The style of our audio piece was inspired by ‘Meat Factory Earworms’ by Richie Beirne. This is a piece designed to explain what it was like working in a slaughterhouse in Ireland, he uses music to add a sense of emotion to the piece. The main focus of the audio is Richie Beirne talking about his time in the meat factory, and the different stories he had about the place. This is played over various different songs, each with an explanation to the connection it has to the specific time in his life, relating to the meat factory.
We originally planned to work to this style, relying on a voice over to determine our ‘sense of place’ and carry our narrative, at the same time relying on an underlining atmos track to support the vocal piece. However, after recording our background sound, we decided it would be more effective if we left that as a stand alone recording, but using interview style question and answer clips to give a more personal feel of the subject. The idea is that they are reminiscing about their favourite moments in football, or the proudest moment they’ve witnessed in relation to their team.
Our experimental film was inspired by classic documentary style films based around the historical side of football. We decided to collect footage from an archive website of old football matches, and incorporate these into our piece. This plays on the idea that the piece is meant to be reminiscent of the fans favorite time in relation to their football team. We also chose to include recent footage of outside of the clubs to show a contrast between old and new, and therefore creating a sense of place through time.
Our target audience is quite broad. It could be said that this piece is aimed at football fans as it is obviously about the sport itself, and the fan base behind it. However, it is not specifically for the fans as it also offers people the insight into the passion behind the fan base and the sport itself.
Throughout our project, we faced a few minor setbacks. For example, after contacting the media staff at Bramall Lane, the football ground that is home to Sheffield United, asking their permission to come onto the grounds and either record some footage of their training session, or at least to collect audio of the crowd during a game, we were told that they did not have the correct facilities to accommodate our request, and therefore we they were unable to give us permission. To resolve this issue we decided to collect the footage from outside the grounds, and to see if we were able to collect the sound from outside the grounds as well. Although we initially thought this would hinder our project slightly due to the quality of footage not being as good as it could be, or the lack of contemporary footage from inside a football game, it actually worked well and the quality of our work was not affected too much by the change of plan.
After presenting our work to the audience of our peers and tutors, we received some really useful feedback in relation to what was good about the piece, and what could be improved. For example, it was quickly made obvious that the levels needed adjusting within the editing stage of our piece. This is due to only listening to the piece through headphones, and completely disregarding the need to check our sound levels. Another useful piece of feedback we received was how we should try and incorporate close up sounds of actual the actual football game, for example a clip of the ball being kicked which would represent kick-off.
Thankfully, we were lucky enough to not experience any technical issues throughout the project, other than being unable to play our piece to our tutor during a tutorial.
Personally I feel that the interview style questions really worked as it added a whole other level onto the piece, providing it with the personal touch of actual fans. Also, I really liked the individual emphasised sounds, for example the police horse shoes on the ground, and the charity change buckets being shaken. However, I do feel like with the permission of the media staff in Bramall Lane, we could have collected some better footage of the football match itself in order to create a better comparison piece for our experimental film piece.
We began our planning stage with a choice of five topics to work with. These were, Industrial, Nature, Home life, Student life and Sport. We decided to chose sport as Sheffield, a city both Dani and myself were unfamiliar with, has two successful football teams, Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday. We decided to utilise the fact they were both so accessible, and use one of them in our piece. This gave us the opportunity to discover a bit more about the city we both have chosen to live in, as well as allowing us to find out more about the sport as neither of us had used football in our work before.
At the beginning of our planning stage, we decided to focus mainly on the voice over, and use that as our narrative. We planned to design the atmospheric tracks around the voice over. The voice over itself was either going to be two people, one a particularly older fan, and a younger fan. This was to show the diversity between the fans, and to create a broader coverage of their proudest moments. It was our aim to have the voice overs explain their personal views on football, and their proudest moments of their teams. It was going to be a continuous track of them talking, and then include the atmos tracks as a sort of back up to that.
However, after going to the Bramall Lane football grounds for the first time, alone, I heard the cacophony of interesting sounds, each one combining to create a narrative in itself. This inspired a change of plan, and therefore we agreed it would be create a more interesting piece if we relied more on the atmos track to create the narrative, and change the interview clips to the supporting audio.
Because of this change of plan, we decided to go back to Bramall Lane a second time to collect more detailed sounds. For example, close up sounds of the police horses, close up sounds of the turnstiles and to collect clearer recordings of the chanting.
The next stage of production was the editing. After we decided to allow the atmos track to create the narrative, we then began adding more amplified, and more detailed sounds to our original atmos track. We amplified the sounds of the police horses, turnstiles, chanting, traffic, program salesmen, and charity bucket change collectors. Each sound created a sound-scape of the overall experience of a standard match day.
On top of this we included the interview snippets we had collected. We edited these until we had the best clips remaining. These were the older man explaining his loyalty to his team, as well as his reasons for enjoying the general match day atmosphere, and the younger man who explained his reasons for coming to the football, as well as explaining his loyalty to the team. We tried to be diverse in our choices, so as to gain a broader coverage of what the sport means to the fans. To do this we used a variety of ages, but unfortunately we were only able to collect voices of males, we attempted to interview a woman but she directed us to her husband. This was unfortunate because it would have added to the diversity, and break out of the stereotypes that it is only men that enjoy football. Although we were unable to do this, the answers we did collect definitely added a personal level to the audio piece.
As we developed our piece, it started sounding less and less like I had imagined, but in a good way. We adapted our ideas to adjust to the changes we had to make, for example the fact we could not collect footage from inside the grounds. However, I am still really pleased with the end result.
As well as enjoying the project, I feel it has given me the opportunity to learn how to use SoundTrack Pro, as I had never had the chance to use this software before it was definitely useful. Because of this I can now confidently use SoundTrack Pro to create a decent audio piece. As well as this, I was able to improve on PremierPro. I had used this software before, but this has definitely improved my originally basic skills.
As well as learning to use the editing software, I was able to learn how to successfully use a professional marantz. The fact I had never used one before was definitely a hindrance, but luckily Dani, my project partner, had done, so she soon taught me the basics. I also got the opportunity to learn the difference between the boom mic, which we used to collect atmospheric sound, and the standard mono mic which we used to collect the interview style questions and answers.
Overall, I feel like I worked really well as part of a team. Dani and myself decided the fairest way to split the jobs was to do all of them together, or to take turns doing particular stages of production. For example, we took it in turns to ask the questions to our interviewees, as well as taking it in turns to edit our work. This allowed us both to improve our basic knowledge of how the editing software worked, and also allowed us both to equally experience what it was like to go out to film and collect audio. We both offered creative input to the piece, and confirmed each and every change we made with each other. This was in order to remain equal in the levels of work we were doing. As well as this, we looked for each others opinion on each change.
I feel that my strengths within the team was my creative input. I personally decided the project subject, and had a big part in the adaptation and development of the ideas. I feel like my weaknesses were organisation and time keeping. I feel like I relied a little too much on Dani to decide when we were meeting. Unfortunately, this has always been a personal downfall. However, I am determined to make this something I will work on in the future. I will definitely strive to change this for future projects, and I hope I am able to do so.
I personally really enjoyed this project as it gave me an opportunity to learn and understand sound production a lot more, as that is a stage in production I have not worked on before. Also, I think that the fact I have had a positive experience with working in pairs, definitely had an overall positive effect on our project.
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