Sense of Space - Final Piece!

We've had a very rocky last half of finalising our edit together; at the last minute we decided on cutting out the narration whole together, as we felt it sounded better without it. This was a huge decision to make as the whole half of our final piece was meant to integrate the narration to help move along the narrative.

Recording the sounds went pretty well overall, however it took us a while to gather everything we wanted... We resorted to recording sound effects in bursts, as a majority of the time we were busy/had something scheduled, so we were forced to re-arrange another time to meet to finish off the recordings.

PROBLEMS - We hit a few dead-ends whilst trying to record, some equipment was faulty, for example the headphones and a shotgun mic, this forced us to head all the way back into Uni (stores) to return and swap the equipment. If i have learned one major thing to take on board for future reference, is to test/check the equipment before leaving.

Another problem we came across was only receiving one connecting cable lead with two shotgun mics in-which we intended to record stereo.. this furthermore emphasises the need to check the equipment before leaving.

As for the editing, initially it was a long and steady process of logging every sound we had into Soundtrack Pro (SP) and re-naming them.. this took up heaps of time and forced us to return to editing the following day... Once we had began the editing we knew exactly what we were doing. I began by creating the intro, introducing the egg frying clip whilst layering the running up the stairs clips, brushing teeth, the knock on the door etc. What we had learned in the workshop sessions really helped with the editing we were doing on the day - The shortcuts, editing in fade-ins/face-outs quickly and efficiently, layering and altering the EQ/compressing options.

Personally I feel our final piece was satisfactory, nothing we did was too out of the ordinary or ground-breaking. Perhaps I think we should have kept in the narration because it may have made the whole piece more interesting.

Sense of Space - Further inspiration

This famous scene from the award-winning 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998) directed by Steven Spielberg has always been a strong influence/inspiration for me.. The way the sound changes from above the water and under the water really makes you, the audience feel you're there with them.

Sense of Space Inspiration

Inspiration never really came from anything specific.. in other words the inspiration I had was gathered from a wide-range of external sources. From movies, to radio sound-clips, games and everyday sounds in real life.

Sat on the train and closing my eyes whilst on a journey ironically opened my eyes to the sounds in our every day world; subtle background laughter that can be heard from the other end of the carriage, the subtle back and forth movement of the train as it sways on the tracks and the sound of a fast train approaching and swooshing past me with it's horn.

Walking through town also opened up my eyes to potential sounds to form a log - The rain bouncing off the tarmac and a leaking drainpipe that drips on the floor creating an almost 'echoey' noise.

As for inspiration that may have influenced our final piece, I would say that 'cliche' horror movies such as 'Scream' (1996) directed by Wes Craven and 'The Ring'(2002) directed by Gore Verbinski

These two movies offer some of the most well-known sounds that are associated with horror/thriller movies. They use soundtracks and sound effects to convey tension, atmosphere and fear.

Knocks at the door, phones ringing, creaking doors and unsettling voices are all juxtaposed together to create what is seen as an effective range of sounds.

Sense of Space Planning

My partner (Christi) and I spent many days planning on the piece we were going to create.. many ideas were thrown around from the idea of portraying life and death, to a sci-fi piece. Eventually we thought of an idea that seemed to gel together well..

Our first idea was to create a thriller piece that situates the main protagonist in his home, who'm is then chased after and killed by a murderer. Whilst portraying this through the use of sound, we also decided on using narration in the piece.. the narrator was to be in fact the victim of the attack (the main protagonist) looking down from heaven, discussing what happened that dreadful night.

However after the feedback we received, more ideas were thrown around the room and we settled on changing the narrator from the perspective of the victim, to the perspective of the killer. Although we weren't to make it obvious that the narrator was in fact the killer, until the end of the piece.

In the early stages we created a sound map that outlined our main idea -

On top of that we created more notes on what sounds we needed to collect, along with brainstorming ideas -