Due: March 25 March 27. You should upload your final, exported project to the COM 202 Group on Vimeo. You’ll need a Vimeo account and then you need to join this group before you can upload your sound design. More instructions about exporting/uploading here.
Design sound to accompany a small portion of an experimental, black-and-white film. Your sound design should capture a mood or emotion and present the clip in a new or unexpected way. Choose and combine the elements of sound design: music, voice, sound effects, and silence. You do not have to use all of these elements, but you should layer two elements at some point in your composition. Select from the following films, or talk to me if you have a different clip in mind:
- Maya Deren
- Fernand Léger, Ballet mécanique
- René Clair, Entr’acte
- Viking Eggeling
- Hans Richter
- Man Ray, especially Emak Bakia
Instructions
Use Audacity to mix your sound track. Then use a video editor such as Adobe Premier or iMovie for Mac to combine the audio with the selected video. Here are more detailed instructions:
- Select a video clip between 60 seconds and 2 minutes in length. You will not be editing the video clip, except to cut out the segment you want and strip the original audio.
- Choose something that you think could be sonically interesting. It does not have to be the most visually interesting clip ever.
- Download the clip by right-clicking on the video or entering the URL into a downloader program like MPEG Streamclip.
- To bring the clip into your video editing platform, you may need to convert it to a different format first.
- Create a storyboard (or sound map) with timestamps to get a plan for what sounds will go where in your composition.
- You can work with sounds from Freesound.org (account required for downloading) or a number of other Creative-Commons-licensed or public domain sites for sound. Please check the Resources page for a big list of good places to download sounds.
- OR record your own sound effects, e.g. Foley sound effects. See the Audacity tutorial for recording.
- Export the final sound design as an .mp3 file (you made need to install the LAME mp3 encoder) and then add that track to your video clip using video editing software.
Here are some tutorial videos to get you started:
Upload your final project to the COM 202 Group on Vimeo. You’ll need a Vimeo account and then join this group before you can post your sound design.
I will evaluate your mini projects based on the quality of your sound design (levels, sound quality), originality/creativity, variation in the composition, sense of a beginning/end, and how well you have chosen sounds in relation to the video.