First Sound Reel

As I am producing the sound for our first  'Sulking Winds' video, I have put together a short sound reel to document my progress so far:





The first sound clip was to be used for when the book is dropped and the pages are blown violently by the wind. To record this I plugged a vocal microphone in to a computer via a sound card. Then, using Audacity, I recorded myself flicking the pages with my thumb. I overlaid these sounds with a gusting wind from the BBC sound library our corse has access to. The sound is okay, but would be hard to synchronize exactly with unpredictable blowing pages.


For the rising pillars, I wanted to achieve the sound of two heavy stone surfaces grinding together. For this, I found a dragon sound from the BBC library, slowed it down and boosted the bass. This gave a really deep rumbling sound. There is also some relatively high end left, which emulates grinding stone. On top of this I added in a wind once once again from the BBC clips. I am quite happy with this sound and  believe it could be used for the stop motion segment of our video when the pillars rise from the book.


For the falling pillars, I was fairly limited in achieving the sound I wanted. I kept the rumbling dragon sound from the rising pillars, as I wanted the deep hum. The only real sound of crashing rocks comes from the slowed down gun shots, but still the sound as a whole does not effectively emulate falling stone pillars. This one will still need work.


Again, I am not fully happy with the runic chant. I found the phrasing for the rune equivalent of 'H', meaning 'hail'. I though this appropriate, as to me 'Hail' represents both worship (towards Odin) and also harsh weather conditions. The rune phrasing is 'haw-gaw-laws'. This part I am happy with, as the rune seems appropriate. To record the sound I again used the vocal mic to record myself speaking the Phrase. I tried to sound commanding, but do not believe my voice is powerful enough to represent this book, which really needs to have a strong presence in our film. I multi tracked the voice (in the end using only two, as the clip was beginning to sound busy) and added an echo effect to make it sound more intimidating. We have decided that Luca, who will be playing Odin, will be a more appropriate voice actor for this clip.


Overall, I believe some of the sounds are effective, yet some still need work. We managed to gather some sounds on location at the Ilkley Moors using a boom mic connected to an XD cam. I plan to work some of these sounds in to the sounds I have produced already to make them more fitting to the location.