Practical Screencraft Part 2: Evaluation

For the second half of Practical Screencraft, I actually found it to be a challenge. My only experience with sound mixing and editing is in my spare time so this was a new experience from an academic level. I have almost exclusively worked on sound for video so having to focus solely on audio by itself was new to me. 

We were presented with a number of methods in order to produce sound for Soundcloud such as recording diegetic sound effects and incorporating them into a custom made music piece. While it was an interesting way of producing sound, it wasn’t something I felt confident with. Recording sounds was fine but trying to build music around it was tricky. I had to be inspired by the sounds but sometimes I just sat there with no inspiration. Getting over creative blocks was the biggest problem I faced throughout this module and greatly affected the outcome. 

For a number of the sound files on Soundcloud, I collaborated with other students in order to produce clips akin to audio dramas. We picked Dragon Age and Batman: The Killing Joke as inspiration for the pieces and let us voice act followed by editing. We also gained experience with setting up the sound equipment inside a professional studio space. Performing voice acting inside a proper studio was refreshing and much better than the times I’ve recorded at home for previous modules. 

The musical pieces took a while to get right as I have no experience with instruments keyboards so  I infinitely felt like I was producing music from riffing. I experimented with sounds and music tracks until I reached a sound I liked which I would then make into a full piece. My piece ‘Tom's Totally Not Boss Music’ was inspired by the style of music one might here fighting a boss in a video game. I found issues with composition as I started quite a few pieces however I would reach a point where it just wasn’t coming together and left the idea behind which resulted in only having a handful of sound clips left over.  In the future, I’d probably get myself more aquatinted with the program and the means of composing inside with the large number of composing options.  

Overall, I believe the module could have gone better. My inexperience with sound making software held me back in the process of making sound clips which is something that I can work on in the future. I know what works and what doesn’t so I can learn from the experience. In hindsight, there was much more I could have done and will most likely expand on some of these ideas in the future.