Sound Effects

"Sound effects play an important role in conveying action.  Music helps express emotion". Michael Geisler

I believe the quote above is very true and relevent. Within a film of course you need a good story line and good actors, but the importance of sound effects is something that most people tend not to think about much at first,  but the subtlety of it can make or break a moment on screen.  A videos sound effects are just as important as its picture, and the use of them in any type of video, whether it be instructional or fictional, reinforces the story by enhancing its realism or adding comedic effect.  Horror movies emphasize sound to draw attention, if you were to watch a horror movie on mute (or any movie for that fact) you would not feel the full effects and become bored of the film, because sounds draw the audience in. Some sound effects can be in the form of music or the change of voices. When the audience is attached to the sound, they lean forward and listen more intently, they become more engaged in the film. Within some films sound effects are able to give the audience the feeling that they are right next to the character, hearing exactly what they hear.

Below is a link to a more in depth description about sound efefcts:
http://www.articlesbase.com/multimedia-articles/the-importance-of-sound-effects-378020.html

Here are 2 videos, one with no sound at all and the other with sound effects to show how they can make a video really capture what is going on, and engage the audiences imagination. 

Audacity

In this lesson we were shown how to use the program Audacity, which is a software designed to record and edit sounds. For the task everyone had to create a pod cast using the program, in which we had to pretend to be a news team reporting on something. 

The program was pretty straight forward to just as a recording tool, you could change your voice to make it sound completely different which was fun experimenting with.

 Unfortunately our recording would not upload, but it was all about comedic things that we had found on a news website e.g. debate over the best bunking biscuit. Below is an example of someone using this program:

                                

Zu3D

In our last lesson we had the opportunity to use Zu3D, which is a software that enables you to create stop motion animation films quickly and easily. Here is a link to the website which explains and shows all the things that this software enables you to do: http://www.zu3d.com/features

At first when I opened the software, I thought it was going to be quite difficult to use and didn't think I would be able to create a really good stop motion mini film, but after watching Mandy's demonstration and trying a few times for myself, I quickly got the hang of it. Once getting familiar with the different options and understanding how to take multiple frames, we had to get into small groups and create a small stop motion film. Me and my friend decided that we were going to use paper to create our film and came up with the idea to make a paper origami game and the stop motion film would show how each different section of the game is made. The amazing thing that this software enables you to do is take lots of images that end up becoming a film once finished, so you can go back over the images to get them perfect and delete the ones that are not. Once we had finished our film we were so pleased with how it turned out, we couldn't actually believe that we had made it. The completed film shows our paper design coming to life all by its self, even though it was quite difficult we were able to take all the images without our hands in the pictures, which left the film looking professional and really effective.

I will upload the film to another post as it is saved on the university computer, but below I have uploaded a short paper stop motion animation to show you what they are like.

Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion Is very much like clay motion. It involves taking hundreds of photos or clips to form a smoothly running short film. Below is the worlds smallest animation that Mandy showed us in class. It think it is absolutely amazing and such an inspiring creation.  The time and effort that was put into making this is unbelievable.

What is animation

In our last lesson we had to research what animation is, and blog about the last animation that we had watched. I found this lesson really fun and enjoyed learning about the different types of animations that you can get, and how each of them work in different ways.  Using animation is a great way to help most anyone develop skills and competencies in various ways:

1. Visual communication

2. Concentration

3. Story telling

4. Problem-solving and innovative aspects

5. Cognition, emotional, ethnic and aesthetic aspects

Stop-motion animation is what we mainly focused our research on within this lesson, and we were set a task to highlight our findings. 

Below is a link to a website to explain in a bit more detail what stop motion animation is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion

• Characteristics 
• Advantages 
• Disadvantages
• Costs
• Successes
• Disappointments
• Examples  

Below is a  short clip to show you a stop motion animation video