MA Unit 02: Sound Creation and Perception_Briefing notes

The 2nd unit of my part time MA was briefed on the 5th of Feb 15, Sound creation and perception!

Sound is definitely not something I had planned on working in, but it is undeniably a key component to any emmersive experience in film or game.  I plan to integrate the unit to my ongoing project and investigate how to create relevant sounds for the environment I am producing, this will include mostly ambient sounds as well as noises of various assets that will appear in the immediate world.  The main prerequisite is the fact I need to create sounds that appear familiar but are convincingly part of the alien / science fiction world, this seems like a tall order for my first delve into the subject matter, but if I can identify what I need to produce as well as research and understand how I can go about it then I will be on the right track.

My starting point will be investigating how the sounds of Star Wars (one of my main influences) were created, as well as this I will investigate ambient music that has influenced me in the past such as FSOL (Future sound of London) and Funki Porcini among others.  These artists have been able to use sampling of real world sounds and distort them as such to create surreal and ambient music which ties in perfectly with my subject matter.  I have been put onto: http://filmsound.org/ which should give me plenty of information to begin my journey into sound!

To tie in with my practical work I will begin the task of storyboarding my short film, taking my random notes and sketches of various elements and beginning to piece them together. This will not only give me my asset list for production but I will have a direct reference of what I need to create sounds for. The storyboard serves as a shot list for the final project and acts as place holders for the key scenes, I am hoping to end the 2nd unit with sounds that match as much of the storyboard as possible, as with the storyboard being a place holder for the final composited short film, so will the sounds be 'initial' place holders unless I am able to get satisfactory results within the unit time frame.

Thought I would brighten the post with my sketch book notes featuring some quick profiles of some MA peers: