Evaluation Soundtrack 2

What do you feel was the most successful element of your soundtrack or successful process when making your soundtrack?
Personally I believe there was no one part of my soundtrack I believe to be to be more successful than others. All of the sound effects, both Foley and stock, sound good and are synced up nicely and the music fits the tone of the scene nicely. There is only one part I am not happy about, that being the ADR.

What was the least successful?
As stated above, I think the least successful part of my soundtrack was my ADR. The ADR was done by both myself and a fellow student Ben, however as neither of us are professional voice actors and so the voices sound... well less than stellar. Like I said it is no fault of ours, its just that we aren't experienced in voice acting. Maybe if we had more time to practise the recordings would be of a better quality.

How would you improve/change next time?
There are only two things I would do better next time. The first being to experiment more with some Foley noises or on location sounds and mix them together to create whole new effects, as opposed to using stock sounds. The second would be to improve the voice acting. While I realise I will probably never be a good voice actor, I would have liked to find more people to use for the voices, maybe even hold informal auditions to find the best voice.

Evaluate how successful your soundtrack was in terms of how the sound and image work together.
While putting together the numerous sound effects and music, I had a general idea of the effect I wanted to create for the scene. Taking the original soundtrack in mind, while also making my own spin on it, I wanted a very suspenseful aura about it.

The music track I finally decided on was a royalty free Sci-Fi inspired track from YouTube. The track itself was perfect for the scene for every moment save for one. During a dialogue heavy segment about half way through the scene the music went from really quiet to extremely loud. This meant that you could hear the characters talking as the music drowned it out. Luckily, I was able to cut, copy and paste certain parts of the track as an underlay for this segment. Combined with the laser SFX and characters speaking, these edits were easy to mask to the point where even if your listening for it its hard to find.

As for the sound effects, I tried to make them sound are realistic as possible. This included making the guns sound more like modern ones with a Sci-Fi touch and even recording real punches, during my Foley recordings, to make them sound believable. After trying numerous ways during Foley to create realistic punching noises (Including punching a carpet and slapping my hand) I finally decided to punch into my forearm to create the sound, just making sure not to do it hard enough for any real damage.

In what ways does your soundtrack reflect professional standards?
As I stated above I tried numerous ways to create the sound effects needed during my Foley, so that they would be believable to the audience while watching. This was easy enough for sound effects such as punching and falling as they are sounds that exist that just require recording with a microphone. However this wasn't so easy when it came to finding sounds for the more Sci-Fi noises.

While most were taken from royalty free sites and Garage-Band, others I wanted to do using sound design techniques. One such example would be when one of the guns 'Transform.' after experimenting with many different ideas I found that the best sound came from a common stapler. By opening it up and handling it around the mic, it created a metal clanking/shifting sound that fit perfectly with the image.

By trying numerous different ways of creating the same sound, I was able to find the perfect Foley and sound design sounds need for the scene. This included overlaying certain sounds together to create a far more interesting and complex effect.

In what ways does your soundtrack require improvement to reach professional standards?
Overall I believe that my soundtrack sound very professional in all ways save for one, that being the ADR. While the audio clips are clear with no background noise or any other interference, I'm not happy with the voices themselves. This unfortunately can't really be helped as both myself and Ben (who supplied the voices) are not professional voice actors and so the voices sound very cheesy and poor, not fitting the tone of the scene at all. If I was to do this again I would possibly hold an informal audition trying to find the most appropriate voice for the character. While I may never find somebody who reaches a professional level of voice acting, I almost certainly will find somebody who is better suited than Ben and myself.