Looking at Sound

As mentioned in a previous blog post I taken a look into surround sound and the concepts behind it and it seems to be really simple although perhaps when talking in the crit today that I really showed my understanding of how the sound would work or the plan of how I think the recording will work as Phil raised a point today that seperatly recording the different elements will make mixing the sound togeather difficult, in terms of making the sounds match if they don’t match up with the other sounds, although my main problem is that the audio if mixed togeather to much may not allow for the range of freedom that I think we need as things like footsteps would need to be done on a seperate channel as I’m sure that if you simply record this like a straight piece of audio that the feeling of being in a space might be lost so if when you pan the sound around the entire sound track will move around in the pan.

Which leads me to the point that Liam raised today when I spoke about this in cinema where they have 22.1 speaker system or above and in most cases while the main bulk of the sound track and ambient sounds are just played back through all the speakers with certina foley style sound being added in and panned properly throgh the system to empthasies a key event.
Which in some cases the more I look around for videos about recording for surround sound or even tutorials it does seem that this is still really a developing field and that still no one is really sure on good techniques as the use of the technology has yet to be pushed into the areas that were trying to take it.

While looking into the term psychoacoustic I came upon this site that explains some of the baisc prinacables of how our ear work, I found a paragraph that compares our ears to our eyes and the fact that our eyes only really take in three colours red blue and yellow and make up our rick colour vision by mixing these togeather which makes sense when compared to how computers make up colours, although I want to take some time to read this article fully as the authour is university lecture with a PhD in Psychoacoustics which is the study of how sound travels and is interpritated by the ear.
In this article he points to the human ear having some 100 channel of audio that it is able to hear which gives it a lot more infomation to work with in comparison with your eyes which might explain why we can tell if something sounds off more easily than seeing it and make our experiment with audio even more interesting in terms of telling a story and relaing information to the a person.

New Music Box

Won’t my space have it’s own ambient sound

After spending ages thinking about recording sounds to make up the entire scene of my room I have over looked the fact that while a simple room design and very clean and crisp sounds will be produced with in the room that I may not need a base track from the speakers as the audiance will be sitting with in the room, although in the audiance area the need for a base track to the audio might be key although part of me wounders weather or not you could just live record the room and play that back to the audiance so that it may give a feeling of over hearing a conversation.

Future Cinema (Audio Theater)

After taking our idea forward into the crit today and having the chance to have totally impartial and outside of the group discussions with our peers, this has helped me realise that what we have been talking about and planning for the last few weeks really does come across strongly although we still need to work explaining every element and making sure that people clearly understand what will be happening with our installation.

I feel relived the audio that Ali, Adam and myself had been capturing for the last few weeks for the purposes of crit and trying to test out some of the ideas were revived well and not heavily criticsied as that was one of my biggest fears as I know lacking any real surround sound tests made me feel that I had not really achieved much beyond what we had done in previous talks with Liam and Phil.

Although I felt that while not perfectly pulled off due to the slip of my finger the feeling of having voices coming from different macs helped to give over the a feeling of actors delivered on a stage instead although if we were going to do this again I would have set macs up around a central point so we could fake the feeling of being within a scene, which I think is real technical separator from other groups as it is true that Stereo has really come to it maximum potential with surround sound emerging with but still only being used for audio and sound effects but not really in cinema being used to deliver dialog to make people feel like they could be sat somewhere in relation to the scene.

This idea was something I took from reading a article of a audio engineer who works in the music industry and was predicting that with more and more people getting basic surround sound systems at home, giving more options to setting up how the recording could be played in different way to change the position of the audience.

Although I think the next major step will be an experiment with the surround sound systems and speakers as so much of this project will be based around actually testing the equipment and experimenting with how best to play the sound back to the audience along, although we do need to record the audio which is still a question of should we do it separately to allow for more mixing options.

