Year 3 Final Project Start

We have now started our final project of the third year of the Television Production course.

As the previous project was only a high concept pre-production that was never actually going to be made, I had always planned to join one of the other groups in order to help them on their larger project that they had been previously planning.

As such, I have joined the group in the role of sound operator and sound engineer. This roles involves the operating of various sound equipment and editing the sound during post production. I chose to take this role due to being stronger in that area in previous projects, with some of these being focused exclusively on the sound. I also feel that this was also the strongest aspect of my high concept pre-production project despite my various issues with the final result.

The working title for our project is 'Cereal Offenders' and the script centres around a group of friends who are desperate the gain views on their internet livestream show and thus go to some extraordinary lengths to achieve this.

As we already had a rough script prepared, it was easy for us all to become familiar with the material we are working with. I decided that I would read and annotate the script. This means that, if I mark where I feel certain sound elements would be appropriate, I would be able to set to work on it and discuss these with the other members of the production team straight away. These annotations consisted of ideas for soundscapes and background noise, such as cars being heard in the distance from a bedroom. Others included effects within the audio feed itself such as when the characters are talking loudly through a laptop microphone, creating a distorted sound effect.

Here is an example of the annotations I made on the first page of the script (please excuse the language involved):

I have already started work on creating some of the soundscapes, mostly that of the bedroom. The sounds included are the faint sound of various traffic that has been muffled slightly to give the illusion of distance. A faint buzzing of a light has been included in oder to help add to the general atmosphere of the setting. I have done this in order to show the rest of the group these examples in order to gain feedback so there is a good feed from the group in order to help produce a clear vision for the project.