Sound Joy - Professional Toolkit

The classic creative block always there when I show the most enthusiasm towards a subject, typical.

The horrible memories of A-level Music Tech return as my migraine like headaches return.

I was thinking at first that I would do a scene from The Dark Knight, where the Joker crashes a party and intimidates all the guests. It is set in a high-rise building at night with a lot of people drinking champagne and eating food.
I thought it would be a good opportunity to include lots of layers of sound, firstly the muffled sounds of the city that would include helicopters, police sirens the list could go on. Then the guests and the party, firstly talking you would hear glasses, plates cutlery making the noises you expect to hear at a cocktail party. Then when the joker comes in, the guests are quiet only faint noises like breathing the odd glass noise and gasps.

When I recorded my sounds I had all this in mind and it was fairly difficult, however I kept going and thought I'll be able to make something of them when I came to edit them in protools.

However this of course was not the case.

After messing around with EQ, Compression, Reverb and panning it still didn't sound like the Joker could burst into the make believe room I had created.

I listened to the sounds individually and when listening to the one titled "ew breath" there is a second at the end of the clip where you can hear me gasp. When I was recording I tried to move without making any noise and instead fell of my chair. I would say this then got me thinking about situations where people couldn't make noise but it didn't I continued to listen to my sounds making the reverb longer and shorter seeing if they would sound like anything I knew. That added with the gasp got me thinking about Anne Frank and how her and her family were trapped in the annex hiding from the Nazis. Not really sure how my brain made that connection, but never the less it did.

After editing my sounds some more and panning them to a more appropriate place I got it to sound like it was in a box or a cramped space.

To conclude this update of where I am with my work, I have to find a short passage from Anne Franks diary. I'm really pleased with how it's going so far, I also enjoy the simplicity of it, in that I won't be including typical World War 2 sounds, like tanks and guns, I will be including the scratching of Annes pencil, the creaking of her house, things that scared her during the war, other that the risk of being caught.