Month: November 2023

I spent the least time working on this theme. This is because firstly, I have put too much time into the beatbox theme and secondly, in my opinion, this theme is easier to complete by mainly putting all the cartoon sounds.

However, I believe there are still challenges for this theme. One of them would be finding a suitable cartoon sound for a specific movement in the scene. Due to the theme setting, the sounds I made are totally inauthentic. This means that the selection of sounds will no longer based on rationality and authenticity. I will need to make judgements based on my creativity.

Such an approach reminds me of the nature of humour: A joke can only be funny when people understand the joke itself. It is just pure nonsense when no one gets the idea but only yourself. Therefore, I believe getting sounds that make people resonate and understand will be crucial to making a great comedy theme so that they will find it funny and silly. Therefore, I need to get the right sounds to provide meaning to the audience.

Another challenge would be making the cartoon sound effects connected. These sound effects are very different from each other in terms of tones, frequencies and dynamics. I need to find ways to combine them together in a way that makes them sound good with each other.

As I was finishing the theme, I found that music is very important to the theme as well. Music helps to boost emotions that strengthens the feeling I want to bring through the sound effects.

As mentioned in the previous blog, the foley and sounds are all made by recording my voice only. The theme mainly focuses on the editing techniques using different plugins to alter the sound and discover the editing possibilities. Out of all the three themes I personally found that this theme is most challenging yet also rewarding. Due to the limitation of the theme, which I can only make the foleys with my voice only, my editing skills of sounds are fatally crucial to the outcome.

I found this theme is between the other two themes in terms of the rationality from the realistic theme and the creativity from the comedy theme. On one side, I need to make sure that the sounds I create make sense to the scene so that it won’t sound silly enough to feel like a comedy. Last lesson, Jessica mentioned that she felt a bit of humour towards this film as she saw my work. This was not my intention although I am really trolling and messing up with the theme. Therefore, I had to find ways to distinguish the two themes and so I decided to remove my pathetic off-sync dialogue on the pilot with a slightly Southern Chinese accent.

I probably have mentioned already that this theme has taken me a lot of time to complete, which is at least 60% of the time. Most of the time was spent on experimenting with plugins and editing, then the selection of suitable takes for the movements in the scene as well as syncing them together.

One thing I realised when I was editing is that it is so easy to lose focus when I am listening to the results that I am happy with. It is okay to appreciate myself that I am doing a great job of designing sounds. But the problem is that time is limited, and I need to keep reminding myself of it so that I can carry on (Keep Calm and Carry On!). However, it feels really awesome when something that sounds stupid turns into something that actually sounds good.

In the next blog, I will demonstrate my project and the workflows.

Jessica had replied to me and seems that she likes the idea but it would be better to just include 3 themes instead of 4 as that would take extra time on that and the quality of all the themes would drop. Therefore, I decided not to do the cyberpunk theme which includes music and dramatic sound designs that take ages to complete.

Last week I have done most of the recordings and found the sound effects for the themes. It was fun and in my opinion, quite chaotic but in a good way. I feel like I am actually messing up with the assignment rather than doing this in a usual way. Normally, I should have a list for the sounds I need so that I can record the sounds more effectively in terms of time and quality, but I think it will take a lot time to do this (an excuse for being lazy) and I already have ideas on what to record so I am mostly improvising during the recording session. Although it was messy but I was able to record what I want. I believe improvising is actually better than repeating the same scene over and over again especially in the beatboxing theme. Since I have no experience in beatboxing (I cannot even do a water drop sound), I think it would be better for me to just keep repeating the same sound than edit and sync them. And so I didn’t even look at the screen and following the scenes to mimic the sounds but just keep repeating the sounds I needed. Have a listen to one of the takes during the recording:

I guess I will spend most of the time in the beatboxing theme as I takes time to select , while the other themes are mainly using sound effects. I might need to do some extra recordings or sound effects of ambience as for now I have only one so far.