Finally it all gets put together! A few weeks ago (it seriously seems like an eternity ago) we had to create our own sound effects for a Charlie Chaplin video, but we had to do it Foley style. Watching the video now, I was very glad that I was born in July and had to only do the first 30 seconds. Now for this video assignment, I faced the challenge of creating audio for the whole entire film by using my students sound effects to re-tell the story.

I found myself wondering how someone could possibly retell a story that has already been told. I mean the visual part can’t change, and we only have a few selections to pick from with each audio (if we even had any). So the reality of it all was the background music. So what vibe was I going to go for? A dramatic one of course! What?? Me? Dramatic??? You don’t say.

So I googled “dramatic classical music” I found O Fortuna by Carl Orff and I loved it for what I was trying to do. The only problem was that it was too short! However, it so happened that the music ended at an opportune moment, it’s like it was meant to be! So I was looking for clips of it on YouTube and ended up finding a concert that played another Carl Orff song after that was perfect for the mood. Seriously, it’s like it just said “Princess Karissa play me and use me!” All I had to do was cut out the applause (although I was pretending they were clapping for my awesome find), and I was good to go for the background music, now I just needed the sound effects.

I really enjoyed seeing everything that the students have to offer, I love checking out my fellow classmate’s work! I just really enjoy how the same 30 seconds can be seen so much differently to everyone doing the assignment, and expressed that way too. It’s just a cool thing to think about. So when it came to picking between all of these sound effects I ended up getting really excited with ones with talking. I’m not sure why, but it really just seemed to add a new perspective to the story so you could hear what he was thinking or saying.

With that being said, for the first 30 seconds I picked Kelsie’s clip, for the second 30 seconds I used Brooke’s clip, for the 3rd 30 seconds I used Brittany’s clip, and for the 4th 30 seconds I picked Kristen’s clip. Even though I am writing my post late, I actually did this video last week (I just haven’t had time to write things up recently), so the 5th and 6th sound clips had nothing, so I let the music tell the storytelling which I think actually went well.

The way that I made this was pretty easy actually, except I really do not like Windows Movie Maker. It kinda really sucks to work with. I’m talking like how I had to restart my computer so many different times because it would stop showing what I had, but it would save just fine. It was really annoying, but I managed. I simply put the clips in and muted them. I then went into Audacity and put all of my clips together which entailed the music clips as well as the background music. I did this because there is only one audio track in Windows Movie Maker and I needed multiple layers for this process. I saved that as an mp3 and then put it into my movie!

Looking back at this assignment I was really pleased with how it turned out, and I do think that I was able to tell another story by using sounds.

Thanks for reading,

Princess Karissa