LO2: Foley sounds

Equipment used:

To make sounds:
-Coat:  rustling
-Black tape and straw blanket for walking on leaves, using feet for walking and hands for a dog
-Metal door chain for clinking keys or metal hitting each other
-Walking on different surfaces:
   Nice house: tight wood
   Old house creaky wood
   sand: snow
-Watering can: rain
-Wet ground and footsteps: Walking in the rain
-Ice cream cone and wet dough for a egg cracking

To record sounds:
-Microphones
-Tripods
-Sliders
-software
-Track ball

LO2: Know the techniques and elements used to create sound elements for an identified media purpose.

Ben Burt

Ben Burtt's job is to create sounds which are original, this consists of all the sounds from the background noise to electronic sounds. He has to create everything from his own imagination using all his own plans. For a laser gun he stretched out a slinky and hit it with a wooden stick which made a laser sound and he knew this would work due to his years of experience working with sound. He sometimes went out to record real-life sounds which would all be put together to make a realistic sound but he is very interested in the creation of sound. He created sound by rubbing wood against a canvas but also pulling a canvas across a carpet. He stores a lot of his sound on tapes so that he has sound prepared for when it needs to be used in a film creating a sort of library of sounds
When listening and editing the sound he uses sliders to change the volume of each piece of sound he is using and listening to how it sounds and edits how loud each component should be.

He was famous for working on Star Wars as he created sounds that sounded realistic and the film now consists of the some of the most recognisable noises. He recorded real bear noises and mixed it with other animals to create a growling noise that sound like an actual animal and so the audience don't notice that the sound effects were recorded separately to the actual film. For R2D2 he wanted to create a human-like robotic noise which doesn't actually speak English, he tried using computer noises however this sounded too robotic and not human enough so he added his own voice and mixed it using a mixing desk to mix the computer and human noises to mix them together creating a human-sounding robot.

He also worked on Indiana Jones he created the sound in the famous scene where the massive boulder rolls down behind Indiana Jones using the sound of car wheels rolling down a gravel hill which sounded right for a boulder rolling down the hill. He discovered that the car tyres sounded right just by chance in a car journey where he heard it and they just pulled out a microphone and started recording.  He created the whip sounds by actually going out and recording whip cracks in different areas, showing sometimes it is just recording the real thing and putting it into the film afterwards. Location of recording is important in this case as there is the slightest difference in the sound of a whip cracking in a forest to the middle of a city.

Another thing that he has worked on is WallE which is important as all sound in WallE is artificially made as it is an animation, he describes it as 'creating a whole new world of sound' and they completely create their character. In this, though he found machines built just for making sounds which sound like real life sounds, such as a rain machine which was just a big cylinder with little balls in it that sound like rain. Another machine which he used in Wall-e was something called a thunder sheet in which you hit a large metal sheet and it sounded like an actual storm. In Wall-e he actually created the sound effects during production which was very strange, he actually made sounds using the storyboards and rough animations and a group of people would critique it. He first decides on how he creates a sound through physics and how they would sound in the real world however if this does not work with him he scraps the realism and creates what he believes works. He used an army generator to create the sound of Wall-e moving slowly and if he moves faster additional sounds where added such as an inertia starter which was used to power old planes, this worked perfectly for Wall-e as it sounds like fast-moving robot wheels. He used a device called the vocoder to create the robotic synthesized noise of eve to create a human-sounding robot.

Practice example of applying soundtrack tools.

I created this clip with Abbie, Abbie found facts on red squirrels while I wrote down the facts into a script. I timed the script to see how far each section took up, I also looked at where I wanted to start each section as well, knowing where each section started and ended I could see how much of the video was taken up by voice overs.  Once the script was finished we went into a sound booth and I recorded the voice of  the narrator onto garage band and then exported it as a .WAV file and then put it into Adobe Premiere and matched it up with the video and then I exported it.

(I wrote both of these)