Reflective Summary

Producing the audio for two projects has been a fun but challenging experience. My first project was a collaborative effort with an animation team called the ‘Ragtime Gals’. The second project was a self-set learning experience in which I attempted to redesign the audio for a short clip taken from the animated film ‘Heavy Metal’. Before working on these projects, I set myself some learning objectives to research upon during the process. These learning objectives had strong impacts on the development of my work.

LO1: “Learn ways in which music is used in film and animation”

I’ve found that music can be used for a lot more than just background noise – It can convey a lot of information. In the Rag Time Gals project, I used piano music as a diegetic sound effect. As a sound effect, it had to react to it’s source and surroundings. And so, the piano music can be heard changing in tempo and even stopping depending on how the character playing it is feeling.

In the Heavy Metal project, I tried to give my music multiple purposes. At some parts, I used strings and drum rolls, combined with rising dynamics, to create feelings of tense build-up. Other times, I used it as a substitute/addition to sound effects, reflecting directly what is happening on screen. For examples, crashing cymbals can be heard at various points when characters get hit by objects. I also gave one character a theme song/instrument. Whenever the main bad-guy is present, a synthesized brass instrument is almost always playing along side him. I even wrote him a motif that plays when he is first seen in the animation and then later repeats when he gets the upper-hand in a battle.

I chose to use synthesizers and digital instruments as I had easy access to them. I think they worked great because they reflected the 80s period really well. However, if I had access to other instruments then I certainly would experiment with them. Some acoustic strings could offer a lot more emotional control through playing techniques such as note-bending and tremolos.

LO2: “Learn methods of producing gun sound effects”

I’ve always wondered what makes guns sound so impactive, hence why I set myself this learning objective. This basic objective surprisingly turned out to be one of my most useful ones. I first found that sound effects can be theoretically deconstructed into a variety of layers. Once you have an idea on what layers are needed, you can then construct the sound as you see fit. After using this process to make some satisfactory gun sounds, I soon found that I could use the same process for many of my other so far lackluster sound effects. As a result, I managed to better some of my other sound effects including swords and body hits.

LO3: “Using references from other films, learn when it is appropriate to pan sound and music and utilize the stereo field”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much research material for this learning objective other than films and forums. I set it as I know that in music production, panning is used to create space and balance mixes. I wanted to know this would be similar when mixing sound for visuals. I’ve found that panning can still be used to create space but it can offer a lot more information as well including locations of objects (for example, wide panning, combined with changes in EQ, could suggest that an object is far away), what direction objects are moving in and what perspective the audience is listening from. Deciding on which perspective the audience is listening from seems to mainly come down to creativity. However, I have at least learned that too many extreme changes can become quite distracting to an audience and so it’s sometimes best to leave sounds equally panned left and right rather than have them change in a number of scenes. For this reason, I decided to keep the piano panned equally left and right throughout the entire Ragtime Gals animation – sometimes simple is better.

LO4: “Learn ways of effectively communicating with clients”

I’ve had good and bad experiences while communicating with my clients, the Rag Time Gals. At first, we had a number of miscommunications. With them not having much knowledge on audio-related lexicon, they found it difficult to tell me what expectations they had of their animation’s audio. The best they could ask for was “realistic” audio (but realistic audio is a complicated term. What most people think is realistic usually isn’t realistic at all). To get around this, I sent them renders of my work-in-progress frequently so that they could hear for themselves how the audio was coming along. Feedback was usually vaguely approving of my work. They knew what sounds they wanted in certain areas but overall most of the creative control was left to me. This could mean I’m either meeting their requirements or they’re just not too interested in having much control over the creative decisions behind the audio. The image below is a screenshot of our latest exchange of works in which they tried to send me a scene from their animation (but the link didn’t work) and I sent them my latest audio render (which was at the same level of progress as my submitted artefact).email

Although social media is a popular option for most people, myself and my clients ended up communicating via email most often as it allowed us to send files over to each other. In hindsight, I would have pushed to use Facebook more as there were many times in which the animators were quite slow to respond to emails. This often slowed down my production. I also should have pushed for more regular meetings as some studies of netnography show that social interactions over the internet can sometimes be different, and sometimes even untruthful, compared to those expressed in person.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m happy with what I’ve produced. The Rag Time Gals project is still ongoing as I am waiting for some more recent renders to sync my sound effects too. Some sound effects in my submission, such as the footsteps, will have to be completely re-synced in the near future. The Heavy Metal project was fun to produce as it offered me a lot more creativity than the other project. Creating sounds for fictional cartoon weapons and creatures offered me a chance to imagine what things could sound like rather than just give them literal interpretations.

Syncing and mixing sound effects was the most tedious aspect of the work but putting more effort into it (like using multiple layers for each sound) can be very rewarding. I’ve found that writing music for visual is a lot different to that of regular standalone music. You have to take a lot of things into consideration including what information you wish to convey, what sound effects is the music going to mix with and when the music is even necessary as sometimes, silence can be an effective feature. I’ve also found that music is difficult to sync to already-existing visuals unless you’re willing to create something with a flexible BPM and tempo.

