Sound Story

    Alejandro, Arturo, and I have recently been working on a project for our film class that I'll talk about in the post below. The way this worked was that we were supposed to try to mix audio and create a file between one and two minutes long that told a story using a maximum of seven words of dialogue and in a manner so that the listener would still be able to understand what was going on. We also would have to record ourselves making four of the sound effects (not including dialogue) that we'd use during our file (so this would be attempting our own Foley Stages). This meant we couldn't take all of our sounds off the internet and leave it at that. I didn't have any ideas at first, so I was relieved when Alejandro told me that he already had an idea. 

    We discussed his idea and streamlined it, and came up with the following idea: we'd try to simulate a mafia hit (or at least attempt to) that would begin with two members talking to each other in a car on an empty road, with music softly playing in the background. The sound of their voices would be muffled and barely audible. After this, the car door would open, and the man carrying out the execution would get out of the car and start to walk softly towards the target (another person walking on the side of the road). When the two people would meet each other, the mafia member would swing a baseball bat at the victim and leave him dead on the side of the road, quickly running away from the scene and back into a car already running and ready to speed off. Even though this situation isn't entirely realistic, we thought it'd work well for our purpose.

    After coming up with our idea, the first thing we had to do was create and record ourselves making the sounds which we could easily make ourselves with our limited resources and decided that we'd create and record ourselves making the following sounds:

• The sound of the two mafia members driving towards the scene with music in the background
• The sound of the mafia member walking slowly towards the victim
• The sound of the man running away towards the car after carrying out his hit
• The sound of the car engine as the two men speed off

    We took some time to create these sounds, and the two sounds which we all made together were the sounds of walking. After much trial and error, we decided that the best walking sounds would be achieved by having me and Arturo in our sneakers walking outside (separately, me being the one walking from the car towards the scene, and Arturo doing the opposite but faster). Here are the videos of us making the two sounds:

    Alejandro was kind enough to make the other two sounds, those with the car, and the videos of him making those sounds are shown below right here:

    After this, though, there were still plenty of sounds that we needed to get, most of which we got from online, and many of them we had to edit as well to make them usable for our purpose. I was the one who was editing the sounds, and I did all that in a free audio editing application called Audacity, which you can get by clicking this link. I've used Audacity a few times in the past, so I thought this'd be easy, but it turns out it wasn't that easy. A few video tutorials later, though, I was up to speed and was able to change the sound effects to make them fit in our final file.

    Here is a list of the rest of the sounds we got:

• The sound of the two mafia members talking in the car - A good sound of only two men talking together with their voices muffled and not understandable was frankly very difficult to find online. After searching for a while, I finally settled on taking a sound from YouTube of the videogame character Mario talking gibberish. Of course, the sound is firstly incredibly fast, and secondly extremely high-pitched. Both of these make it not suitable for its purpose as being said by a mafia hitman. To solve this problem, I took the first few seconds of the audio clip, slowed it down heavily so it was just a little bit shorter than the audio clip of Alejandro driving with music (so the clip of the mafia members driving towards the victim before they carried out their hit), and lowered the audio pitch of the clip heavily. Below you can listen to the original clip that I downloaded, and then the edited clip used in the video:

• The car door opening and the car door closing - This was another video shamelessly stolen from YouTube, from this video. We didn't even need to edit the video. Since there are many examples to choose from in the video, the ones that we chose are right below (the car door opening, then the car door closing):

• Seven words of dialogue - We were given the opportunity to use a maximum of seven words of dialogue, and took full advantage of it, using all seven sounds at different parts throughout the audio. We made these voices ourselves, and then I lowered the pitch of all three of the audio clips by 17%. The seven words we used were as follows:
• "That's him" - The phrase said by the mafia member driving the car to the mafia member who was going to carry out the hit on the victim just before the hitman would leave the car and begin walking towards the victim. - Alejandro said this - Listen to the original sound and the edited sound below:

• "It's over, boss" - The phrase said by the hitman as he's getting back into the car after carrying out a presumably successful hit. This phrase was said before the car door closed. - I said this - Listen to the original sound and the edited sound below:

• "Good work" - The phrase said by the driver to the hitman as the hitman gets into the car and tells the driver the news about the successful hit. - Alejandro said this - Listen to the original sound and the edited sound below:

• The "whack" - For this sound we wanted to get an imitation of the sound of a baseball bat hitting a person. To get the appropriate sound, I went on YouTube to search up a proper sound effect and found a large variety of sound effects to use. There were many different sounds that I could've chosen, so to decide on the final sound, I asked different people which sound they thought best fit. After taking their feedback, I decided on one of the sounds labelled "body hitting wooden door" from this video. It did not require any editing whatsoever. You can listen to the sound below:

    After this, I still had to mix all the different audio clips I had. Once again, I did this in the application Audacity. There was very little I had to do here except properly place the audio clips in the order we wanted the viewer to listen to them in, which was as follows:

• The clip of Alejandro driving as well as the "muffled talking" clip (Mario's voice). These were stacked on top of one another.
• The car door opening
• The driver saying "That's him" (Alejandro's voice).
• The sound of the hitman walking towards the victim (My footsteps).
• The sound of the baseball bat, or the "whacking"
• The sound of the hitman running away from the victim (Arturo's footsteps). I sped up the sound, though, in order to make the sound noticeably faster than the reader.
• The hitman saying "It's done, boss" (My voice).
• The driver saying "Well done" (Alejandro's voice).
• The sound of the car engine, meant to simulate the car speeding away from the crime scene.

    You can view the result in the screenshot below, the last one taken before we exported the video and presented it to the class for them to listen to:

    
    Here's the final audio clip:

Looking back, there obviously were many things which could have been improved upon, such as:

• Adding more sounds, such as:
• More background noises to signify the time (night) and location (suburbs), such as crickets chirping
• A sound of the victim screaming right before he's hit by the bat
• An audible sound of the car engine running before the executioner reaches the car
• Decreasing the volume of the sound, or better yet, finding a better sound effect to use for the two men in the car talking.
• Making the transitions between the sounds less abrupt
• Changing the pitch of the sound of the car door closing, which is noticeably high

    Overall, though, this project was fun to complete and I greatly enjoyed doing it, and I especially would like to thank my partners Arturo and Alejandro, who made the experience possible and much more pleasurable than it otherwise would've been.