Task 5 - Sound Design
This task was all about showing our craftsmanship at creating sound fx. I chose to create a sound design for a Star Trek space battle scene as I felt this presented me with a lot to work on. I found it extremely challenging due to the amount of detail required to create a realistic sound design. I went about scoring this by firstly deciding on what sounds would be required for each movement. There was plenty to implement such as low rumbles, laser firing sounds, space ship fly by sounds, rocket engines, explosions you name it, this scene required it all. A good place for me to start was on the rocket engines and rumbles. As the scene begins a giant space ship flies towards the screen therefore I had to find a perfect engine roar sound, together with a low rumble as it flew past. The sculpture synth in logic provided me with some of the answers although a lot of EQ adjustment was required in order to boost the rumbles in the lower end spectrum. Many of the sounds I required were obtainable through freesoundproject.com, a free royalty free sample sharing site which has almost every sound you can think of. I took a lot of sounds from here and then treated them accordingly. In the initial stages of production I simply took the samples that I felt fitted best with what was happening and laid them down in their raw format. Once everything was laid in place I then proceeded to add the desired dsp and automation. This was where the craft really came in, as I had to make sure that all the frequencies did not clash with one another. Using the analyser on the channel EQ I could get a visual representation of where the frequency was at it’s most prominent, allowing me to boost of cut accordingly for each of the individual sounds. The idea was t achieve a balance so that everything could be heard clearly over everything else. If I had more time to complete this task, I would have varied the sounds of the space ships flying by to differentiate them from each other, also the sounds of the lasers could have been different and more varied as i feel it perhaps lacked variation and sounded at times a little flat.
