Okay so I'm partly kidding. I take pride in all of my work, and would show any of these weekend projects to anyone on any day, buy I am absolutely stoked to be done posting them and get to move on to some of the much more awesome work I have been up to. So with that being said, let's get on with this post.
This project was all about using offscreen sounds to propel a story forward. I decided to take on the additional challenge of mixing the entire project within my NLE, Adobe Premiere Pro, instead of bouncing it into an audio DAW like Adobe Audition. I must say, Premiere was much more capable with the audio than I think most people give it credit for, although it is still no Pro Tools or Logic. So without further ado, here is the project!
We downloaded all of our sounds from Creative Commons websites, which means that they are free to use as long as we credit the original artist. As a quick breakdown into my workflow, I first mixed whatever in camera sound I wanted to keep, which was mostly a little bit of ambient noise and Victoria's grunt when he hits the ground. I made sure it all flowed together smoothly without any cracks or pops and then sent it all into a bus. Then I started layering on my sound FX that I downloaded from the creative commons sites and positioning them in the right places. Then I adjusted the volumes of everything, routed all my sends and returns, keyframed the overall track volumes of the bus tracks, normalized everything to -3db, and viola. A short film mixed in Premiere.
As much as I learned about the mixing capabilities of Premiere in this project and also about the importance of sound as an element in our stories, I learned a lot more through the very nature of this project. From the moment my second weekend project got slammed by my Professor until the end of the weekend project cycle, I looked at each one as a learning experience and tried to learn as much as I possibly could from each one. I didn't care about the quality of the finished product nearly as much as I cared about the elements that we were learning in each video. But through all of that, I lost sight of one of the most important pieces of filmmaking: HAVING FUN. Taking the mindset I had, I went in to each weekend project viewing it more like a homework assignment than an opportunity to make a movie. At my school, my homework isn't calculus or European history; my homework is MAKING MOVIES. How cool is that?? For this project, my entire crew just threw their arms up and basically said "screw it, let's have fun" and instead of meticulously planning everything out and being very picky, we all had so much fun. We made this project up as we went along, as opposed to the other projects which were storyboarded out cut by but. We came up with ideas spontaneously on set that were awesome, even though some of them didn't work out. We saw a train track and decided to film on it, which might be illegal, but I wasn't really sure so we just went for it. This project was so much fun, and one of those moments that I realized that if you don't put your heart and soul into what you are doing, you won't ever be successful or more importantly, create good art. Filmmaking is a balance between the technical and the creative, and I have discovered that both sides flourish the most when passion is put into them. When you're truly passionate about what you're doing, you're going to have fun doing it, and that's a fact.
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