Multimedia project - In review

Our groups project production timeline was a fair bit shaken up at times as evident through the final products being vastly different from other groups in the class. The projects we ended up completing for our portfolio: 6 Minute Soundtrack for a student film, 1-minute jingle with foley and dialogue recorded and 1-minute solo project for which I did another jingle.

We collaborated with trimester 4 audio students to assist in the production of an original soundtrack for a film being produced at SAE.

The basic synopsis for the film we worked on is that a bogan family suffers the loss of their grandpa/father. Because of their socioeconomic status, they are unable to fund a funeral for him, so as you would expect they decide that the best way to fund the funeral would be to rob the daughter's workplace, the local fast food burger restaurant.

The request we received from the director was to not have any sad music in the film at all because she wanted it to have more of a comedy feel rather than being a sad film about losing your grandpa. So we intended to have music inspired by traditional polka, classic rock and blues/roots to accompany the picture.

Our composition process basically consisted of recording a collection of demos with vague direction from the film students, as we knew that once the film was complete we wouldn’t have much time to compose music. Once we received the final cut of the film from the film students we delegated parts of the movie which should have music and which parts should be without. Once we did this, we then decided which parts of our demos will be put into the movie, then cutting them and making slight mixing changes to suit the picture.

For our group jingle, we decided to recreate the soundscape for a dicks sporting goods advert where the family buys a ping pong table for Christmas and the video follows the life of the table as the family ages and the kids get older, becoming adults and eventually leaving the home. We decided that the general feel for the film should be to have a very nostalgic feel as the audience reminisces over this families lifetime.

We recorded all of the foley sounds in the studios at SAE, except for the crowd noises.

One of the most difficult things about recording the foley for this clip was without a doubt the ping pong sounds. Being in an isolated studio room without much ambience the same as a garage to replicate what was going on in the video. Although with use of eq, filtering out boxey low mids and emphasising the top end to bring out the excitement in the sound we were able to get something that closely resembled what was happening in the video.

The dialogue for this video was once again extremely difficult to match to the picture. As all we had was Jan and Daniel to perform voiceover, and neither of them sounds like the people on screen. We tried to pitch shift the dialogue to match the age or gender of the on-screen actors but there is an extremely noticeable difference in what is being seen and what is being heard. In the end, we just went with what we had and used the dialogue as a background effect so that there was something there but the music was the main focus of the soundscape.

The mix for the foley was interesting because i noticed that the low end in the soundtrack was taking up a lot of headroom on the master bus so to tame it i had to hi-pass at around 30hz so i could make room for more of the important mids and top end. Also because the music was too dynamic and stuck out in various parts of the soundtrack, i had to lightly compress it so that it would stay tucked in at all times.

For my solo project, I recreated the soundscape and jingle for a modern vegemite ad. I completed this in one weekend in the first week of having this project assigned to us, so that I could maximise my time devoting towards the other projects.

I started with the guitar riff, I decided it should be more percussive and corny to match the on-screen picture. I then started adding in other percussive elements to introduce different rhythms. The kick is being hit on every crotchet to hold a steady tempo throughout. The snare is an interesting pattern that I felt introduced a marching element to match the vegemite aesthetic. There is also a shaker which is playing a similar rhythm to the snare to fill in the top end. I decided the low end was feeling a bit empty, so I just added a bass guitar which is just following the main chord structure of the acoustic guitar.

For the sound effects, I decided to just replicate the sounds that were already in the original. All the sounds were sourced from freesound.org.

One thing I did with the sound effects that I thought was interesting, there is a part where the on-screen picture is showing a ned kelly helmet being shot by a bullet. To achieve this sound I found something that was reminiscent to a bullet grazing the dirt with whooshing sound to go along with it, but there was no metallic sound to imitate the sound of the bullet hitting the helmet. So to fix this problem I just recorded myself hitting a metal bucket with a mallet and mixed it with the bullet to make the sound more intense and potent. Production wise I doubled the acoustic guitars and panned them hard left and right to make them seem bigger. To make them seem really wide I recorded the first guitar in standard tuning, playing the whole way through, i then doubled the part by tuning the guitar down a semi tone and putting a capo on the first fret to make the guitars sound a bit more different and increasing the stereo width. The end of the song features a string arrangement with a melody that is reminiscent of the old days of Vegemite ads with the whistling melody, i thought this would be a cool way to end the song the really hit home the Vegemite theme and aesthetic.

In regards to achieving the goals we set out for this project i believe we executed all of the plans we had in place to a high degree. Although there were some misunderstandings with the foley and dialogue replacement for the film which we thought we would be involved in, everything went well and to plan.