In task 1 that I haven chosen, I will be telling 2 stories using nothing but sound effects. The genres I have chosen are “War” and “Horror”.
The first genre that I chose was “War”. “War” came to mind immediately because it has very distinct sounds that make it sound like war – all sorts of guns firing, explosions, bullets, grenades – all these make up a basic structure for “war”. Nonetheless, with all these typical sounds making up a war scenario, it might sound repetitive and cliche, and even to the extent of boring and a drag if the sounds simply keep repeating. I watched several snippets of war scenes on youtube, including Lone Survivor, and also TaeGukGi : The Brotherhood of War, and listed out the sounds that I wanted for my project.
Above is the Lone Survivor, and below, TaeGukGi : The Brotherhood of War.
For my scenario, it goes like this:
“A bunch of soldiers were walking through a sandy terrain, when suddenly they heard guns firing. They hastened their steps to find cover, cocked their weapons and returned fire. It was distinct that the enemies and strong fire power, with continuous firing from different weapons. Bullets drift past and ricocheted, until the protagonist gets shot. As he witness he comrades go down, he tosses a grenade over towards the enemies. The firefight continues and he runs out of ammo, when a sudden explosion hit so near he was deafened by the ringing in his ears. With no ammo to fight back, he heard footsteps inching near. The last thing he saw, was a machine gun pointed at his face…”
Next genre was “Horror”. To me, I like “horror” as creepy, psychotic, and those that sends chill down your spine, instead of simple jump scares. Jump scares do work, but seem to have little substance to it, and doesn’t give a lingering scare like scary storylines do. As such, I started to imagine a scenario and pulling out bits and pieces of memories of horror films and some creativity instead of referring to existing ones.
Here’s how it goes:
“It was a stormy evening, where she drove past and stopped at a house for shelter, hoping the rain would subside before she continues. She walks fast across the puddles, and knock on the wooden door. There seems to be no response, until the door squeaks open with an eerie crack. She walks in, with her heels hitting the wooden floor. It seems deserted to her, with mice running along the edges of the room. All of a sudden, she feels a knife stabbed into her from behind, she could not make a sound. Warm blood gushed out together with the exit of the blade, as she fell to the ground motionless. In the kitchen, a man with bloodstained hands and shirt sharpens his knife in the gracefulness of that traditional chinese love song, waiting for his next victim… 我等着你回来… ”
Most of the sound effects for both scenarios are gotten from youtube clips, and because of that, the volumes varied greatly. Quite a substantial portion of time was spent on adjusting the volumes and making use of the volumes to create a more dynamic and 3D space.
One problem faced was during the production of the scenarios, my Premiere Pro crashed and could not launch half of the time. I tried all methods of resolving that I managed to find online, updating video driver, renaming files, but all to no avail. It was on/off and this affected the time taken a lot.
Another challenge is to tell a proper story without the help of visuals. With visuals, silences could help tell what was happening but without, it creates a suspense. As such, I could not leave too much silences or else the sounds would scenarios would sound very vague.
Nonetheless, the making of this project was fun and interesting, and allowed a lot of creativity and freedom in the building up of the scenarios, as well as how individuals can have a slight variation in interpreting the sounds heard.