Sound Effect Recording Seminars
In this 3 part seminar we had to first record a series of sound effects on the street using a special sound recording device; we asked to go on a scavenger hunt recording a variety of different sounds within the allotted time period, these included sound effects such as trams, keys jangling, drilling, car horn, fire engine, birds, traffic, dogs barking etc. We had to do our best not to pick up any other background noise in the recording. The next stage was to transfer these to hardrive, convert them to appropriate sound file format and edit the 'in' and 'out' points to make the sound effect as authentic as possible.



In the final seminar we were asked to select a video clip from a given selection of films, cartoons and adverts and remove the audio. We then had to take the sound effects we had recorded and use them with the visuals where appropriate using Adobe Premiere. I chose to use a gun shoot-out scene from the 1997 movie Grosse Point Blank. We hadn't recorded any gun shot sound effects during the scavenger hunt there had to recreate them as best we could using Sound Forge. I used the 'pneumatic drill' and 'crushing can' sounds and editing them using various distortion effects to create 'machine gun' and 'pistol' effects respectively before adding them to the video at the appropriate moments.

Overall I really enjoyed this task as sound production is something that I have never had the chance to experiment with before and found it to be fairly innovative and creative. However my lack of knowledge with Soundforge and the Adobe Premiere sound mixer meant my final result in this exercise was slightly unsatisfactory in parts though good practice. I would like to try to get to grips with this sound production more in my spare time as well as producing music in Cubase or FruityLoops.