Audio For Multimedia 

When beginning this section of my course i had very little knowledge as to what goes into making a movie or animation clip feel alive and realistic, Also how sound change depending on the feel of the clip, For example a realistic action movie may have more realistic footsteps compared to a cartoon like the looney tunes where everything is overexaggerated and shown to be more whacky. 

We started this part of the course by reviewing different video clips and learning about diegetic; which is sounds that move the story's plot forward, these sounds always come from within the world of the story. The other being non-diegetic sounds, these sound come from outside the world of the story for example the Film’s score or a noise that's connected to a character for example in horror you may hear a violin or record scratch effect when killer or monster is on screen. 

After reviewing the clips with a lecturer, we began to get given clips that we had to work on ourselves the first clip i worked on was a clip of this girl getting on a train and magically being transported into the sea on a boat when she put her headphones on. This was my first time really getting into all the sounds that would be required as before i done this I didn't realise how much the little sounds can affect and change the clip’s feel for example before even getting on the train all the sounds of the train station’s background chatter as well as the person announcing the train times. Additionally, how much the score of the clip can change its feel. Another clip I worked on was a clip from a movie where a man walked into an office and shot a man with an air gun. This was good practice as I worked on 3 different environments’ that sound different to one another as the first was an echoey stairwell then it was a carpeted hallway which I gave a dense sound then into an office which would be slightly echoey. At first, I was really struggling to grasp the sound of these spaces and how they differed from one another. 

Choosing my clip 

After doing these practice clips it was finally time to choose the clip I would be submitting as my final project. The kind of the clip i was wanting was an animation clip that had humour in it yet had sounds that were a little realistic. After looking upon multiple different animation clips, I ended up choosing an animation called “Geoff short film” which was a clip made by an animation student that was turned into a Heinz bean commercial. The sounds i initial saw in the clip which intrigued me were his machine sounds also the sounds of the ultrasound was something i was struggling to find. I also was trying to work out what sounds i may use foley for in this clip.

Timeline (describe what you started with) 

So, I began with laying out some sounds that are in the clip by labelling where sounds were and what sounds would be in my clip as you may notice on this view of my project there's labels everywhere. 

After I labelled everything i began with getting the sounds for the machine’s the first machine I done was the robot arm one for the cans this was created using a sound of a some hydraulics then just changing its pitch i didn’t record this sound but i found it on sound Q and decided to try experimenting with different ways to make them sound different for each time the hand’s moved. Another thing i tried experimenting with when first creating this sound was trying to make a synth that made a futuristic moving arm sound I could I find the right sound but I hope with my next project i do i can use a synth in that way cause it was fun trying different things to make a specific sound. 

After doing that I made a Padlet with information regarding my clip for example videos for inspiration and any other research I done.

Here's a link to my Padlet: https://padlet.com/ashtonmckittingjones/heinz-beans-animation-plan-x6cdhizsy2axxbev  

The thing I struggled with the most was the soundtrack for my clip I didn't make the sound track myself so I was trying to find a specific score for my track something that was dreamy and whimsical I looked at millions of different tracks eventually I decided to leave it until the end and that's what I done. When it came to adding the soundtrack, I found that this was the better choice as it really let me fine tune my other sounds before they got drowned out by the backing track. 

The last thing I recorded before fine tuning everything was my obviously incredible voice overs for the narrator, and all the sound Geoff was making. This took 2-3 recording sessions as I found more sounds that Geoff would've been making for example sounds of him running like panting and when he was carrying the thing on fire a slight scream/shout. The set up I had was an AKG-414 with a pop shield to block the harsh S sounds. For the mixing of my voice, I added some EQ and some slight compression to get rid of any background noise that was picked up by the mic.