Tuesday, October 15, 2024

My Sound Story Experience!

            Hello bloggers! For today's blog, I have posted my sound story project as well as my foley sounds video and my script for the project. Creating this project was an experience that I will never forget, including both the highlights and the obstacles me and my partner Yulian overcame. 



Creating the Sound Story

            My partner Yulian and I decided to make a sound story about a swimmer in a swimming competition. During the scripting phase, we decided we wanted to start off with the swimmer getting ready for the race, then follow up with the swimmer walking up to the pool, then the race, and finally the swimmer getting out of the pool. Easy in concept, unreasonably difficult in execution. The following script is what we ended up recording:

Sound Story Script 

By Jonathan Glendale and Yulian Vargas 

Scene: Swimming competition 

Act One (0:00 to 0:46): The swimmer is getting ready for the race. 

  • Background chatter begins 

  • The swimmer opens their locker  

  • The swimmer zips on their swimsuit 

  • The swimmer’s heartbeat begins to rise  

  • The swimmer closes their locker 

  • The swimmer begins walking outside to the pool 

  • The crowd is cheering wildly  

  • The swimmer’s heartbeat rises again  

  • The referee blows the whistle, starting the race  

Act Two (0:47 to 1:43): The swimmer is racing. 

  • Crowd still cheering  

  • All the swimmers jump in and begin racing 

  • The crowd’s cheers become quieter as the swimmer begins to focus  

  • The swimmer’s mind is depicted as empty with brown noise  

  • The swimmer’s heartbeat rises 

  • The swimmer’s mind goes quiet  

  • The crowd’s cheers come back to full volume 

  • The swimmer gets out of the water 

  • The swimmer laughs 

  • The swimmer’s mind returns 

  • The swimmer’s heartbeat gradually slows down 

  • The swimmer’s mind goes quiet 

  • The swimmer’s heartbeat slows down further 

  

            First, I decided to get the non-foley sounds first so that we could finish off with foley sounds later. I got the following sounds from freesound.org: crowd cheers, heartbeat fast, heartbeat fast-to-slow, brown noise, background chatter, and the whistle blow. I chose to include brown noise as a representation of the swimmer's mind during the race to portray their focus and determination to win. The whistle blow sound was the hardest one to find out of them all. Originally I had planned to use an announcer voice to signify the beginning of the race, but I couldn't find anything particularly good. Then, I switched to finding a blank shot sound as a replacement, but once again I couldn't find anything I liked. Finally I switched to a whistle and found a suitable sound shortly after.

Creating the Foley Sounds


            The foley stage was the easiest part of the project. My partner Yulian covered all of the swimming sounds as well as the footsteps for the introduction scene. I recorded the sound of a locker opening and closing as well as a zipper moving. To record the locker noise, I went to my mailbox, which happened to be metal and made for a very realistic locker noise, and opened and closed it. The zipper noise was simple enough, I just took my backpack zipper and moved it at differing speeds to portray the swimmer getting ready for the race.

Putting the final videos together

Now that we had all of our sounds, it was time to put both the sound project and foley video together. I predicted this project would take about 2 hours, and it ended up taking upwards of 6. At first I used Wevideo.com to put together the sound project, which I started on first. Putting the sounds in was easy enough, then layering them took a little longer due to the restricted features on the free version of the website. The real trouble came when I had to publish the projects. I made 2 test uploads to make sure all of my sounds were going through, but the website blocked me on my 3rd upload and asked me to pay for premium to upload more projects. This meant I had to find some other way to upload my project properly, which meant installing Filmora and Capcut, which took about an hour just to install. Eventually, I was able to finish the sound project and put together the foley sounds video with Filmora, after an intensive struggle with slow download speeds and limited features on the free versions. It was all worth it in the end though, as me and Yulian were able to put everything together!

Sound Project



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