Foley Sounds

 A few months ago, we did a project in AICE Media about foley sound creation. This project was to help the class learn about how these sounds are made and it gave us the opportunity to try it out and make it on our own. This project, although difficult, helped me improve my newfound skills and allowed me to learn the correct way to do foley.

Foley sound creation is essentially the process of recording sounds that are edited over the film to be in sync with the scene, which helps the scene mimic real world sounds.

As Clem and I continued to brainstorm for our project, we knew we wanted to include foley sounds into our film to make the diegetic sounds incorporate into our film well. We did a variety of foley sounds to pick and choose which ones we wanted to use, and recorded some foley sounds more than once so we could have the option if we needed it. 

For the first scene, we decided that we wanted to create a foley sound of the bottle smashing instead of using the real sound from the film, since we wanted it to be more noticeable while watching the opening. We smashed a glass bottle on a concrete floor to create the best sound effect we could. When editing, we will layer this sound over the original audio of the scene to keep the dialogue in the scene but also making the bottle sound intensified.

For the car crash scene, we record the car horn a couple of times. This is too intensify the scene and induce anxiety for the audience. This will be used to layer over the car crash to make it sound realistic and give it a very serious tone to the flashback.

For the scene when Scarlett is walking into the party, we are planning to layer over the sound of waves crashing to make it seem like Scarlett has her mind on other things. This will also be used to transition into the first flashback during this scene.

Group Meeting #2

 Today our class had our second group meeting. I was in a group with Octavio, Fatima, Gabriel, and Julian. We all discussed our project ideas, how far we are into filming and editing, and any problems, issues, or just anything we needed suggestions or help on. We also looked at each other's blogs and gave any constructive criticism, suggestions, or compliments as well.

First Gabriel shared some insight about his project. His film is about basketball, and it is about a basketball player (played by one of his group mates) facing struggles. The protagonist’s older brother was very successful in basketball and the main character is struggling since he strives to be like his brother, but he isn’t at that level yet. The film’s title is “Airball.” He also shared some ideas he has for his CCR, which was to do something similar to an interview while having another student or one of his parents interviewing him. 

Next, Fatima shared her project, called “Dear Diary.” It is about a girl and it takes place during the last day of summer. She is not excited about going back to school and is dealing with suicidal thoughts, so she writes in her diary about it. She says she filmed for 3 days in total, but on the 2nd day, she realized the film looked way too rushed and bad quality, so they had to film another day. They ended up cutting some scenes out and focused on the main scene to focus on the girl’s depression more, so Fatima’s group decided to make the film more slow-paced to truly portray her depression. They are currently in the process of editing. She also expressed some concern about the film being roo quiet, so I gave her a suggestion of having a radio in the main character’s room and having diegetic sound coming from the radio. I said some sad, slow music would be able to add to her depression and make it easier to communicate her depression to the audience.

Octavio’s project is called “Mending.” It is about a couple who is going through a rough patch in their relationship. The film opening shows a fight that the couple had and shows the aftermath of the fight. The next scene is about the day after the argument and it helps to develop the characters in the story. The girl ends up running into someone she knows and then the film opening is left on a cliffhanger after this scene. Octavio chose the title “Mending” because the film is supposed to show the couple trying to bring their relationship back and try to mend things. He says he is done with filming and also almost done with editing, but just needs to tweak a bit of the sound effects such as the foley sounds and the music in the background.

Julian’s film is an opening of a video game genre with one person playing the game. One person gets transported into the video game. Basically, you’re walking around and you see a neighbor being caught and he gets trapped in a basement (I was a little confused while he was explaining so I tried my best to write down what I did understand). Since he hadn’t come up with a title yet, we gave him suggestions for this, and since the film revolves around video games we suggested the title “Game Over,” which we thought was very fitting to the theme. He also said he was done filming and doing the editing himself on Adobe Premier Pro.