SUMMARY
For Project 3 we were asked to research and understand the connection between sound and emotions. Depending on the sound being played, it can change the entire emotion of a situation or event. For example, a horror movie is less scary when there is no sound. Sound can build or break suspense, cause excitement or sadness, and even make us believe in what is not visually there. Our project began by choosing a location, either fictional or non fictional, and imagining the sounds we would hear in this location and the emotion we would like to evoke. The collective sounds we would record for this project would be considered a soundscape.
PLANNING
I faced some difficulty with this project, not only was it the first project I had to incorporate sound in to but struggled to grasp what the project wanted me to focus on. This led to the development and scrapping of several ideas.
My original plan was to film a short narrative about a girl who wakes up to find out that she is now an “adult”. Everything she did when she was a “child” seems to fail her. Yet her initial excitement of finally being able to do the things she couldn’t do (go to clubs, wear make up, drink alcohol) blinds her from the fact that she can no longer enjoy her favorite activities from her past. Eventually, she realizes that she doesn’t like adulthood as much as she thought she would. Instead of going to the door she originally left from in the morning, she goes to the door next to it hoping that she can go back to the past.
However, for this plan I focused too much on the narrative rather than the correlation between sound and emotion. I wanted to reflect my transition from teenager to adult as I moved from high school to university. In the end, I decided to start fresh; focusing more on the sounds that I could create. This led me to my second idea. Subversion. A technique we utilized in project 2 where we were given an object to describe and change meaning to. My character would enter an alternate reality where everything is reversed. Like a mirror-world, where everything seems the same but is not. Everything is backwards in this world, from the sequence of getting ready to the sounds that you hear. The day begins with waking up at night with a full face of makeup. The main character then leaves the house after removing her makeup and wearing her pajamas. After heading out the character would proceed to eat breakfast at night, lunch in the afternoon, and dinner in the morning. Yet, when the character is eating her cereal for breakfast, you hear the sounds associating with eating a stale dinner. The story ends with the the character returning home to putting on pretty clothes and makeup to sleep.
However, though I loved each project, I did not feel as if I was understanding the project fully. And after a fair amount of consideration I decided to change my idea. This idea I chose to stick with regardless of any feelings that would arise. The location for my idea was my head. I wanted to give people an insight into my head, especially the thought process that occurs throughout the day. However, I did not want to confuse the viewer because my mind could we a bowl of spaghetti at times. Which is why I chose to focus on my mind as the days lead up to a test. The goal of my video is to show the disparity between the outside world and my head. I tried to achieve this by playing a recording of my voice memorizing the information for my test over a soundscape of mundane everyday noises.
My original lo-fi board for my video included an introduction into my mind. This would have helped the viewers better understand where the location of my video was. However, I decided to cut this scene from the final video because I felt that it broke form the first person narrative flow that is dominant in the rest of the video. This goes for the sixth thumbnail in my hi-fi board. Though it added to accentuate the contrast between my mind and the actions occurring around me (other people using the bathroom facilities), the break from the first person narrative broke the flow.
SOUNDS
All my sounds except the cricket and explosion sound at the end of the video. I chose to record (using the ZOOM recorder I borrowed from the school) mundane sounds one would normally hear on a daily basis. The sounds include the running of tap, the leaves rustling, the cars driving by, and even the trite elevator sequence. The use of such a commonplace sounds was to emphasize the extensive disparity my consciousness felt during even an every day situation. This discrepancy from reality is prevalent throughout my life, not just the hours leading up to a major event. Drawing from those previous experiences, I focused on not the big moments of disparity, but the trivial instances.
The sounds are then overlapped by a recording of my own voice that continues to repeat a list of information related to the test. The voice is almost robotic in the sense that it is played on constant loop and stays constant throughout the video. My mind is so focused on engraving those points into my mind that I am oblivious to the sounds around me.
IMAGES
My original plan was to use moving images to create effects such as time-lapse and continuous transitions. However, due to time constraints, I ended up using still images as my visual aids for this assignment. Though an unexpected turn of events, I feel that the rigid nature of still images adds to the distance I feel with ever-flowing outside world.
