When there was an opportunity to spend a few weeks focused completely on sound I was really excited. I first started by thinking of what scene to do from one of my favourite films. I wanted to do something from Batman or a superhero film but nothing was really working or sticking out as something good.
I couldn't think of anything so I went about it a different way and recorded sounds and thought of what could go with it.
I have a sound bank that I've built up over a few years of different sounds like foley and atmos sounds so I tried some different things with those, I had a collection of footsteps, different room sizes and background hums that I could work with. I layered them all up and added different reverbs to create a small room with the sounds coming from outside. I recorded conversations I had had with various people and put those sounds outside the room. It became apparent to me that I should do a quote from Anne Franks diary when I had put the conversations in the background outside of the room I had created.
At this point I had quite a lot of sounds within my final piece and it was sounding quite cluttered and messy. I had more room noise that was necessary and it needed to be simpler.
I still hadn't chosen what part of Anne Franks Diary I wanted to use as the base of my piece but I continued with it and as everyone knows the basis of what happened so I could take away and add specific things and be able to put a voice over onto it.
I started taking things out of it, I cut it down to around 7 tracks with the voice over by the end.
It turns out that in this situation less is more and it worked out quite well. Once I had decided on a segment I moved around where the conversation began and finished and where the footsteps moved towards the front of the space.
Adding the pencil writing on the page added some centre to the track, without the voice over still makes it linkable to Anne Frank I think because the size of the room created makes it feel very claustrophobic and small.
The isolation of the sounds reflects the literal isolation the Franks experienced and the building up of the footsteps and faint talking in the background is how I imagined the suspense of living in that situation.
After looking at the different pictures of where she lived it gives a good idea of how small and cramped it would have been. This image was of the door to the annex in which her and 7 other people lived.
It makes me think that I could have perhaps added one more sound of people breathing in the background, but I think the simplicity of the final piece emphasises like I said earlier the isolation of their situation.
Reviewed your sound work with Harry yesterday. We were both very impressed with your project. Well done.
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