Projects With Sound

Over the summer, I took RTF318, probably my most extensive experience recording and editing sounds for movies. During this time, I was able to use a little DV camera and a boom with several microphones to take in all the sounds for my projects. While this was my best experience with sound and video recording, the semester before actually taught me a lot more about the difficulties of sound.

For the final project in my introductory Spanish class, we were put into groups and instructed to create a short, creative project meant to teach basic language skills. My group mates and I decided that we would do a short film project in Spanish, making fun of those awful videos they always use in language classes. This soon became an issue as I didn't have the access to video equipment afforded by 318 enrollment. Instead, we were forced to use the video option on a digital camera borrowed from a classmate. In addition to taking video with poor resolution, the camera barely captured sound at all, making the creation of an educational video quite difficult. After many, many takes I was still left with a portion of video that had terrible sound quality. Wind noise drowned out a great deal of the dialogue we shot outside, while the indoor shots were restricted by sounds like air conditioners and crowd chatter. When I took the video home to edit, It turned out that the format of this camera didn't work with my video editing software, forcing me to download and learn a new editing software to complete the project. Through all of the process, I came to despise parts of the editing process, especially managing the sound which was of such poor quality that I cut most of it for the sake of comprehension. However, through all of the frustrating sound issues, I managed to put a good project together which forced me to learn a great deal about sound. So, when the next semester came around, I felt extremely well prepared for editing and sound design in my 318 class. It just took one really crappy sound experience.