Professional Toolkit- Sound Brief

In this unit, I have been given the option of choosing three, four day workshops to attend, and for each I will have to come out with an end result. This first one, sound, will be introducing me to Protools as a program, and increasing my skills further in sound design.

The brief I have been given is to create a 30 second-1 minute soundscape using a handful of recorded sounds, based on a piece of text that we may choose ourselves. The aim is to hand in two versions of this, one with the piece of text spoken over the top, and one without it. We are to convey as much detail and emotion about the text as possible.

In this first workshop, we were shown a few aural illusions, and interesting pieces of sound design, such as the Orson Welles radioplay of 'War of the Worlds' and the more recent 'Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy' to give us an idea of the potential results we have when we create a piece of sound design. We also were inducted in the Marantz recorders, which have mono microphones that we shall be using for this project.

As soon as the brief was given, I knew what piece of text I wanted to use:

Was I there?Or is that troubled surface something elseshadowy under the dipped fingers of willowswhere satiny mud blooms in cloudinessafter the treading, heavy webs of swansas their wings beat and whistle on the air?
It is an extract of a poem called Cold Knap Lake by Gillian Clarke, and is one of my favourite poems. I thought it was suitable as I can imagine it to be very interesting and challenging to recreate as a soundscape.

I went ahead annotating the piece to try and get my thoughts and feelings about the piece down on paper, and then made a list of sounds I thought I should record to be able to create my soundscape. My next step will have to be to book out the equipment I need and get to recording my sounds because of the quick turnaround of this project.