See Hear Project Part 1

For this project we given the task of creating a piece of music form everyday sounds and then animating over it, these sounds could be anything from someone talking to footsteps on the pavement. However we were divided into 2 groups indoors and outdoors and I was placed in the outdoors group. This meant that we had a whole host of outdoor sounds we could record. On the first day we were introduced to the sound equipment which consisted of two microphones, one for directional sound and one that we used for very close up sounds and the recorder which was very simple to use. Wanting to get used to using this equipment we set out to record some sounds to test it out, ending up down at the Meadows where we recorded some basics sounds and some sounds we thought were quite interesting like a stick being run along a fence. As we done this we were beginning to think of some themes that we might want to have, one idea was to record peoples conversations and tie bits of them together but as we recorded other sounds we drifted away from the idea and wanted to focus more on sounds rather than people talking. 

The next day we went down to Waverly station where we knew we could get some interesting sounds. We recorded the trains, tannoy and escalators which left us with some interesting results, some of the sounds ended up being really cool and we were happy with what we collected. We also recorded various sounds from along the Royal Mile like cash machines and traffic which we also though we could use our soundtrack.

Working on creating the soundtrack in Audition

 So once we had our bank of sounds we sat down and looked at where we could use them in our soundtrack. The soundtrack itself had allow for the 4 of us in our group to each have a segment so this left us with 30 second part each, in turn giving us 30 seconds worth of animating to do. Our group took the sounds we had recoded and began to put them together in the software Adobe Audition. We created a beat with them giving a rhythm to the piece as a whole with transition sounds in-between to allow each section to link together when it eventually came to animating with each person doing something different within them.

Once we had the soundtrack complete it was time for me to take my own section and begin to think of ways to animate the sounds within it. As a group we wanted to make it quite abstract and loose and so I had to think of a way I would do that. I came up with the idea of just experimenting with lights and water, using a tank and head torch in my garage with the lights off.  

In this first test I simply simply just dropped nails into the water which produced small bursts of bubbles. I quite liked this effect and I ended up using this in the final film as a background.

For this test I experimented more with my head torch light. The orange glow actually came from shining the torch through a full Irn Bru bottle giving it this unusual effect. I also threw more nails in to see how the bubbles would look under this lighting. 

In this test I used a plastic tube that I filled with water and poured the water back in to see what effect the rushing water would give. I also played around with the tube itself as it appeared quite ghostly in the light, which was an effect I quite liked. 

I ended up creating quite abstract and strange effects when playing around with the water and lights, but I wanted to try also using shapes to covey some of the sounds. Many of the sounds in my section overlap so I thought I could composite shapes over the top of the water and lights footage. However choosing shapes that represent sounds is more difficult than you think as I wasn't sure how complex I wanted that animating to be and as we only had 2 weeks to complete or film in. I stuck to more simple shapes, circles, squares e.c.t.

Sketches of my different Ideas 

Testing possible shape colour

When animating I again used Adobe Photoshop, turning off and on the layers and compositing the images in Adobe Premier to put them together into the sequence. What I surprisingly found most difficult at this stage was the timing of the movements of the shapes in relation to the sounds. It took quite a while to sync the two together due to the fact I didn't do the animation over the soundtrack, but they eventually came together.

Once I had done this I took the animation back into Premier where I keyed the background of the shapes out and composited it onto the water and lights background footage. The background I had edited to be black and white prior and gave the effect of it looking like static with the bubbles looking like white shapes. This overall tied the two together I feel, the water and bubbles acting as a representation of the background noise that runs through the whole section, also correlating with the other members of my groups animations as we each had an element of our pieces being in black and white. In retrospect if there was anything I would change it would probably be the use of the different colours as I think just keeping the shapes black and white might have made it tie in a bit better. However I feel that the final film has come out quite well and I am very pleased with how it has turned out.

Our finished film:

See Hear Outdoors from ECA Animation on Vimeo.