Week 10 (21/11) : Acoustic Portrait Shoot & Walter Murch Presentation

This week I planned to shoot my acoustic portrait but unfortunately I had a lot of problems booking out the equipment that I wanted to use for when I wanted to use it. Due to the fact that the equipment has to be returned by 10am the morning after you book it out (and that I also live off campus) meant that the days where I could book out/use the equipment were very limited. I managed to find a day where I could book out the equipment, shoot, and get the equipment back by the next morning at 10am. I went down to the Greyhound Stadium in Hove (23/11) and set up the equipment. Unfortunately, due to it being mid November and extremely cold outside it meant that there was next to no one at the stadium apart from the dogs and their trainers. I recorded some sounds of the dogs running around the track, the man speaking over the tannoy etc, and when listening to it back it really didn't pick up much at all. The sounds were really uninteresting and there was way less sound than I originally thought there would be. 

Due to the sound equipment being in very high demand at this time in the semester the kit I wanted to use was all booked out during the times when I was able to pick it up and shoot. Unfortunately this meant that I had to come up with another idea, fast (as the Greyhound stadium really didn't turn out as planned). As I had the kit already and still had a little time that evening I decided to make an acoustic portrait of my bathroom. Although it seems like a simple idea at first, I'd never heard anyone make an acoustic portrait of a bathroom before so I thought it would be a good opportunity to experiment, and the sounds would be easier to manipulate in my own home as I had full control, rather than at the Greyhound stadium when I had to catch the sounds as and when they came. I returned home with the kit and set it up again in my bathroom. I managed to get some really intricate recordings of my Mum running a bath and swooshing the water around, taps running, brushing teeth, deodrant spraying etc, and I was a lot happier with the quality of these recordings. Usually I hate the squeaky floor in my bathroom but it actually made a nice sound and added an element of greater depth to the recording. I spent around two hours playing around with different items and utilities in the bathroom and recorded as much footage as I could before I ran out of ideas. It was really fun to experiment with all the different sounds and I'm excited to put them into Adobe Audition and see what I can do with them.

In class this week (25/11) I had to give my presentation on Walter Murch. I was meant to be producing and giving this presentation with another member of my class but even after lots of trying I was unable to actually get a response from him, so I was left to create the whole presentation myself at the last minute, which was very tricky. I managed to produce a presentation that I was fairly happy with. The presentation that I created and my notes can be found below.