Assignment 2, worth 60% was again to produce the soundtrack to something. This time it was a video game movie trailer. The game appears to be set on a spaceship. I haven't really paid attention to what the game is...

The last project was supposed to have "silly" sounds and not really be realistic (though I kind of went down the realistic route for the most part), but this project is about making it realistic as possible. Except not really, because otherwise when the hanger door opens on the spaceship you'd hear nothing. I seriously considered doing that but decided it's probably not meant to be that realistic if I want marks.

So I sourced appropriate sounds, our tutor helpfully sourced a lot for us too which I wasn't so impressed with, because I can do that myself - the more he does for us, the less distinction I have from other people in the class.

I spend a solid and uninterrupted few days on the project, one part that took a disproportionate amount of time was trying to achieve the doppler effect for the elevator scene in Pro Tools. Thousands of dollars worth of software and would you believe it, you can't without spending hundreds more on plugins. So I faked it, and it works well enough. The faking took minutes to do. What took hours was exhausting all possibilities of doing it properly.

We had to add a music backing track, the test in that was that the music isn't long enough and we had to chop it up and make it fit, along with making it fit in with the action. That was actually pretty easy, though you are limited in your options of fitting it in with the action.

Hardest was getting levels not to redline, and the compression settings recommended to us made compression ineffective at that task. So I cranked up the attack time on the dialogue which was by far the biggest culprit. I recorded my own dialogue and completed the project with 2 weeks to spare before hand in (because I have bigger fish to fry) and then we got dialogue emailed to us along with some tips. So everyone else gets my work and skill for free damn it. So I changed it.

I'll add the result to this post once I've handed it in.