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

Brainstorming and some more new ideas

 Tonight I had a little brainstorming session. I was browsing through “The Foley Grail” by Vanessa Ament, partly because I have a foley recording session for the ‘Jam’ coming up next week, but also I thought of getting some new ideas for the dissertation topic. In this book I came across a very cleverly named chapter, entitled ‘Replacing Reality’. This got me thinking back to last year’s film analysis and watching documentaries and interviews with different sound designers, like Ben Burtt for example, on how they approached sound in their films. As we know, sound we hear in films is not the sound that is recorded on the set while the movie is shot. The sound we hear in films is recorded separately on foley stages or on location and then carefully designed in the post-production. So, I came up with an idea of recording a gunshot (hopefully with the help of the military or police) and then compare it to a gunshot heard in movies and analyse the differences. It would be a cool project to do if I could get to work and record inside of the military base, even just for that photo opportunity!

The dialogue editing dilemma...

 So, the work on dialogue editing for my new movie project ‘Jam’ is underway. I have also almost finished reading the book on dialogue editing. I say almost because I ended up skipping some parts of it. The book, however insightful, is very technical. And I mean VERY! It talks at great lengths on comping vocal takes from different perspectives, camera/microphone angles and there is a very large practical section devoted to step-by-step film dialogue editing. It proved a good read for the purpose of learning new things to try on this new movie I am doing, but in terms of discovering some exciting possibilities for a dissertation subject it didn’t offer a great breakthrough. At this point I am a bit lost and I really don’t know what else I could do. I have a first official progress presentation coming up this Friday with James, so I will have a think in the next few days about some other possibilities. For now, I am out...