Sense of Space: Reflection

The Sense of space project was all about sound. Aaron and I had the idea to portray our interpretation of Limbo for this piece which gave us a great deal of creative freedom. Our idea was to use sine waves and other ambient recordings to create a sense of space and distance between the person and their surroundings in Limbo. We wanted our piece to build to a climax at the end where the character’s death is revealed and their sorrow is emphasised through the use of sound. We decided to include dialogue in this work, partly to give a narrative and context to the work and also to express a sense of the character being haunted by events of his life. Our audience is really people just like us who are intrigued by the idea of an afterlife as well as sceptical on idea of ‘resting in peace’ (surely in the eternity of the afterlife a person would reflect on their life and feel regret over certain decisions and actions that that they made). The main issue with our Sense of Space task was our organisation. We tried to schedule our recording days but found we were falling behind on our plan quite early on. We have still managed to complete everything in time but feel we could have improved our work had we been more prepared and spent more time on it. Other than that I am quite pleased with our sound piece. I think we could have improved the final cut more by using more background sounds and building to our climax more smoothly but I am satisfied with what we have created. I think were successful with the use of Sine waves whilst our dialogue could have been improved to make it sound more believable. My individual contribution to the sound task was that I did quite a bit of the planning materials and schedule, some recordings used such as the dialogue pieces as well as some of the editing decisions being left to me. With that said I feel we have both contributed well to this Project, Aaron did the majority of recordings as he had the equipment to do it at home. Our idea did change; we considered many different dialogue ideas as well as changing the end of our track from what we showed during our rough cut. I think this is an improvement. We suffered no real production issues as we both knew what we were doing. The only slight issue we had was with the quality of some of our recordings. This was fixed by simply re-recording until we had the material we needed. I mostly learnt about quality sound recording during this project as when I began I was not making very good sounds and was capturing too much noise. I spent quite a long time practising with the Marantz and various microphones to the point where I was able to record some pretty clear sounds that make one some of the many layers and tracks in our final sound piece. We experimented quite a bit with panning our sounds on speakers and also with speed and fading as a way of creating a sense of space as well as building toward a climax. I have definitely developed my skills in recording and editing sound files as a result of this project. The Sound of space task was not so well organised so our contributions to this project are not entirely equal. I feel I did more of the planning documents whilst Aaron did more recording. We edited the work together and some of my recordings do make it into the piece but I think Aaron’s recordings are what make the piece good. With that said; he is more experienced with sound work than I am and was able to quickly do things that would have taken me some time to figure out. Overall I think one of the strengths of our collaboration was that we were both on the same creative level throughout the project. Our weakness, as I have already mentioned was our organisation. I think our project would be a great deal better had kept to our schedule as planned.