Video and Sound Production - Exercise

1/4/2019 - 22/4/2019 (Week 1- Week 4 )
Lee Yu Hui | 0335787
Video and Sound Production
Exercise

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Instructions

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Week 1
First day into the class I'm actually quite excited as I've always wanted to study more about videography. After giving us a short brief about the module, Mr. Martin introduced us to the basics of video and sound production and for the first class he basically taught us the basics of Adobe Premiere and asked us to combine a couple of clips to form a whole video. The process was actually pretty fun as I really enjoyed the behind the scenes job in film industry.

Later in the day, we were required to view stop motion videos online and pick 3 of our favorites, as stop motion is going to be our final project. After viewing a couple stop motion videos, these are my favorites:
1.

This is one of my favorite stop motion video that I was able to find on YouTube. It was really interesting to me as the creators was able to use just clothes to mimic a person's movement and made a whole action video out of it. The sound effect was spot on and the whole composition was amazing! The details in the video is also outstanding and I can totally imagine a real person playing in it. 

2.

Next, I find myself liking this one too. There's actually a few stop motion videos with similar idea behind it. This is actually an ad from target, and the way they present it is unique and creative, I especially like the scene where the clothes burst out and the mc flew to the other scenes. It was nicely done and I can tell the effort put into making it since they had to capture the scenes slightly different than what we normally would. The whole video looked like the woman was walking and jumping and flying but in reality she was just lying on top of a sheet of blanket and with the perfect camera angle, the whole video just looked outstanding.

3.

This one also caught my attention. Even though this is an ad for the post it note company, I still think this was also nicely done. They used post it notes combining with stop motion to create a interactive kind of video, which I think was a brilliant idea and it did showcase the point of the video clearly. What I like about this was the flow of the video, as the main focus was the post it notes, hence the flow of the video is also important else it would've felt fake somehow, I like the transition between one scene and another, because it was done smoothly and it felt like the character was really in the world.

Since our final project is stop motion video, we were required to provide an idea for the video.The theme for the video is: I dreamed a dream.

The story focuses on being a dream of an old woman when she was younger. All the happy and sad memories projecting in her dreams, like times when she made new friends in school, times when her dog died, times when she graduated school, times when she started working, times when she met her true love and so on, and in the end it was all just a dream, a dream that made her who she was in the end, a dream that she dreamed.

Week 2 
For this week, we were taught to use Adobe Audition to edit sounds and music. We learned about the equalizer, which is used to tune the base of the music. Then, after giving us a brief explanation and tutorial, we were given the task to try to tune the music to the original one. For me, this is my first time experiencing with sound editing, so it's kind of hard for me.

In short, for the sound exercise, we were required to try to imitate the original sound as close as possible. I had a pretty hard time doing this exercise as my earphones aren't the best, and I could hardly notice any difference between the sounds. However, I did manage to try to get the sound to be as close to the original sound.

Fig 1.0 Using Parametric Equalizer to tune the 6 soundtracks given.

Then, we were given 2 sets of soundtrack, and our goal is to try to make a better version of them.

Jetplane sound after refined

Punching sound in audition

Punching sound after refined

Later in the day, Mr. Martin gave us a lecture about cinematography. Since I'm into cinematography, I was very interested with the lecture. I learned about different shooting angles, and it was a eye opener for me. We were also assigned another task to distinguish the frame size and screenshot the scenes that was given to us and paste it in a template provided.

Fig 1.1 Using screenshots of clips to distinguish different shooting angles.

Week 3

This week Mr. Razif taught us more about sound editing by introducing us to pitch shift and reverb tool. It was interesting to see how we can play around with different effects to come out with different sound scenarios. Using sound clip given to us, we were required to do different scenarios (bathroom, telephone, monster, stadium, airport announcement)

Original Soundtrack

Bathroom scenario


Telephone scenario

Airport scenario


Studio scenario
Monster scenario

Overall I feel like it's actually not as easy as it seemed to tune the sound, and this is the best I could do.

Later during the class, Mr. Martin assigned us in groups to learn to shoot in various angles. 

We then went into our own groups and started shooting. To be honest, the shooting process was actually quite fun as we learn to explore different shooting angles hands on. Mr. Martin asked us to compile our video into one whole video and send it to him.

Week 4

This week for sound production we were assigned to do a ironman blasting sound effect with given visual reference. We need to look for sounds and try to make it sound like a shooting sound in the clip. It was a little harder than expected, but here's my final outcome.

Process of sound editing in Audition

Final Outcome

As for video production, we were divided into 2 groups and we were to set up a production team for the video shooting.