Audio Updates (James H-W)

Been a lot of work over the last couple of weeks or so that I need to catch everyone up on. Firstly having armed myself with a wealth of foley sounds, work has been completed on the environmental audio. The environment is mainly comprise of sounds recording of the hustle and bustle of Scarborough town centre which has been edited so that easily audible passing conversations don't appear. These are then mixed in with recordings of wind and rain which are mixed and EQ'd differently depending on whether the user is outside of the shop (at the beginning) or inside. Inside the store the bubbling elixir experiment is separate to the rest of the background audio and is a mono recording which helps with placement and also helps by looping at a different time to the rest of the audio. Other spot sounds such as thunder and horses have also been created to be triggered separately. Other environments have also been recorded for the origins of each charm. These sounds are mostly made up by foley sounds and some studio magic, but the mother of pearl fishes eastern market environment has had some BBC sounds blended in one comprising of foreign spoken busy streets and a highly edited environment which included an eastern instrument playing in the background where busy road traffic had to be edited out. This was done mainly due to a shortage a busy foreign streets and eastern instruments in the Scarborough area.

Perhaps the largest body of audio work undertaken for the assignment has been the voice over work. The main idea was to go completely over the top with the amount of dialogue recorded often creating multiple takes of the same sentences as seemed better to have too much and scale back than to have too little and keep having to return to the studio. The voice (if I say so myself) seems to work very well but I'm not a trained vocal actor and the recording process was quite painstaking as the longer sentences often needed multiple attempts and a lots of time spent editing out mistakes. After long periods of editing regular sanity checks had to be made as the constant sound of my recorded voice playing over and over in my head was rather maddening and wouldn't stop being mentally replayed during tea breaks. The dialogue itself was a mix of pre-written ideas and some some improvisation, the quality of the audio has been produced to give his recorded voice an aged quality.

Most of last night was spent creating winning musical phrases which are to be played when the user wins a charm which Callum Ward would then use to create congratulations videos. The requirements being that they each had to be about 5 seconds long, reflect the environment in which the charms are found as well as reflecting the fact that the user had won a prize and we all decided that it would be good if the phrases were 'rubbish in a good way'. Having completed the work late last night I hope that I've found a good balance and that there's not too much 'rubbish' and not enough 'good way'.

Time was also spent creating some icing on the cake sound effects mainly feedback ideas we had been given during Mondays lecture which they'd like to see incorporated into our design. These were deemed to be luxury items to be added if we had time once the essentials had been completed. This consisted of little things like a chest opening sound and a dragon growl to go off when someone pressed on the dragon on our map. I actually brought in an out of work session dragon to be recorded, you can imagine the health and safety issues that were involved, hours of paperwork.