4D II Project 2 – Soundscape

Artist Statement

EmOCEAN is a soundscape that reflects emotions through the use of an ocean landscape. It explores the happenings when emotions take over tranquillity. I made the audio to be under the night sky as the night always exudes a feeling of a mystery to uncover which fits my aim to let the audience uncover the emotions inside my soundscape. In the audio, different elements like thunderstorm, rain and waves were utilised to paint the landscape of an ocean. Also, windchime to represent tranquillity. Emotion is not felt based on just one element but many. Hence, this project gave me a good opportunity to uncover the abstrusity of feelings.

Research/ Concept

My original idea was to actually record an audio about a day of my life. However, I tried with some test shots and I felt that the audio was relatively mundane- there weren’t any layers and complexity to the audio. It felt mono. Furthermore, the idea was kinda cliche. My next idea was actually an inspiration from a song in my playlist which I was playing on my way home.

The introduction to the song was actually my most favourite part of the song whereby it plays the sound of waves and windchime. Hence, I decided to do an audio on an ocean/ sea landscape. However, during the consultation, I realised this was another cliche idea but I insisted on the ocean concept due to my obsession with the introduction of the song. So Lei suggested me to incorporate emotions to my original idea.

Yeap, that was the start of my misery. How in the world am I going to incorporate emotions to my audio? Like how? Do emotions have an audio to represent it? How do I even invoke such emotions in my audio? I decided to do some research on emotions through sound and below are some of my inspirations.

The audio in this clip made use of repetitive rhythms to evoke feelings and emotions which inspired my to use the sound of wind chimes throughout my soundscape.

Through this video, I decided to include some foley elements into my audio like rainfall which I created through the crushing of plastic and blowing into the mic and doing some post editing after that.

Making of Soundscape

The making of the soundscape was another challenge for me as I have no experience with audacity although we did some exercises in class before and having an extra clear recorder wasn’t helping much either as it tends to record other disruptive audios too. For the waves audio which I recorded, it was actually filled with many background noise like footsteps, the rustling of the leaves and people talking. Also, this problem arises in pretty much every audio of mine- the sound of the crickets and frog. After much struggling and playing around noise gate and noise reduction, I managed to tune down the background noise to the best I could and cover the redundant sounds by underlaying it with a constant base audio.

To ensure that the audio does not sound choppy with the many different sound elements that I incorporated, I translated a picture of waves into audio. I used this image as it has a sense of motion to it- an ambiguity towards whether it is a stagnant wave or a moving wave, hence, a neutral stand in terms of wave.

So after much talking, here’s the end product~

The dynamic in my soundscape is actually quite simple. First, we start off with equal audio from both the wind chime which I used to represent calm and neutralness, and the waves which paint my scene. The use of crickets here is to represent the night sky. As we proceed, we realised that the crickets started to disappear and there is a short moment of peace before it is replaced by a storm/ thunder which mimics strong emotions like anger and anxiousness or even anxiety that we are bound to feel at any part of our lives. My intentions with the raindrops which came after that was to evoke a sense of turmoil within the audience. The wind chime is still playing here as I intend to show that anger has taken over and our emotions are skewed now. In real life, we always hear frogs croaking after the rain stops, hence, I included that to show that it is not raining anymore. Lastly, I tune up the volume of the wind chime to illustrate the comparison between emotions before and after the rain.

Credits

Thunder

I was praying for thunder for the past week but it only rained and thundered really softly sigh so I had to get the thunder sound from an online source below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkG4Fd1Igg

Wind Chime

I walk the whole mall and they don’t sell wind chimes sigh. Henceforth, the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw_1PsJQP9Y

TATA.

4D II Project 1- Alter Ego Final

Password: 4dproject

4D II Project 1- Alter Ego Process

Inspired by: Spirited Away

To use Chiihiro in Spirited Away as my Alter Ego was actually inspired by one of my classmate’s 10sec video whereby she used japanese anime to create in it. Immediately, I thought of using Spirited Away as it is one of my favourite animated film of all time and I really like the character- Chiihiro in the film.

I went to watch the whole film again to refresh my memory about Spirited Away and took some notes about Chii with what I get from watching the film. I guess I felt there’s an affinity between Chii and I was because we were very similar in terms of being very adamant to changes and we value friendship alot and I really want to develop these characteristics through my short film.

After mapping out Chii’s personality after the film, I quickly jot down the things that I want to include in my video as shown below.

Character Development

Chii refusing to accept that she’s thrown into a deep mess. Ambience is dark and heavy.

Chii refused to accept that she’s moving into a new town and has to adapt to new changes.

She made a friend during her adventure to save her parents

This film shows alot of scenery scenes to curate the whole atmosphere and tone.

Other Inspirations

I was always a fan of wongfu’s videos and always wanted to create a video that is something similar to theirs. Hence, given this opportunity, I tried to create my version of wongfu.

These videos emphasizes alot on speeches and sceneries which is my underlying motive when I thought of creating my video.

Spirited Away also revolves around the theme of seen and unseen literally (between humans and spirits). I decided to take upon this idea and create my version of seen and unseen of intangible force of refusing to accept new changes in terms of friendships and friends.

Storyboard

I cant draw for nut (xD) so stickman is my go to.

Film Direction

The story will be narrated in the form of monologue.

Lighting– High Saturation which is common in many anime film (keeping the essence of the inspiration film)

Monologue– Highlight character’s state of mind

Music– One Summer’s Day- Joe Hiraishi

This is the ost for Spirited Away and I found the transitions in the music really suits the directions and tone of my video alot.

Story

My story will start out with a scene to set the atmosphere of the video. With it being dark and gloomy initially to highlight the loneliness and current state of mind of the character. As the story proceeds, we see people asking the main character to sit with them but she

We see people asking the main character to sit with them but she didnt. We hear her train of thoughts through the monologue and how she is adamant to changes and how she missed her friends in her old town. We can see here that she value her existing friendships alot and refused to move on because of this which is quite similar to how Chii refused to accept her new town as she likes her old life and refused to accept the new changes.

However, through the process, the character starts to reflect her own actions and realised that if this keeps going on she will be lonely and sad forever. She wants to make a change but she doesnt know how and dont have the courage.

As she is once again asked by her friends to eat with them, she picks up her courage and decided that its time to move on.

Script

But life is just boring for me. i can’t remember the last time i was excited for something.

I missed all my friends in my old town. How long has it been since i moved here? 195 days or so it seems.

I missed all my friends in my old town. Making friends here is so hard. How do I strike a decent conversation with them or even gather some courage to speak out?

And then I realised, for the longest time, I was so rugged out for change that this secluded me from making any new friends.

Maybe, I should give myself a chance and a chance for these people, whom have been nice to me all the while.

Challenges

I speak to my friends in Mandarin normally so to narrate monologues with English is a huge feat!!! Omg I dont know how many times I burst into laughing while recording as my English sounded very very broken and very very Singlish.

Editing the film was another problem for me too as this is my second time using Premiere other than my last 4D project. I had to google how to do everything in the end. But im glad it turned out how I wanted it to be so all’s good.

Character development was also quite tough as I had to set the personality and characteristics and also the changing process all under one minute.

Final video in next post.