Had to do sound effects to tell a story.
My Character is a shop owner that gets stalked by someone who wants to harm her. This is a soundbite for a scene in the book that I have been trying to write.
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Had to do sound effects to tell a story.
My Character is a shop owner that gets stalked by someone who wants to harm her. This is a soundbite for a scene in the book that I have been trying to write.
As soon as I read this prompt, I knew what I wanted to do for it. Since it has to be related to our noir characters, I decided to have the story be about the most prominent set piece in my character’s universe, the Puncture. The overall story for my character is certainly a balance between noir and sci-fi, with Jim Sardic being the heart of the noir and the Puncture highlighting the sci-fi aspects of the story. The story is an audio recording of a women in a lab on the day the Puncture formed.
Sound Effects Story (3 1/2 stars)
Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds. Another example (by a UMW student): http://ds106.us/wp-content/audio/audio_story.mp3
Story Behind the Story
I absolutely love working with my character and in every other assignment she has been the focus or made an appearance, so in this one, I wanted to mix it up a little. Below are the different aspects of Stella’s story if you would like to browse them before entering this new scene.
The setting is a dark apartment, more specifically, Stan Reins’, private detective, apartment. It is late, and he has been almost all night trying to crack Stella Vaughn. Papers are scattered across the table and floor, dark circles embed themselves under his eyes, but he is relentless. So far, Reins has yet to find any physical evidence that Stella is harming her clients. She leaves no trace. He has testimonies, suspicions, faked documents, letters, blackmail, the list goes on, but none of it ever ties back to Stells.
It is about 3 in the morning. Stan is hovering over his coffee maker while he stares blankly at the wall. The end spurts are so sudden that he is snapped back to reality. In his slippers and robe, comfy but still so perfectly worn, with a bow symmetrically holding the robe in place, he shuffles back to the table, pulls out his chair and begins flipping through the same papers he has been looking at for the past 7 hours. Nothing. He has nothing. The ticking clock looming over his failure, reminding him that he doesn’t have eternity to nail her to the wall. Reminding him how many hours he has put into this case.
But then….no, he is just tired. There it is again. He hears a fainter clicking. Maybe it is a sign that he needs to give up for the night. He gets up and starts to close shop for the night, but before he can turn the lamp off, he slows his pace. Someone is trying to break into his apartment.
This can’t be Stella. She wouldn’t be this dumb. His focus is so set on Stella walking through that door. This will be his break. She finally lost her touch.
In the midst of his contemplation, the door slams open and someone immediately starts throwing punches. Stan starts fighting back. He has no idea who it is or why he is fighting them. Finally, he throws them off, looks down and sees….George?!
George is the character that Stan has interacted with most. He used to be one of Stella’s clients. Why they hell was he trying to break into his apartment?!
END SCENE
Here is the story behind George breaking into Stan’s apartment. Once Stan has George pinned, George starts to cry, saying that Stella has him all kinds of confused.
Stella wants George on her side so that she can finally figure out what Stan is up to. She knows that George is the weakest link. For the past two weeks, she has gone to visit George at his apartment to show that she “cares” about his wellbeing. In reality she has been manipulating George into turning against Stan, feeding him lies about how certain people will cause a relapse. In the past, when things get out of control, George goes into a frenzy. Stella was counting on some kind of reaction.
Stella always has others do her dirty work.
Work Itself
Narrate the Process
When I finally finished this assignment, I expected it to be at least 5 minutes long. I had completely forgotten that I made a 1:13 sound effect story. I spent so much time finding the right noises, adjusting volumes, layering the sounds correctly, that I expected to have this over the top masterpiece. While I am not at all disappointed in my outcome, I did have this feeling of “that’s it.” when it ended. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into this sound effect story.
I started with the ticking clock. I decided I wanted that to be the base of my story. I made everything else fall into that. I always feel like noir has this race against time feeling. At some point someone will get caught or murdered. It is not a matter of if but when and that is what I wanted to encompass with the clock noise.
I had to physically walk through my apartment to map out what kind of noises I would need and where they would fall. From that it was just a matter of finding the sounds. A lot of time was spent listening and re-listening to what I had made. I couldn’t just look at it and know it would turn out well. At one point I even felt a little like Stan. I made coffee, sat at the kitchen table and poured over my computer trying to find an answer. Luckily, I avoided someone breaking into my apartment.
It was a lot of cutting and softening sounds to get the right story.
For this story in sound, I used the sounds of crickets, a train, clicking, and the song, La Valise d’Amelie from the Amelie soundtrack. Fun fact, the title means, “the suitcase of Amelie.” I thought that the song was especially appropriate considering that Victoire was traveling. I wanted this story to be about how she got onto the train, and then sank into deep thought.
In this and other sound posts, I’ve been using the same sound track quite a bit. The movie is French, and considering that Victorie Absinthe is French, and came from New Orleans, that there was a neat correlation between the sound and her character. I’m still working on how to show this, but I want Victoire to put on multiple masks, but through this soundtrack show her real self.
Sound Effects Story: 3.5
If you’d like to try this assignment, click this Link
This assignment was to create a story related to my noir character, using only sound effects. It was really difficult assignment to me. I had no idea how to start and what story should I make that is related to my character, John Brown. To start this assignment, I went to the website that was provided on the noir106, free sound. And just search for any sound effects until I get the idea. And then, I downloaded the effects and uploaded on Audacity to put it together. After this process, I exported into mp3 file to able to upload it on sound cloud.
