Progress Presentation with James

 Today I had attended the progress presentation with James. I came in fairly prepared –Last night I’ve had compiled a list of things that I would possibly like to be doing this year. The meeting was fairly short. We got around 15-20 minutes each to talk and I found that was way too short to talk about all the ideas that I’ve had so far. Also, other people presenting at the meeting had projects that seemed very well developed already and they had formulated their aim, objectives, tasks and deliverables while I still haven’t got a dissertation topic. Anyway, in the short time that we had to present I have run my ideas through James. Straight off the bat he rejected my sound design for games in FMOD/WWISE idea. He said it was not feasible for me to do that. I would have to outsource a working game/game engine and generally advised me not to do a project on video game sound. He seemed to like my film sound ideas more. My idea of recording cool sounds like gun shots for example, was met with a mixed reaction. First of all, while not impossible, it could be hard to obtain permission to record on military grounds (as that what I wanted to do). Secondly, James didn’t like my rationale behind this project when I told him I want to have photos using expensive field microphones inside a military base. I understand his reasoning that this is simply not a good rationale for an academic project like a dissertation. At the end of the very short meeting we have settled on my ‘modality in film sound’ idea, but James altered it slightly and asked me to possibly focus on ‘hyperrealism in film soundtracks’ and asked me to do research in that subject. Overall, I don’t seem to be making much progress at this stage, especially considering what I have seen of other people’s work so far...