After taking our idea forward into the crit today and having the chance to have totally impartial and outside of the group discussions with our peers, this has helped me realise that what we have been talking about and planning for the last few weeks really does come across strongly although we still need to work explaining every element and making sure that people clearly understand what will be happening with our installation.
I feel relived the audio that Ali, Adam and myself had been capturing for the last few weeks for the purposes of crit and trying to test out some of the ideas were revived well and not heavily criticsied as that was one of my biggest fears as I know lacking any real surround sound tests made me feel that I had not really achieved much beyond what we had done in previous talks with Liam and Phil.Although I felt that while not perfectly pulled off due to the slip of my finger the feeling of having voices coming from different macs helped to give over the a feeling of actors delivered on a stage instead although if we were going to do this again I would have set macs up around a central point so we could fake the feeling of being within a scene, which I think is real technical separator from other groups as it is true that Stereo has really come to it maximum potential with surround sound emerging with but still only being used for audio and sound effects but not really in cinema being used to deliver dialog to make people feel like they could be sat somewhere in relation to the scene.This idea was something I took from reading a article of a audio engineer who works in the music industry and was predicting that with more and more people getting basic surround sound systems at home, giving more options to setting up how the recording could be played in different way to change the position of the audience.
Although I think the next major step will be an experiment with the surround sound systems and speakers as so much of this project will be based around actually testing the equipment and experimenting with how best to play the sound back to the audience along, although we do need to record the audio which is still a question of should we do it separately to allow for more mixing options.

Future Cinema Critique- Adam

Today we had our group critique. It was really useful to talk about our piece in front of the group with both tutors as we wanted as much input as possible. We started off by talking about the script and the narrative. It was stated by Liam as being a bit like a soap opera and we justified the need for the narrative to unfold in someway to keep the audience engaged, without this the lack of visuals would become more apparent. The lack of visuals was another main concern from the group, Elliott talked about experimenting with the hospital bed projection just so if we think the piece needs it we have something we can use. The tag-line brought up for this piece was “Radio Theatre” and i think we need to keep that in mind.

Sound is massive issue as most people didn’t get the fact that the dialogue and ambient sound for the room is going to be placed around the room with surround sound and the internal thoughts will be played through directional speakers built into the seats. this will give each audience member to get a different take on the emotions being brought up by the loss of someone that each character loved in someway or another.

I feel that everything we have achieved so far will not only get the audience to feel empathy but without visuals get them to transfer it to a personal interpretation.

Future Cinema – Empathy (Alastair)

When discussing our project with the rest of the group we got a lot of positive feedback, outlining the strengths and weaknesses and discussing changes that can be made. One point that was brought up was the lack of projected visuals in our piece. Although the project is called Future Cinema we decided not to take this to literal as in produce a piece that most people would represent as a Cinematic experience. For example a mass audience watching a high quality video projected on a screen. We decided to try and create a completely new and different Cinematic experience using props and heightened sounds to immures the audience, making them feel although they are physically there in the room.

We are hoping to do this with the help of a heightened version of surround sound filling the room with spoken audio of each of the characters. We are also going to have the thoughts of each character playing in directional speakers on each of the three chairs. This directional audio is only the thought of each individual character playing in the seat that we have allocated to them. The audience will pick any seat they want turning themselves mentally into that character.

The script plays a vital part in our Audio Theater piece and that was an aspect that we decided to spend most of our time on trying to perfect it. We decided that of the spoken audio couldn’t stand alone and work as a piece then the rest of the project wouldn’t work.

A mixture of props both large and small, some subtle smells that you might find in a hospital room and the strong audio surround and directional all build up the immersive experience of our Project.

Audio Theatre.

Looking through the web and did a little bit of googling which led to this little website that is based on the world of audio theatre always handy I thought. The link below takes you a website that describes writing for radio plays, and other topics such as editing and everything like that. Writing for Radio.. the first site also goes into the history of radio plays and there evolution of the art form, I love a quote that describes them as “Movies for the mind” which basically sums up pretty much what it is, like a book it gives the audience bit of information, descriptions and dialogue, which leads the audience to imagine the imagery, a nice thing about doing that is that everyones interpretations of the text will be different, the core premise will be there like the narrative, but their relationships with the characters will be different. With our piece it play heavily on empathy as there’ll hopefully be mothers that sit in Jackie’s chair and totally understand how she feels and what she’s going through, and that’s what I think future cinema is, its an immersive art form that provokes stronger emotions to people, because something like this is physical, you are that person, like in a computer game but except with my piece you have no control on the narrative but you can choose where you stand on the subject and with which character you empathize with.