This is what I got.
I ended up with creating what he does after his work. So, I started with car door opening effect, and goes on.
When John Brown was done with his works, he just goes straight to his house. He does not go anywhere else, especially Friday. He hates crowded place, just want to relax in peaceful place. He arrived at his house and got off from his car. He walked to his place and search for key and unlocked the front door and got into house. He wore slippers and went to bathroom to take shower. After taking shower, he went to kitchen and open the refrigerator and search for beer then sat on the couch and turn on the television. While he is watching it, he fell into sleep.
From this story, I want to show that John Brown is anti-social person. As you notice, there is not any noise on the background. He got his house where no one can bother his personal life. There is only his house, nothing else.
Sound Effects Story (3and 1/2 points)
For my Audio Assignment Sound effect story ( 3 1/2 stars) I made a short video that covers the sounds that Edie hears one night. This occurs with one of my other stories for her– The one that takes place in my post a canary.
In order to do this assignment I use GarageBand. The sound effects that I chose included an old phone ringing, thunder, a woman scream, gunshots, heavy footsteps, and dramatic piano. The piano and the thunder were included in GarageBand, but the phone, woman, and gunshots were off from YouTube. I Added these affects to GarageBand and overlapped some of the sounds, then converted that to an iTunes song and uploaded it to sound cloud. There is also a random background noise from GarageBand in this that I thought I added a special Erie tone.
I forgot the name of whoever’s blog I was reading, but I found that during this post I had some common problems. I was trying to listen to sound effects and I kept getting creeped out and had to take breaks. I kept thinking that my parents are going to hear the screams downstairs and come running up to see if I was okay. But I closed my door and tried to keep them quiet so that wouldn’t happen. At one point I thought about adding in door squeaking open but every sound effect that I could find for it sounded just like farting or a noise that was so high-pitched it hurt my ears. So I opted out of that and just stuck with the dramatic piano.
She lives a privileged life with her husband and family, but then her husband dies in a horrible polo accident. She later finds out that he has spent all their riches gambling and is forced to relocate the family to the slums of New York where the dogs bark, the children squabble, and all she can do is imagine she is with her husband by dancing to the ballroom music in her head. Will she figure out his coded Italian letter? Will she pull a stunt of her own on her husband’s best friend that ruined them? Stay tuned.
3.5 Stars
Here is the link to her story: https://soundcloud.com/savannatrma/andrea-carr-life-story-told-by
Creating a story through sounds is not only challenging, but extremely fun! The task was:“Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.” I had such a great time picking out sounds that I thought would work for my story. Since the story had to relate to my character, Blair, I decided to create an accident scene, since she cleans up crime scenes for a living. I used audacity to edit all of the sounds together, and I got all of my sounds from freesound. (This assignment was worth 3.5 stars)
The first thing I did was create a “sound story board” on Word, where I carefully planned what sounds I was going to use. I then put them in an order that made sense, and to which I planned to follow as I layered my pieces together. This really helped me out. I was able to stay organized and focused throughout the entire process of making my story.
I started out by taking the sounds of cars driving by, to give the effect that you are on the street. Everything else involved a lot of cutting and pasting. I really wanted to get the effects to fit together nicely, and some of the sounds were incredibly long. I really only needed a few seconds of them, so I learned that if you found a spot where you wanted to cut the sound, you could press command I, and it would cut it for you! Then you just had to delete what you no longer wanted to use. I then took a car slamming on its breaks, a horn honking, and a car crashing and layered them together to create the car crash effect. The timing of this was imperative. It was really hard to get them all to line up in a way that sounded realistic. The next thing I added was a woman screaming, so we could get the feel that a woman was hit during the crash. After that, we hear the police siren coming, and then a police officer (who has a jingly key belt) running towards her. She is then heard crying, which fades into the sound of the ambulance which has taken her away. Lastly, we hear a sigh (which is from Blair), as well as a hose which wets the road, and finally the sound of sweeping up glass.
Blair cleans so many messes, that some of them are just not interesting to her, especially when she doesn’t find a treasure that she can keep. This story is a pre-curser to one of the many scenes that Blair has found herself working at. Many people wonder how the accidents happen, and this assignment was a way to show what happens before Blair cleans up, and what types of things are considered crimes. She doesn’t just clean up murders, as many people think. There are so many different types of crime, and Blair has seen them all. It is nice to see one that isn’t a grueling bloody murder.
I really enjoyed this assignment, and in reality it wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting. I think my story came out well, and was pretty accurate with my story board. I think I am continuing to become more familiar with audacity, and how it works, which is really exciting. I’m sure as the weeks go on, my audio assignments will continue to get better!
Here is my final project!
Here are the sounds I used
This is for the Sound Effects Story Assignment! – 3.5 Points
Marcus is still in Nevada trying find a vehicle. Unfortunately he has gotten lost and found himself running into the same mobsters that he dealt with earlier. One of the mobsters takes swing at Marcus, but he manages to dodge the attack. Marcus started to get overwhelmed with onslaught so he grabbed one of the mobster’s gun and started shooting erratically. Marcus then stole one of the mobster’s car keys, ran to his car and drove off…..