See Hear

Beginning Semester 2, I was re-energised from the Christmas break and raring to go. We had a meeting with a tutor of sound to discuss the project to begin with. He explained that we would be recording our own sounds to begin with, and then animating to them. We also got an introduction to sound recording equipment, and to Adobe Audition - the programme in which we edited our sounds.

The group I was placed in was assigned the word 'artificial' as our stimulant. We went around the building and recorded a variety of sounds we thought we could use. We then went off and edited them, some so far that they were unrecognisable. Once we'd done this, we created our sound track, which was 1 minute 30 seconds long, and we animated 30 seconds each.

The project is an abstract one, as we were encouraged to use abstract art instead of having a narrative with characters and a plot involved. This made it much more free and able to experiment with different techniques.

After this section of the project, we were given a pre-recorded sound track, and told to animate it without conferring with one another, so we could see afterwards if we would be able to join any of them together. I found this section quite difficult as it was very abstract and I went through a few ideas before settling on the final one.

Overall, I'm happy with the finished product, but I think some of it could match with the music better, and it could not change up between literal and abstract work so much as it becomes confusing. I saw the music as a mix of lots of different things, but I tried to pick out a conflict/fight between the softer, more natural sounds, and the mechanical, heavy sounds. It didn't quite work out how I planned as it turned out more of a train of thought and less of a fight on screen. It's fast and messy and frantic, like a mind thinking about lots of different things at once, and I like this aspect of it.

This project also let me work more closely with some coursemates, and I was also able to develop my use of photoshop as a tool in my work.