Lesson #6 | Working on Our Foley Projects

This is our sixth film lesson and we spent the entire lesson working on our foley projects. My group went to the library meeting room to replicate and record some sounds. It was unexpected how the sounds we produced in the meeting room for the clip were actually desirable and realistic. We played around with the chairs, the TV remote, the door handles and locks, the sockets, and fruits. To emulate the chewing sounds in the film, we recorded the sound of Michelle eating an apple. We rubbed the TV remote against the chair and it created an interesting sound that matched one of the scenes. With the door handle, we created the sound for the pulling of machine levers. The process was enjoyable and certainly eye-opening. 

After recording sounds, we went to the film suite and edited our film. Seeing how the most of the sounds recorded in a meeting room matched perfectly with a scene that took place in a factory was amusing. In order to enhance the sound quality of our film and make it more realistic, we had to adjust the volume of the sounds. 

Lesson #5 | Motifs

In our fifth lesson, we began with learning about motifs - which after researching and sharing, we found out that is the repetition of an element in ways that acquire symbolic meaning for the element. It can be a technical feature (a shot angle, a lighting set up), a sound or piece of dialogue or music, or an object,  according to this website. Motifs are not only applied in films, they are used in literature and music as well. 

Afterwards, we watched an old horror film named "M". As a class, we identified that the man's whistling in the movie is the motif that symbolises the presence of the murderer. 

Then, we proceeded with our Foley group projects. We identified more sounds in the clip that we will have to replicate and recorded the dialogue for the clip with the help from two male classmates. Originally, we thought that we would do the voiceover ourselves, however, we decided that it would be more realistic and sensible to get guys to do the dialogue for us, since the characters in the clip are male. The process went smoothly; the only problem we had was finding a quiet place to record the sounds. We went to the empty classroom across our film classroom at first, however, the sounds of the wind and electricity could be heard clearly in our recordings. The same situation happened in the other classrooms. Zhu Laoshi then advised us to record the ambience sound and layer it under the other sound effects during the editing process in order to solve the issue. It would be a good idea to go to the music hall to record our sounds next time.