Presentation Prep List

 Tonight I created a very quick list of ideas that I wanted to present at a tomorrow’s Progress Presentation with James. So far, I have been toying about with so many different topics and ideas for the dissertation proposal. I decided to write down the things that I would like/be happy/be interested to do, and things that would prefer not doing. Here’s the list:

Like/Wanna Do:

• Soundtrack Analysis (Sound Design, Dialogue/SFX Levels)
• Modality in film sound - how perception of a scene changes depending on modality/soundscape
• Replacing Reality - Record some cool sounds (possibly in the field or foley stage), design some cool ambiences, scenes
• Maybe some dialogue editing – to tie in with the movie I have been editing
• Implement sound in FMOD/WWISE

Don’t Like/Don’t Wanna Do:

• Feedback forms/user surveys/questionnaires
• Some stupid movie off of YouTube
• Musical (theory) analysis
• Create/film/record my own movie