Multimedia Report

End of the trimesters are awesome. You don’t have anything to do except a long report. This trimester has been an awesome and interactive. The structure of the assignments was quite interesting. On the first part, we were given an assignment to make a remix with stems from our classmates apparently. So, I borrowed stems from a classmate. As I didn’t have any experience on Ableton at all, so it was a whole new world for me. Along with that, I also didn’t have any experience of electronic music at all. I did not know how electronic music is produced and any of its techniques, methods, tricks and process. But I learnt it somehow and made a remix. It was a very primary level of a remix. I am not proud of it, but I did learn A LOT from the overall process. I had to remake a track that suffices all the requirements. I went for an electronic funk track.

For the next assignment, we as a group have to recreate a track which has the same instrumentation and processing and make a track that sounds exactly the same. We found a vocalist and asked her who she sounds like and chose a track according to her voice. We found some other musicians as well who did a good job for us. There were a lot of errors while the recording stage which didn’t get fixed in the mixing session. But as a group, we did a great job. I was more comfortable doing this project than the remix as this requires Pro Tools which I’m familiar with. Overall, these 2 assignments acquired half of the trimester in which tested where we stand in the spectrum. I’d say that I did a better job for the soundalike than the remix as creating the remix was a very tedious and slow process for me as it was a whole new interface for me.

For the next assignment, we had this multimedia project in which we had to create a couple of things as a group and as an individual as well. As a group work, we had to select a trailer for a game, movie or a short film and recreate the sound to that. As a matter of fact, this module mainly contained modules to recreate the sounds for a narrative rather than making a new sound. That made us well-practiced for a stage where we might produce something on our own with ease.

With the trailer, we chose a game trailer called PUBG 4. It was really a quick decision for the trailer. We met as a group for the first time and that was it. The trailer was decided on that very day. Luckily, our group fitted with each other. Each of us were good at something that made me the group stronger. One guy was good at creating background score for the trailer on Ableton. The other one was good at Pro Tools like me and so, we divided the work for the trailer accordingly. The trailer’s original sound consisted of mainly score (which was the driving element of the trailer), a tiny bit of Foley, lots of guns and bombs at the end of the trailer and a voiceover for the whole trailer. With the voiceover, one of our group members agreed to do the voiceover for the trailer and suddenly, that bit was sorted. We didn’t have to go to special voice artists and asking them to do this for us. With the score, Indigo (music production) took the job to create the score on Ableton as no one else from us were familiar with Ableton as he was. With the editing part of the trailer, I stood up for it as I think I’m good at that and the other guy had to mix the trailer. That was it. This was decided on the very first day. We divided the roles for each of us, we set up a Trello Page as well and started researching about how to create Foley sounds for guns, blasts and bombs.

On the recording day, we thought we’d experiment with a couple of things. We smashed two pillows together hoping it would create a sound like a bomb blasted at a distance. But the sound recorded had a lot of high end and so we had to process it quite a lot and make it sound like a bomb. We were successful. We cut out the high end, compressed it, reversed the transients and printed it together. But there was not much sustain in the printed sound, so we sent that print to a reverb channel and that was it. That was the first bomb sound that we made. There was a camera movement sound to be done as well and we recorded the faders on a digital console and processed that. That gave us a nice camera movement sound. Hence, we experienced a lot of things to make things sound alike. For the gunshots, we recorded a pop filter running down a roller door and processed that as well. We did more than 15 takes for the voiceover as the original trailer had an accent to it but we didn’t have a Russian voice artist.

I compiled the vocals for the trailer and put the sound in the appropriate places and then gave the file to be mixed. Meanwhile, Indigo was focusing on the score of the trailer. I would say he did a major part in creating a beautiful score for the trailer. After that, Deep made a beautiful mix for the trailer.

For individual projects, we had to make an advertisement jingle and a soundtrack for the animation made by our fellow animation students. With the animation, I used a couple of sounds off freesound.org where I found many samples that suited my theme for the animation (THEME: The guards are playing cards in the other room while the king has been murdered and been dragged away). With the animation, I was aiming for medieval soundtrack according to the visuals. And there was a mysterious atmosphere. I played a chord progression that sounded mysterious together. The aim of the animation was not to create the soundtrack too musical, but it should help the viewer get into that atmosphere. I created the score in Ableton and then added the sounds in Pro Tools. Ultimately, I looped the track in Pro Tools itself.

I chose a gum commercial to make the jingle sounds. It consisted of 100% score and voiceover. There was no Foley required for the jingle except one impact sound which I made into the score and it sounded good. I, then imported the score into Pro Tools and synced up the video to the jingle.

If I am to carefully reflect on the assignments, then I’d say that the assignments challenged my overall performance throughout the trimester. The multimedia project challenged my Pro Tools skills and skills that I’ve gained for Ableton as well. I really struggled with the remix, but the weekly blogs and research helped me a lot. It was like we had to do two different things in the beginning and then bring it all together into this big multimedia project. I’d say that I’ve learnt a lot of things this trimester from making sounds to a professional trailer to saving the files as frequent as possible. Here’s a link to our multimedia website: https://1012480.wixsite.com/mysite-2