Sound Effects Story – Beach Photography (3.5 Stars)
This Audio Assignment can be found here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/
The Story:
The setting of the sounds heard above is at the beach, around the time of sunset. My Character, Sterling James, enjoys taking small ventures by himself to natural landscapes in search of solace. He finds beauty in nature as it is one of the few things that has remained consistently peaceful within his life. This audio story depicts Sterling taking a step back from his life at the beach, beginning as he strolls down the boardwalk with his camera gear towards the ocean shore. He walks across the golden sand, stops and then sets up a tripod. He mounts his DSLR camera to the tripod and begins to focus it towards the shoreline. You hear his camera beeping and the rapid clicks from the shutter. Sterling finishes his time at the beach, packs up and then walks away…
The Process:
In making this audio project, I decided to use Adobe Audition rather than Audacity as it provided me with a more professional interface. I figured I would learn how to use Adobe Audition as this is Audio Week for Ds106 and I wanted to get something out of this week… Anyways, I found all of my 14 sounds at freesound.org (great site) and imported each individual sound into separate tracks (as seen below), where I was able to adjust the sound levels and effects accordingly.
I used two different sounds to form the background noise and simulate a beach setting. The first one was a gentle whisper of the ocean’s general movement and then the second that followed was the noise of waves crashing as you walked closer to the water. I also mixed two different walking noises on different textures to simulate Sterling transition from walking on wood, to walking on sand. The rest of the steps were pretty straightforward, so I just played around with various foley to render my story.
At first I thought that I would hate doing this assignment due to its complexity and time consumption, but I actually really enjoyed learning about the audio production environment and the potential it has to offer. Surprisingly, this was one of the most fun assignments yet and I am glad that this was required.