Technical Specification

As part of the requirements of the hand in is to have a technical specification for what we would need for the final installation, so far I know that we will be needing a surround sound system in order to deliver the feeling of the ambient sound in the room which will help make the whole experience all the more complete, of course we still need to get some more sounds to complete the background and also do some experiment with the set up as we have not really had much chance to look into how well soundtrack relates the information to the speaker set up.

Along with the surround sound speakers we will need more of the ASDA speakers for each of the characters chairs which will cost £10 each although the question of timing will need to be sorted out.

Finally we will need a few props to make the room look complete like a bed and three chairs, while outside of the room we will need a set of speakers to allow people watching from outside of the room to still get a film/ cinema experience.

So in summary we will need a:

1 Bed and Linen set

3 Chairs

1 CRT monitor for EKG

1 Surround Sound Speaker System

3 Pairs of Small Directional Speakers

Getting actors

Jamie has been getting in contact with possible actors for our project via the casting call pro website, the main problem with this is the lack of responces we get to calls as we found out in our last project ‘Reunion’, so when we get emails back askking for a script and a phone call we try and get on it as soon as possible so, today I got in contact with Simon Heywoods who after reading the script seemed more than up for the part and wanted to see what was going on interms of recording dates and so on.

To which I explained that as the project was to be part of a open installation in Poole we didn’t want to go over commiting our selves until we get the final okay after the crit tomorrow but I have asked Jamie to e-mail him the current version of the spoken script and also the latest version on of the thoughts as we still want to perfect them a bit more before finalising them.

Crit Vocals

With the crit insight and the spoken dialog now completed and the thoughts for the script being polished off it seems like the best time to get some recording of our dialog in order to give a better representation of the piece as a recprdong of the three of us would miss sell the characters, although we have not used any real actors we have at least tryed to find voices that would reflect the characters better.

As shown in a previous blog we got Steph and my house mate Sarah to plays the role of the girlfriend as they are about the same age as Becca although as Sarah works as a carer in a nursing home and has a large family I also got her to try out for the role of the Mother and the Nurse, while the role of Roger was covered by Jamie as he seems to have the best mental understanding of the role and able to get it down in one take.
The most difficult role was Helen/ Jackie as even thought this isn’t the final recording we wanted to have someone with the experience of having children, and life in general as it is always a totally different voice to someone of our age to really put across a that much experience.
So in the end as my mum only visit once or so a month and had already visited the week before we decided to use Jamie’s mum to cover that role of Helen although we did have some problems when I walked into the house said my hello’s and then when we started to record she automatically started talking like a west country farmer, but after that and giving her a few more attempts to get the emotions right in the voice we have a series of voices that we can use in our project.

Just like in the post about recording Steph voice I used the small directional microphones in order to make sure I got less of the ambient voice from the different environments I would be recording in so that when it came to editing and preparing the voices it would hopefully have less static for me to cut out and remove, although this come with the trade off of only recording in mono (Image below).

While this would reflect what happens when speaking as the voice is produced from one point, your mouth but I feel we do need the stereo recording as this will not just be playing inside the room but outside thought a set of stereo speakers for anyone watching from outside, also at the crit on Monday we will only be working with inbuilt Mac speakers so it seems wiser to have the dialog in stereo so that it uses both speakers.

As some of the audio wasn’t recorded at a locations or in a specialised sound booth the amount of sound pollution is very high making it difficult to replay this audio in a final crit due to the buzzing of static or talking of people in corridors and so on.

So following the examples basic tutorials I found online showing way to kill off background sounds that detract from the dialog, although as I did this with only minor tweaks to the default settings for the test dialog so in some cases when turned up loud developing a metal/ robotic sound to the voices, this would be something I would have to tweak and work on for longer with the final voices although hopefully when we do the proper recordings we will be able to use the acting courses sound booths.
Which should get rid of the background noise also as hospitals A & E wards have solid walls and no real soft surfaces accept the bed and chairs, making the sounds more crisp which will work well in the recording environment although as the space is not going to be as large as the room which will require us to change the re verb on the voices.

Final Model screen prints.

These are the final screen pints of the model i made on Maya.