Major Project Unit - Sound Design

   For my role as sound designer, I have conducted some research to find out what would be needed for me to create some special effect sounds needed for 'Routes'. It was important for me to do this so I would be able to create good quality sound effects for the film. During my research I discovered that the importance of sound in film is often overlooked. Though film is considered a visual medium, all it takes is one click of the mute button to tell exactly how much movies depend on audio to convey emotion, the story and even the voice of a particular filmmaker. The effect good sound design has on a film can turn an okay film into a great film. 

   

   The sound effects you hear in any given scene of a film are often not the sounds that were recorded in production. Most sound effects, such as cars, footsteps and general ambient noise, are re recorded and added in later. It can be a painstaking process sifting through sound libraries or recording and creating sounds from scratch, all for the purpose of making the film experience as realistic as possible. 

  

   The main sound effect I needed for 'Routes' was for punching and kicking. To create this, based on my research I would need multiple sounds of different pitches and layer them together to create an authentic sound. I took a deep hitting sound (a car seat being punched) and a higher slap like sound (sandal hitting concrete) and put the sounds together to create the punching and kicking sounds. The reason we did the sound effect in a car was to avoid echoing, which the car's acoustics did not create, and the sandal on the concrete to create a slap like sound that maintained some bass behind it, to aid the effect of the sound further.