Week four - Recording in the home studio

So during the filming of week 4's media project 'Aberpocalypse' we wanted to use sound as much as we could to create this sense of atmosphere (or 'lack' of atmosphere, one could argue). In the film we featured the sound of a chain blowing in the wind as well as droplets of water coming from the weather-wrecked caravan. These noises were difficult to capture on-set mainly due to the volume of the wind (even with the microphone's muffler on and regardless of boom position) So we thought it would be better to recreate them in a much more controlled environment with the use of a studio condenser microphone. Of course the sound of wind was still important to us, however recording them separately meant that we could place the wind noise in its own audio channel with lower gain and volume in order to draw more attention to these quieter noises. It also means that while the sound of the wind could remain central at lower volume, the other noises could be panned left and right in order to achieve a more dynamic audio. The chain that was discovered on-site was brought back with us to my home studio where it could be recorded much more efficiently. We could watch the footage back and even look at the motion of the chains in the footage in order to replicate it most realistically.

The microphone was placed in what we decided would be the optimum position considering the ways in which the sound would be travelling. The microphone was connected to an interface which allowed us to record directly into the video editing software where additional effects could be applied. Here are the sounds as unedited files:

Once we had the sounds we wanted, we arranged them as follows:

Instead of having the audio immediately cut from right panning to left panning, crossfades were added so ensure that the sound would slowly 'travel' from one speaker to the other (or in the case of headphones, one earpiece to the other).