For this exercise we are required to find the most silent place that we can and then just listen and make notes of what we hear.
Sitting in the kitchen on a Sunday morning:
- Cutlery knocking on a plate as someone eats upstairs
- Chairs moving
- Birds tweeting outside
- Computers humming
- Car driving by outside
- Children playing somewhere outside
- Light rain falling on the conservatory roof
Sitting outside in the garden (it wasn’t that silent but it never is really):
- Wind blowing in the trees
- Birds tweeting
- Train going by in distance
- Cars in distance
- Dog barking
- Garage door being opened
- Lawnmower in distance
- Aircraft overhead
- Bicycle wheels
- Children running on the road
- People speaking
The next part of the exercise was to look back at the sequence from Project 2 and identify possible sounds. At first I was unsure what to do because there were two possibilities and both were based on static images. After emailing my tutor for clarification, it became clear that the I would record the sounds onto the static images. I found this a bit a strange thing to do, but decided to give it a go.
The sequence I chose was the ‘Knocking on a door’ set of images of which there are only three images.
The sounds I identified are:
Shot 1:
- Knocking on a wooden door (hard and hollow, ominous)
- Heavy breathing (acid tasting fear)
- Birds (owl sound – distance evil)
- Wind howling (cold, eerie, slices your skin)
Shot 2:
- Winding howling (cold, eerie, slices your skin)
- Birds (as above)
- Footsteps approach the door from the inside (rough texture, sandpaper shuffle)
- The creak of the door opening (ominous, creepy but with anticipation)
- A cat meowing in the background (future DOOM – the evil guys black cat)
Shot 3:
- Silence, except for the grunt of the man at the door ‘What do you want?’and the heavy breathing
- Followed by ‘We’re raising money for our school fete – would you like to buy some fairy cakes?’ (heavy)
- ‘Oh! Wonderful, I’ll have half a dozen of the pink ones.’ (light, shatters the heavy atmosphere, the sun comes out)
This turned out to be a bizarre but fascinating exercise that forced me to think only in terms of the sound. Doing this with a static set of images was useful in that I did not have the distraction of the moving image and could completely focus on sound.