In Depth Sound Research - Credit to Matthew

Although I did some brief research of sound, Matthew decided to do some more in depth research of it for our final piece. The post I previously did on sound can be accessed by clicking the link below:
Previous post on sound
The more in depth work that Matthew carried out can be seen below, in a screenshot form of his blog post.

Reflection:
Having Matthew carry out this extra research on sound was very useful for us as a group because it meant that we could refer to this post when editing to read about the enhanced effects of layers of sounds that can be added for a Film Noir. As you can see from the screenshot, a lot of the work is in blue meaning it wasn't Matthews words, so an improvement could be to make the work more independent to him. Having said this, the way he converted what he'd heard into a blog post was very good, and he gave credit to other people where due. Our next steps are to use the research with our editing, and refer back to it regularly to ensure our understanding of sound stays up to scratch.

Researching Sound

Another aspect of research I carried out was sound. I focused more on soundtracks, and in film sounds to see what conventions we will have to stick with for our Noir.

SoundTrack:
To understand the sound throughout a Film Noir, I first looked at the actual soundtracks that feature throughout the films. I used a website called All Music, which contained dozens of Film Noir soundtracks, and gave me and idea of the typical sounds throughout. The website for All Music and be accessed by the link below:
Film Noir sounds on All Music
















From this, I was able to listen to the way the soundtracks are composed, and their general sound to give me some sort of idea of what we need to create for our final piece.
After looking on the website, it is clear to see that the genre's of Film Noir soundtracks are 'jazz' and 'electronic'. They seem to be played on old pianos, and violins. This means that for our final piece we will need to either recreate a piece of music like this ourselves, or find some music that is copyright free to embed into our production.

In Film Sounds:
In terms of in film sounds, I focused on one thing; voiceovers. I used a website called Vimeo to watch some openings to Film Noir's and see exactly how voiceovers are used. The link to Vimeo is below:
Film Noir's on Vimeo











From researching this, it became clear to see that each Noir had a voiceover at the start which explained the narrative. Because Film Noir's always traditionally start with the end of the film, the voiceover gives the audience an insight of exactly whats happened before to create this situation in the first place. This means that obviously we will try to match this convention to start our Noir at the end, and have a voiceover explaining exactly what has happened to create this situation.


Reflection:
Although this was only a brief piece of research, it was still vital for our group because it allowed us to understand the typical soundtracks used, and the way a voiceover is embed into a Noir to create the story line. Obviously to improve this task I could've done more in depth research, but I just wanted to gain some brief knowledge so that we have an idea on the sounds used. We may come back to this and do some more in depth research later on to gain us even more of an understanding. I learnt about the soundtracks used in Noir's from this research, and I now feel more confident with the knowledge of the conventions we must match.

Our Foley Sounds

After my previous post, we did in fact try to recreate as many as the sounds that we found from the extract of the film 'Priest' that we possibly could. The technological device that we used for this was Matthew's iPhone 6. We recorded as many of the sounds as we could, obviously using the foley technique to naturally recreate them ourselves. After this, we then uploaded all of them to google drive, and from here transferred them into iMovie, where we spent time editing them and adding titles to explain exactly what the sound was meant to represent. The list of sounds we attempted as before is shown below, and the iMovie that we eventually uploaded to vimeo which contains all of the sounds that we foleyed can also be seen below,

   Foley Sounds from Josh Coe on Vimeo.

Reflection:
Overall, this task was extremely useful for us as a group. The analysis of sound throughout an extract allowed us to understand the importance of it, and the recreation gave us some experience of making foley sounds ourselves. We were all able to talk about our ideas on how to recreate sounds ourselves, and we all gained a full understanding on how precise the records must be, and the importance eliminating and background sound. The fact that we then uploaded them to iMovie and edited it to add titles gave especially me and Heather further experience on using iMovie as we have not studied Media before. Our next steps now are to think about what sounds we will need to include in our production, and split up our tasks for further research into Film Noir's.

Foley Sound

To make us more aware of the use of sounds in films, and to help us realise the large variety of sounds that are needed in our final piece, as a class we watched an extract from a film called 'Priest', which is a fantasy horror film from 2011. At first we watched it with no sound, and listed ideas of the sounds that we expected to hear throughout it. We then watched it with sound, and compared it to the list that we had already made, adding the ones we hadn't noticed or expected. This list can be seen below:

Now, we will attempt to recreate the sounds that we have listed, using the 'foley' technique, which means to naturally create the sounds ourselves, and edit them in a way to make them actually sound like what they are. 

Reflection: 

For our group, this was a useful task and will continue to be as we recreate the sounds. From this, we are learnt about the importance of sound effects in films, and how they are emphasised in different ways to have a different effect on the audience and enhance the production itself. In terms of our final piece, this made it clear to us how important the use of sound is, and made us think about how we are going to incorporate foley sounds into our Film Noir.