Research and Production Post 11

LO3: Panning My Mixes

While mixing, I’ve had to consider a few different ways in which to pan sound effects. I’ve found that sound effects are usually panned in one of two ways:

1) From the camera’s perspective

2) From a character’s perspective.

Most of the time, I try to pan from the camera’s perspective to keep the audio simple and consistent. However, I’ve found a few ways in which a character’s perspective might be more suitable and entertaining. For example, in my Heavy Metal project, there’s a scene in which a giant bat flies past the main character while staying in the center of the shot. Visually, we can see that the bat is moving left to right but the audio would contrast with this if it was to be panned from the camera’s perspective. From the character’s perspective, however, we could get panning audio that nicely fits with the visual.

However, when it comes to background/atmosphere tracks, I wasn’t sure whether to pan them from the camera’s perspective or the character’s perspective. I couldn’t find much information on the subject but I did find a forum with a similar question (StackExchange, 2011). In it, a person said that automated panning could distract a viewer entirely and that, unless it’s meant to help give listeners clues on a change in location, it’s best to just pan it center with an equal stereo spread.

 

References

https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/3392/best-approaches-to-panning-backgrounds-when-camera-angles-change?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa

Research and Production Post 10

Finishing Touches

During the last two weeks, I have been busy mixing and putting together all of the sounds I’ve recorded and all the music I have written over the months. I’ve recorded a variety of weird sounds over time including the sounds of various fruits being crushed (for guts and bodily damage), an empty beer keg being struck (for swords and other various metals), shoes and sugar peas rubbing together (for squeaky clothing), a few different atmosphere tracks and even some voice acting by yours truly.

While mixing, I quickly realized that a few more recordings could really better some of my sound effects. Like my gun sounds, a few other effects required a similar treatment in which I layer multiple recordings on top of each other to create a single sound. I booked out a studio and recorded more metallic sounds to help construct better sword strikes for Heavy Metal. I also recorded some velcro and tearing orange peels to add some breaking bones to the guts and gore.

Also, I’ve found my laptop can sometimes struggle to process so many sounds and tracks within a single session file. To lower the CPU usage, I began rendering a lot of the processed sound effects individually. This helped reduce the number of tracks and plugins within each session file.

 

Tutorial Post 5

Unfortunately, I missed my last tutorial on the 23rd of March due to illness. Although I missed a chance to get some feedback on my latest work, I was confident in what I was doing as I had plenty of contact with the animation team, and plenty of research, to make sure my creative choices were justified. Unfortunately, I’m still yet to receive any updated animatics, meaning I’m still working with the same animatic as I have been from the start. This has prevented me from syncing sounds like footsteps, however, information from the animators has kept me busy enough.

At my latest tutorial, I showed my tutor some of the music that I had been composing for Heavy Metal. He told me that he was happy with the second piece, which was composed in sync with the visuals, but thought that something felt wrong with the first synthpop-like piece. He said that the drums were too protruding and recommended I watch Flash Gordon for some references. After watching the film, and listening to the soundtrack of The Neverending Story again, I’ve come to realize that the drums were indeed too noticeable. I think it would be wrong to remove them completely but they could certainly be lowered in volume and altered with an EQ plugin to help them blend into the mix better. Having them stand out seems more like an element of modern synthwave rather than classic synthpop.

Research and Production Post 9

LO1: Writing Music for Heavy Metal

I’ve been writing two pieces of music for the Heavy Metal film. One piece is for a brief aerial chase scene and the other piece is for a fight scene. The first piece is being written like a standard 80s synthpop song as it has a unchanging tempo, beat and time signature throughout (It’s easy to clap along to). This style of soundtrack wasn’t unheard of in 80s movies – take The Neverending Story and Labyrinth for example. Although this piece will not strictly sync to every action in the visuals, it will loosely reflect each scene in each changing bar through changes in chords, dynamics and instrumentation.

The second piece is being written in a more classical manner. The tempo changes throughout and the music syncs to the visuals a lot more accurately (almost like foley). I’m writing it similarly to the example shown below (ThinkSpace Education, 2013). In the video, the composer is often playing music along to the visuals of the animation rather than a beat.

 

Although I’m writing these two pieces using different methods of composition, I’m aiming to make sure they share a lot of the same instruments in order to keep listeners from noticing. I’m writing in two different ways as a means of testing my writing abilities. However, I am confident that this won’t negatively impact my work as I have watched and enjoyed animations with various types of music used before. Take Thunderbirds, for example. It features a variety of easy-listening songs, which you can enjoy and clap along to with or without the visuals, as well as many strictly visual-orientated songs, which can be difficult to enjoy/understand without some form of visual context to accompany it (try listening to the song below for example).

 

References

ThinkSpace Education (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AyswacaFd0