Sound Story Experience

 Sound Story

For starters, when making our sound story, I found it far more difficult to make and gather the sounds rather than compiling and editing them despite it being my first attempt at editing. Going into this, I thought making certain sounds would be easy and I would simply find the rest on the internet. However, this was most certainly not the case as it took far longer than expected for us to find sounds that fit the situation we were imagining. As for the actual editing, I do believe that we could have done better in certain areas such as the sound mixing as we did not layer too many sounds and even the sounds that we did layer didn't really have much impact on the story itself. I also feel as though certain clips were made longer than necessary, making certain parts of the clips feel drawn out. One thing I did feel we excelled in though was the very concept of our sound story. The idea of waking up in the morning for school and getting on the bus is something familiar to us all and can make the listener feel more immersed in the sound story. I'd have to say that the biggest flaw of our sound story by far would be the white noise that suddenly appears in certain scenes and this is something we would definitely have to improve upon by getting a proper microphone next time.

Foley Stage

Regarding the process of actually making certain sounds, I do believe that we were plenty creative in finding strange alternatives to make the sounds. The creation of rain through the tapping on the globe was simply a stroke of luck as we were just going around and tapping on things that we found within the classroom. The tapping on the globe instantly reminded. me of the sound of heavy rain crashing against your window and this is what led us to include the rain at the beginning of the sound story. The sound of the oxyclean hitting the stool perfectly recreated the aggression in which one smacks their alarm in the morning and when we edited it, it was surprisingly perfect aligned with the ending of the alarm sound without us having to adjust it. By far the most creative sound we have would be the scraping of that metal object against the cloth of the ironing board to recreate the sound of a zipper on a backpack. And, easily our least creative sound, the pouring of the cereal into the bowl somehow perfectly replicated what I imagined cereal being poured into a bowl would sound like. Considering that this was our first attempt at such a task, I do believe that our foley stage was pretty commendable this time around. Concerning who did what, my partner, Jacob, worked well with me and was responsible for most of the sounds while I was responsible for most of the editing. Though it turned out this way, it is not as though we both weren't't actively involved in every part of this assignment. We both provided each other with input and cooperated in order to produce the best sound story that we were capable of.

In all, though it was lacking in certain areas, I strongly believe that this was a successful first attempt at a sound story. Our concept could have been more creative for sure, but we felt that it would be best to pick something that would familiar to most so that it would be easier for them to imagine the causes for the sounds. The reason for us doing this would be because we were aware of our lack of experience and how difficult it would be for us to properly convey a complex story through only sound, hence why we picked a simple waking up and getting on the bus. Editing obviously could have gone better as a whole as there were certain portions where sound just blatantly cut off with no real transition to the next sound, but that was to be expected. I definitely expect to do better in my next attempt.