Finished Sound Project (Week 4)

Here is my finished sound project of the mayfly advert:

Production Report:

I chose film choice 1 for my sound project, which is the Vodafone mayfly animated advert. I started my sound project by watching the video a few times, just taking it in and picturing the environment and what I would imagine the overall soundscape would be like. Then I watched it again a few more times, writing down the sounds that I knew/thought would appear, including as many details as possible. After writing a list, I went out with a recorder to record some ATMOS in a forest-like area with lots of birds, trying to emulate a jungle with lots of animals. This was especially tricky as there was roads and paths very nearby with people and cars making noises. I also recorded some sound effects like throwing stones and snapping twigs, a couple of which I softened by decreasing the levels to use in this project.

After this, I then took out more recording equipment like the rifle mic to record small sounds in my room. I used many different objects to record these sounds, including flat balloons, a plastic cup of water, fruit bowl, my fingernails for the wings sounds, kettle, paper, etc.
I then put all of these together in Pro Tools, adjusting the pitch and time shift in the Audio Suite tab for some of the clips. This was especially useful for the wings audio, as I was able to speed up the recording so it actually sounded like insect wings. I layered up multiple ATMOS audios to make it sound more rounded, as well as adding more birds to certain parts where it fitted, and also gradually making it quieter and louder for the part when the mayfly swoops up into the air above the canopies.

The song I picked was ‘Flowing Air’ by Mattia Vlad Morleo, which I found from jamendo.com which uses the CC license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike which means I am allowed to remix, tweak and build upon their work non-commercially, as long as I credit them and license this under the same terms as the original song. I didn’t edit or remix the song, however I did crop it to one minute of the song, and of course will give credit to him at the end in the credits. Here is the jamendo link to his song: https://www.jamendo.com/track/1434776/flowing-air

I also asked my friend Emma King to do the voice acting for the commentary to put over the top, with which we recorded multiple different versions, like happy, normal, exaggerated etc. I ended up using the more minimal voice over the more bright ones - I felt it fit better with the emotions I was trying to show through the audio, which was positive yet contemplative and content.

Overall, I really like the outcome of my work, and I feel proud that it’s my first time doing a full audio of a piece of media including all the foley, ambience, narration and music. It was really fun and interesting trying to get a full soundscape like the real world has, and layering tracks up to create the right sound for different actions or movements in the scene. I do feel, however, that the sounds are not of the best quality, even though I am happy with the way they turned out. I should definitely use the audio suite and dubbing theatre next time, so that the sounds have much less background noise behind them, as I felt that with all the different tracks added together, there was too much consistent noise throughout to be able to hear each sound as clearly as I would have liked. I also felt my attempt at echoing the sounds in the cave part of the video were not very good, and it doesn’t sound like there is a swarm of mayflies dancing around either. I should consult a teacher or technician next time, asking them how best I could create these sounds best. Even though there were some areas of definite improvement, especially in quality, I do feel that the overall emotions were shown well, which I’m really happy about.