Lauren came up with the idea of taking a clip from a silent movie and performing live foley and sound effects. Doing this project is a two person job and she asked me if I wanted to help. The first thing we had to come up with was what clip we wanted. We had two choices: Nosferatu or a Charlie Chaplin clip. Decision – Chaplin. In this case comedy trumps horror.
We must have watched the clip about 20 or 30 times trying to decide which sounds to make and how to make them. Our next stop…Goodwill, Toy Joy and other assorted places. We found a few things, but most of what we used we had to make.
Lauren had an idea of doing the presentation like a 1920’s vaudeville act. She put our costumes together, fixed both our hair and came up with a script. Lauren also edited the clip.
For the footsteps sounds we needed a way to make them project throughout the entire room, so I came up with an idea to build two platforms. I made them out of two small square pieces of plywood and pieces of 2×4.
I wanted us to perform off-center of the stage so we don’t block the clip playing on the screen. Also, I want to hug whoever patched the lights with the spot on the side of the stage. All I have to say is it was perfect.
For my second project I wanted to try something more hands-on. I found a toy piano at Goodwill and, after going to Epoch and meeting a bunch of people there, was able to take it apart and figure out how it worked. What it does is you can push one of the keys and literally bend the circuit board to make some interesting and obnoxious noise.
So, what I did was i replaced one of the resistors on the circuit board with a potentiometer. All a potentiometer is is a variable resistor. I soldered it to the board (which is easier said than done, that was the hardest part) and when you turned the knob on the potentiometer while pushing a key on the piano it made even more obnoxious noise!!!
I had a hard time deciding what to do for this project. One idea I came up with was trying to record a musical palindrome on my roommates drums and edit it together so it sounds EXACTLY the same forwards and backwards. But when I got the equipment i realized I did not know what I was doing. So what I decided I should do is to try something a bit easier. What I did was I recorded a bunch of random sounds of myself and my girlfriend cooking and edited them together.
I am trying to figure out how the microphone fits in the blimp.
I used a Sound Devices 702t recorder and a Sennheiser cardioid condenser microphone (I don’t remember the number). I ended up recording a bunch of different noises. I had multiple different takes of a can opening, of breaking eggs, cooking eggs, a microwave, opening and closing a fridge. I recorded the hum of the fridge which I used as an ambient track.
After recording all the sounds I thought I would need I put them all into Final Cut to edit them. That’s when I noticed that a lot of the sounds were recorded at a very low volume. I ended up having to put a gain filter on every audio file to raise the volume to a level where you could tell what was happening, but this made many of the files sound very shitty. What I ended up with wasn’t anything like what my original idea was. What I originally wanted to do with these sounds was to play a song (I was leaning towards a song from Katamari) and to edit all the cooking noises in a way that sounded like the beat of the song. But that was much harder than I thought it would be. I ended up just editing all the cooking sounds together to tell a story of someone cooking a quick dinner.
