Sound Design

This is one of my passions. As I've already mentioned many a'time I love filmmaking and it's what I want to pursue. For the longest time I have been really into the production and post-production side. I have always loved being the cinematographer or director in production. And also equally enjoyed editing and compositing visual effects. One thing that always lets my films down however, is sound. It is always the tinny vomit enduring garbage that is captured in the Canon DSLR's "microphone". It pulls the overall quality of everything down massively. Filmmakers always say that sound is more important than the visuals and I have only just begun to realise just how important it is. And so with that in mind I recently purchased a Zoom H6 and have been dying for a chance to use it:

This is an industry standard recorder recording in formats far exceeding what I needed for this project. You can record 96KHz audio at 24bit which is overkill even for a Hollywood movie. So with this I then went out into my back garden with just the standard X/Y microphone that comes as standard and a foam wind guard and captured as many sounds as I thought I'd need.

It is known in the industry as foley recording. Recording sounds for things that didn't exist at the time or eventuating and creating exaggerated, artistic sound examples for films to make something more impactful. I captured footsteps, whooshes, ball impacts, tennis racket fits and various handling sounds along with many more and compiled them together to create this mix:

This is all the audio layers in the sequence in Premiere Pro (as you can se there is quite a lot). They were all recorded by me apart from the crowd cheering and the spring sound effects at the end. However, those two sounds were both royalty free and good for commercial use found on the internet. To show you the importance of sound design I have exported the sequence without any music track only the sound elements:

It is so much better with sound. The piece comes to life and all the movements feel more weighty and natural. It is vastly improved by the addition of sound elements. It was a great introduction to sound design and to the Zoom H6.