My First Sound Story!

My Sound Story

The Foley Stage.

Learning about the Foley stage and the "magic" of sound effects was truly fascinating! One thing that really grabbed my attention is when finding out that so many different sounds and ideas can be made using the strangest or most unexpected objects and tools. For example. a simple swooshing of water in a bathtub can be magnified to sound like a boat moving through the boundless ocean! Typically when watching movies I had always assumed that that the sounds were being picked up when actually shooting the film, but finding out that most of them are made in the foley stage blew my mind and forever changed the way I watch movies! My new perspective made me all the more excited to play with sound effects while making my own sound story!

My group and I decided to make a sound story to portray a mother who is making a light breakfast for her daughter who is moving quickly to ensure she isn't late for school. We decided to make this the storyline for our sound story since my group members and I wanted to see if we could use only sound to portray this everyday routine which we have all experienced. The sound story begins with morining birds and then moves to the sounds of a toaster finished toasting toast, to then the sound of jam being spread on the toast to the final delicious crunch of someone biting into the toast. Following this the mother yells for her child to indicate that breakfast is ready, subsequently, the daughter yells that she is coming. Immedidately following, the audience can hear the footsteps of the daughter descending down the stairs to then her closing and grabbing her bookbag, the car keys being grabbed and then the pair making their way to the front door. The two leave the house, lock the door and walk outside to the car. As both get into the car the engine is started and the two drive away in the car, ending the soundstory.  Rushing to get to school is no stranger to Desiree Haghgoo, Lucia Garcia ( my group members), and me which made us really eager to see how accurately we could accomplish our story through the magic of sound effects. 

We did run into some issues... but spoiler alert it all ended up working out in the end! The first issue my group ran into was that one of my group members was going to be out of town during the time our project was intended to be worked on. Although, there was an easy fix for this! She decided to do a few of the sounds by herself so that my other group member and I could use it in our sound story and edit it to be incorporated into the sound story! Another issue we ran into was deciding how to make the sound effects. In particular, the sound of keys jingling was a bit difficult. We found a set of car keys and tried to make a sound effect, but the sound created didn't exactly portray the sterotypical key sound, instead it sounded like someone picking up any object from a pencil to a pen to a phone etc. We wanted our sound effects to be precise, clear and understandable so in order to solve this problem we ended up finding an abundance of keys and objects such as coins and key chains in order to create the sound of car keys. This end up working perfectly! When we finally figured out how to make the sounds for all the ideas we were trying to portray, the next step was editing! This was definitley a challenge, but not one that my group and I couldn't handle ;) Once we had all the sounds in the application "iMovie" we didn't like how the the cuts in the audios were very noticeable, so the sound story didn't sound fluent or realistic. To fix this we faded almost all the audios into one another so that the transitions from sound to sound would be seemless. After I did this my group was pretty pleased but one last thing was bothering us about our sound story, which was how the beginning bird audio ended too abruptly which threw off the fludidity of the sound story so we decided to layer the audio with the toaster sounds.  After this we were very happy with our very first attempt at making sound effects and editing! As a group I was proud of everyones contribution and I was surprised how much I enjoyed editing the sounds and how fun making the sounds with my group was!

Experimenting with sound, inspired by the foley stage, was a very fun experience and definitley had its share of laughs and worries, but overall amazing! I hope to get better at editing and making sound effects as the course of the class continues! Turns out sound effects can actually be "magic"! :)