Idea

Because my world is really based on a high school experience, I based my soundscape on it as well! and the first inspiration I got was from…

I think it’s because I remembered this scene of Lindsay Lohan having to go to her first day of school (previously she was home-schooled), and I remember her getting looks from the other students – so I tried to make my soundscape experience somewhat being in her position (a.k.a new girl in school).

(Up till ~0:15) 

In this video she doesn’t really get a negative response from her classmates, but in my soundscape I tried to portray a LITTLE bit of a judgemental atmosphere from my character’s classmates.

Sound Making

For my sounds, I mostly recorded them from my surroundings, for example

• Talking
• Background noises
• Door opening/closing
• Chair movements
• Slamming of Books

Some of the recorded sounds were not from the actual actions –

• Footsteps (made use of an object(like a pen) tapping on a hard cover book, slightly dragging at the end)
• Heart beat (from my finger (because it’s blunt) tapping on a table)

However there were sounds that I wasn’t able to record on my own

• School bell ringing
• Lockers – I tried with metal objects but it did not come out the way I wanted it to be (sounded very heavy? unlike a locker door which is rather light and hollow)

Composition

I think that my composition changed slightly after the first critic session, rather than the addition of more details to refine my soundscape, I changed the arrangement of some sounds to make it flow better, and to help it make more sense.

Also, I think the idea (that was given in class) of having different sounds passing through the listener’s different ears made it sound better too!!

Overall I found this project really interesting because I generally like to work with sounds (like fixing of the timing and transitions) :-)

My story was adapted from Natasha’s world, whereby people are able to time travel by breaking the stem off their own blue feather.

Ideas/Theme

I decided to make my story a love story, centering around the idea of teenage pregnancy but not exactly/explicitly – because when I read Natasha’s brief about her world, I immediately linked it to the concept of how people lose their first times – and I wanted to show how big of a deal society seems to think it is.

Also, another reason why I chose this theme was because her world mentions about the breaking of the feather’s stem by e.g. Person A BY Person B, will cause them to be bonded together forever. I thought of this as a lifetime responsibility, like how a child would be to two parents.

The mood for my story, in contrast to Natasha’s, is much more bright and playful, and much more casual, as I wanted to try to create a totally different vibe from her original story.

Medium: Comic/Illustration

So I really love reading these comics (below) called ‘Deep Dark Fears’, reasons why is because of the way the author draws his characters, as well as the way he expresses his thoughts across.

To me, he is able to tell an entire story through such small boxes and little words, and I really like that about it. Hence, I tried to align the design of my comic to his.

Personal Thoughts

I honestly think that doing this in a comic format was quite challenging, as it wasn’t easy placing long and detailed explanations into a few sentences that would be sufficient enough for readers to understand my idea.