My Experience Sound Recording

Recording sounds for our sound library was a lot easier than I had originally anticipated. Our director for the project brought a bunch of props with him and we stepped into the cramped whisper booth to record the sounds of dice rolling, the top of a pill bottle being twisted, and tissues being pulled from a box, just to name a few. I then took the sound equipment home to get the sounds of my cat purring and meowing. And every time I realized there was a sound occurring (like the dishwasher running) that I usually paid no attention to, I rushed to retrieve the H4N and start recording. Just listening to the sounds without seeing the source of them helped me to realize the way in which sounds can be deceitful. We saw in class how a bottle cap could be used to make the sound of a skateboard but I really didn't start thinking about how sounds of one object could be manipulated into sounding like other objects until I experienced it hands-on. And I love the idea of having to use one's imagination to create a sound or see what the source of the sound is.

Editing Experience on Master Shot Project

At first, editing was a little difficult because we had a lot of footage, a lot of takes and bloopers, and we actually forgot to record sound on the whole first half of the shoot. Mike and Alex worked diligently to get the sound all synced up though and did a great job. Editing became easier and easier as we just sat down and concentrated on what shots we needed, what take looked best, and where we needed to add sounds for clarification. On the whole, I didn't personally do any editing but I helped to choose what looked best when we had multiple takes. We had two endings to our short as well: in the alternative version, the "serial killer" looks to the camera right before putting on her mask and makes sure the person behind the camera is ready to film...in the end, however, it didn't look good at all. So we decided on the ending that is seen in our final cut. It's funny how good ideas seem at 4 in the morning!  I am so thankful though that we took the time to do as many takes as we did so that we would have plenty to chose from when things went wrong.