Hello everybody! This week I chose to do the “Quote With A New Feeling” assignment. In this assignment I was to find a quote and record myself saying it. After recording myself, I was to mash up my audio recording with sounds, songs or instrumental music to better explain the feeling that this quote has on me.
I chose a quote from “La Jetée”. Below is my result.
“She accepts as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor who comes and goes, who exists, talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then disappears.”
Behind the Process
To begin the process, I decided to use a quote from “La Jetée” as I had watched it for class last week. Since watching this film, one quote has been stuck in my head. So I chose this quote and translated it into English. I recorded myself saying it in Audacity. Recording myself was once again the easy part of the assignment because I knew how I wanted to say it and what inflection to bring to it.
I decided that me saying the quote was a little boring. So I decided to intercut the main character of “La Jetée” saying it too. This gave the quote an interesting back and forth, almost like a dialogue. I think that this element of my assignment is something I did well. I was inspired by this weeks listening from Detective Stories in which they use this technique. This element adds layers and a sense of character to the audio.
For background music I went to 78 RPMs and Cylinder Collection. I dug around for awhile and stumbled upon this track called “By the Waters of Minnetonka” by The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. There is something about this song itself and its quality that feels ethereal. This correlates to how I feel when I hear the quote from “La Jetée”. I also had to learn how to use this website because I initially had no idea how to download the audio. After finding where to download, I had to learn which file type would work best with my audio project.
One difficult thing about this assignment was getting the main character saying the quote. I could not find a short YouTube video of him saying it. I really wanted a short clip not a 21 minute video to download because I am not about that life. To avoid downloading a large video file, I used Screencast-O-Matic to rip the audio. I am not really happy with the quality of the audio therefore this is the one part of this assignment I would improve.
I liked this assignment as it allowed me to mess around more with layering audio. I also liked playing with the effects to achieve the quality I wanted. I did find this assignment fun and would definitely do it again if I had a choice.
Well, that is it for now. I’ll catch you on the flipside.
