NEXT-GEN Nescot Year 2 - sound Foley/sound design

For our Synoptic Project, we collected a sound Foley (series of everyday sound effects) for the outdoors effects.

For this we used a mutitude of equipment to collect sound ourselves by creating sounds used within the animation, E.g: twigs breaking, a thump from somthing falling.

The equipment we used included:

• A Zoon recorder for recording the sound effects.

• A shotgun mic used as an extention to the Zoon recorder, used for recording the sound in a higher quality than normal and to maintain a more focused reciving of sound.

• A XLR cable to link the recorder and shotgun mic together.

• A dead cat (yes real name) which is a protective fur ball placed onto a microphone/ recorder in order to prevent background noise such as wind from interupting the sound being recorded.

• And headphones to listen to the sound being recorded.

The sounds were collected by both primary and secondary resources, for example, lots of the sounds were collected by our group recording them around the college grounds; these sounds include (but are not limited to) branches snapping, thuds by obects falling and wind (in and outside the trees).

However, more complex or harder to collect sounds were collected on the internect due to the inaccessability of the sounds at college. These sounds include (but are not limited to): bird noises, a collection of sounds for a play park, contruction site sounds and snow crunching underfoot.

After collecting the sounds we created a collective folder for each of us to go through them and select the best sounds for our project. We then started to work on editing them. For this, we put them in Adobe Audition and started by clearing up the background noise by reducing the noise of segments with less desired sound. This could also be used to get rid of static as well.

Once we removed most of the background noise, we began editing some sounds to be clearer and louder/quieter depending on what was needed to be done. For the bird noises, I collected multiple ones and merged each of them into one sound file in order to have a singular file needed for different scenes, with different bird noises and timings for each required scene.