Sound Work for Project: Reflection Questions

• What did you do and how did you do it?

For our trailer my job was to create a piece of narration to go with the environments above the other sound elements to explain some of the back-story across a minute or so. I planned a couple of different "scripts" from my back-story, to see what would work well before moving onto Cu-base and learning how I could edit sound with all the various MIDI and sound effects. I then used the sound studio to record my voice with various accents. I ran through it a few times with a few different voices. I then edited my narration to get rid of any dialogue I got wrong (or frustrated shouting ^^), cleaned out the vast majority of background noise and unnecessary dialog. I made two versions of my narration, a shorter one and longer one depending on how our trailer would turn out; I was told I could use the longer one, so my final task was to edit it and play with effects to make my voice seem older and in a certain environment (like a church for example).

• Does your final audio product meet your original intentions?

Yes - I followed my planning very closely, once I'd picked my dialog all I had to do was test accents that I could pull of without sounding terrible; the only thing that differed was some of the dialog after I had done - didn't fit with the content being shown on the trailer, so more of my narration was cut, but around a minute or so is still in the final trailer.

• Self evaluation – how did you manage your time? How could you manage your time more effectively?

Using CU-base in the sound room proved difficult to start with, considering the software wasn't operational for the start of the year, getting used to it was impossible, so when we finally got onto the software and had our work planned, there was no time to spare. I think out of all my units and work this was the one I had the best time management, due to the fact we have 1 hour a week in here, I had to really knuckle down to get the narration I wanted; getting my originally planning completed, being the first to use the recording studio, having it edited and done to get feedback and then changing it based on that feedback by editing my voice to better "fit the bill".

• What did you struggle with?

using CU-base was difficult to start with, it took a few weeks to get my head around the software and when actually doing my narration it's really hard to use an accent and stay on the same sound (my final voice sounding like a cross between Deckard Cain and Sean Connery, although considering there two similar voices it was not so bad).

• What did you find easy?

Coming up with the script was easy, all I had to do was draw from my back-story and put it into some kind of context for the narration.

• How does your finished audio compare to professional examples?

It is obviously not as professional, most professional tracks have the narration fit in perfectly, with the necessarily effects to make it stand out and draw in the user - since my voice-over didn't fit perfectly with the other audio or the scenes (we did the best we could... to a degree), but I still think it sounds ok for a first real attempt.

• What do other people think of your finished audio?

A lot of people who heard my audio by itself (classmates, friends and family), thought it was good (some gave me feedback which I used so I could add more effects to my trailer, or take some away).

• What could you improve upon?

I like the final product, but I think hearing it with the trailer the church effect needed to be toned down, and maybe I should have tried a few more recordings to get the voice just right.

• If you were to do it again what would you do differently next time?

The main think would be making sure when the trailer is fully put together that the audio all works well together where ever it is played that some aspects of the audio don't drown each other out - for us, the backtrack was far too loud - anyone who saw our trailer didn't really pick up my narration, as they could not hear it at all - which for me was really disappointing because lots of people wouldn't hear that work from me.

• It’s not about the finished product, it’s about the journey. What did you learn?

I learnt a lot about how sound works in games - in a technical sense - and I can now really appreciate the whole process. I knew a reasonable amount about it beforehand, and I know how important good sound is in games but I had no idea it was so finicky and time consuming and how difficult it is to use the software and to get file types to work with each other (lots of importing and exporting), it was a real eye opener - and although it took some time to get into the software - I really enjoyed it and look forward to learning more about sound in the future.