Big Bucks Bunny Sound Design

                In my digital audio 2 class, I was assigned to sound design an animation called “Big Buck Bunny” which was a royalty free project that students can use to show their skill set. During this project, I was instructed to make a pre-production sheet which consisted of my foley cue spotting notes and anything else needed before I started recording, such as sound effects and other instruments.

                This was more of my earlier years in college at the art institute of Las Vegas Nevada. So I was still learning the whole production process on how to approach the assignment. Luckily I had my own studio equipment at home such as a laptop, monitor speakers, an interface, condenser microphone, midi keyboard, and software to record.

                During my pre-production process, I was obligated to list every sound I seen in the animation while it was muted. Basically I had to strip away every single original sound from the video, and recreate it using my own music scoring, sound effects, and foley recording effects. After I finished my pre-production list, I then went on to record in my room. Although my room wasn't the best acoustic environment place to record in, I had to make way with what I had available at the moment. During that time, I was not eligible in checking out Studio A.

                After I finished recording and gathering all the sounds that I needed, I then went on mix and adjust the volumes on each track to make it blend it smooth. Prior to mixing, I went through several revisions with my instructor, to see what more can I do to the project, because at the time I was complete clueless on what to do next with the little experience I had in post-production during my freshmen year of college.

The Night of the Living Dead. Digital Audio 3 Project

                The Night of the Living Dead is an archived footage that I re-mastered. The film is about over an hour length feature that we had to cut and edit down to 42 minutes. Of course this process was done with a big production group. This assignment was for my Digital Audio 3 class. In this class, our task as group as was strip all the audio from the movie, and recreate everything from scratch. From the sound design, to the foley, to the music scoring, to the adr recording. We had to recreate the sound.

                Before we started any recording, we had to go through a pre-production stage. Each member of the group was assigned a specific position in order to accomplish our task at a reasonable organized time. After we assigned positions, we were able to start our spotting notes, which is basically a category list of different sounds that we needed. We then also formatted an a/v script for our voice talent that we then hired to help us with replacing the original dialogue.

                After we finished all our recordings, we then started adding any special ambient effects and music scoring to give emotion and character to the movie. It is a zombie movie, so we had to spice things up and add intense, creepy, and scary types of sound. Once all the production was completed, we then went through our final step, which was to mix and master the whole entire project.

                Mixing and mastering are two different jobs. Mixing has to go first before mastering. We went through several revisions before we were able to get the precise mix we were looking for. This process took us in total about 11 weeks to finish as a group. The only difficulties we ran into were communication with other group members, and meeting specific deadlines each week which was showing significant progress.