Sound Rotation

This weeks rotation was sound, our first brief was to create a 20 second film focusing on a journey between two spaces, either indoor to outdoor or vice versa. I decided to do the journey from uni to my accommodation but subvert the sounds to change a monotonous, everyday activity to something new. I filmed 10 short clips in different locations, for some I focused on the visuals while others the sounds. I then used premiere to separate the video from the audio and move them around. For the majority of the clips I swapped loud and quiet audios.

Our second brief was to make three 10 second videos in the style of the online magazine Onomatopoeia with a focus on creating a sound world for each video. The three videos had to be different in style, mood, tone, etc.

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I decided to do a different type of sound world for each video and a different style of animation to go along with it, my original ideas were plasticine stop motion, photos and some sort of digital stop motion. I started with the photos video first, I had some photos I wanted to use from my camera roll but the majority I took around the area I live. For the sound world I used the sounds I had recorded for the previous brief and edited them on premiere to create something new. I wanted to make something quite uncomfortable and hard to listen to as my idea for the video was sort of a look back at covid and the past lockdowns as all my photos were either from the lockdowns or discarded masks and rubbish around my accommodation. I like how this video turned out especially the audio, I think using recorded sounds from the everyday world is interesting and can be a good starting point for a video.

For the second video I started with sound as I wasn’t sure what kind of video I was going to make, I wanted to make some audio with just my voice so I decided some sort of conversation would be the general idea for the video. I used Adobe Character Animator as you can make puppets that have your face then use your laptop camera to make them speak, I just used two pre-made templates due to the time constraints but I actually really liked them. I then recorded some simple mouth movements for each puppet which I put into premiere to edit into what looks like a conversation. I used my phone to record myself making various different noises which I could layer in premiere to create something that alluded to a crowded place with a conversation but without using any actual words. I changed the tones, added different types of reverbs and reversed some clips to try and disguise my voice and add deeper layers to the audio.

For the final video I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do before I started, for the audio I wanted to play around with instruments on GarageBand as I had never used it before and for the visuals I wanted to do stop motion as I had some plasticine left over from a different project. I like the use of instruments/sounds to tell a story without the need for narration or voices. I made the video first so I could tell the story with the audio, the actual video is very simple and not very technically proficient but I was focusing more on the audio and I found GarageBand quite confusing to use at first so it took me a while to create the audio.

Final Video

I really enjoyed this rotation, I liked the broadness of the brief as I had the opportunity to experiment with different styles of audio and visuals. I am not a very musical person so I think the videos with recorded sounds were more effective but I did enjoy trying out instruments. Sound is just as important to animation as the visuals and it’s good to be able to create my own rather than have to borrow from other people.