Whilst at home, I decided to seize the opportunity to record for my project in my brother’s sound proof room. The room has been built inside my garage at home in a cul-de-sac street, so there is no loud noises all the time from vehicles and trains etc like there would be on a main road. As the room is practically sound-proof, noise from cars would be blocked out anyway. Throughout the time recording, I learnt new ways of creating the best quality sound.
To start with, I recorded my dad and brother acting out the script inside the room with a blanket covering the drum kit. I did this because I thought that the drums would reverberate the sound around the room. When I did this, the vocals still sounded slightly echoed as if they were in a large room. Nevertheless, I adapted my recording style by putting the two actors under the blanket themselves. Therefore, any sound that they made would be reflected off the blanket, rather than the walls.
This technique had the great effect of a semi-professional sound proof room and the quality of voice was raised a lot. Therefore, I recorded the whole scene under the blanket, with minor mistakes made by the actors to be cut out in post-production.
There were several other sounds that I wanted to include in my project to aid the narrative, and I recorded most of them with the TASCAM recorder. As inspiration, I found these on Garage Band and replicated them with my own style. I got my boyfriend to make the sounds whilst I held the microphone and recorded. The sounds included clothes rustling, a zip, a can opening and being poured into a glass, glasses clinking, someone swallowing. We recorded all of these in the sound proof room. Additionally, I went out to my local pub to record the sound of ambience to use in the background of the voices. However, when I got there, there was no tables available to sit discretely and I realised the ethics of recording in a public place. Essentially, I would have been recording the public’s conversations and the pub owners would not have been able to ask everyone in the pub if they were okay with me recording. Therefore, I decided that I would use a Garage Band clip called ‘busy room’ that is copyright free. Other sounds that I did not record myself and took from Garage Band were ‘city 2’, ‘door open’, ‘glassware’, ‘glassware ice’, ‘footsteps interior’, ‘footsteps exterior’ and ‘glassware toast’.
When I arrived back at UEL, I uploaded all of my clips to my external hard drive and memory stick as back up, to then import into the Audition programme. After this, I listened to all of the clips, deleting the surplus and renaming the clips I want to use in post-production. For example, I renamed the final clip I will use as ‘Two Ronnies full Sketch with blanket’ and another one ‘clothes 1’, which will make them easier to locate when I edit it.
rebeccamediaprod 