'13'- Shahid's Project.

Shahid came to me the other day and asked me to work on his three screen installation. I am really looking to expand my skills in sound design for my career as much as I can, so I said yes. So, Shahid told me what his project was about, which is (in terms of sound design) a robotic arm and some organic sounds mixed in there. Shahid showed me some reference material, the opening scene from 'Blade Runner':

He said he wanted something that resembled the rumbling underneath this scene to run through the whole of his piece.

And the arm cutting scene from Terminator II which shows the organic noises he is after:

I mocked up something quite quickly for him, and he said he really like the rumble underneath, and that it was exactly what he was looking for.Which is a good start! He also said he really liked the mix of organic sounds, but that the the robotic noises were too modern and harsh (The video is in the next post) and that when he has more animation I should make it more steampunk like.

Feeling For Sound- Over Christmas Recording

Over Christmas I went and did some recording at my mum's house, and various other locations as part of my site specific sound recording. Also I did some recording in the recording studio at uni for this and various other projects while I was there.

I wanted to record some sort of voiceover to base my piece off, because right now it seems to lack a sense of direction, and I feel as if all I'm doing is researching without taking any action. The voiceover will help me link my memories to my sound design, and hopefully I can build some kind of narrative out of the looping pieces.

Anxiety Dance- Sound Design

Laura approached me over Christmas to ask if I could do the sound design for her and Lauren's dance piece. I said I would need to do a mock up of some sound design, to get an idea of the complexity and the length of time it would take me to complete the work as I'm working on other projects as well.

I asked Laura for her storyboards and some reference material and she linked me to a piece from the Utopia soundtrack that they liked the sound of for me to try and create something similar. As a starting point I tried to pretty much recreate it to an extent in order to get an idea of how it's done and then divert from it according to the rest of the film.



This is what I created quickly:


The whole process took me a couple of hours as I figured out what to start off with and overall I found the process fairly easy. I just took a few organ notes using a virtual instrument using Pro Tools and then played around with the distortion, reverb, and other sounds to end up with what I did. Although I feel like there is too much distortion on the piece, I've got the general jist of it now.