Proposal Meeting with Kenneth. New ideas - Soundscape sound design and Recording guns

 Today, I had my second meeting with tutor Dr Kenneth McAlpine. It was a rather lengthy meeting that I really enjoyed. I prefer one-to-one meetings like this with less time constraints, rather than the ones with the class where you only get 15-20 minutes maximum. Because of this, we managed to discuss pretty much all of my ideas that I had up until this point. I started off with the gun-shot recording idea that James previously wasn’t very fond of. Kenny had said that there is some potential there, but again I had big problems trying to justify the idea and in no way “wanting to photograph myself at a military base recording gun-shots” was going to be a serious rationale for an academic piece of work.

 We ended up talking at length about my film sound idea. The topic of that changed to ‘Hyperrealism in Film Soundtracks’ after the last meeting with James. However we have soon abandoned the idea of ‘hyperrealism’. I really like the way Kenny makes you really think and really questions all of my ideas and makes me think even harder! We backtracked a bit and talked about film sound design in general and last year’s Audio Production Methods module. I brought up the idea of sound modality in film and Kenny started enquiring what about ‘modality’ makes it so interesting to me. My reply was that is a very fascinating new concept that can totally change how a scene in movie plays/sound completely affecting the mood. I gave examples that I discovered while doing last year’s blog. I also said that I really like how dynamic modality and the way sound modality can gradually change depending on the scene/storytelling requirements. It can be very effective when used on ambiences and having dynamic sound design in ambiences can really affect the way a scene plays out and I think that’s another reason why I find ‘modality’ so interesting as it has tremendous sound design potential when used well. Having heard all of this Kenny asked me why I don’t focus on film sound ambiences in particular. I said that this could be a good idea. I like the way we can sound design a place, time, or a particular setting with just sound, and most of the time ‘setting the scene’ with sound is done over a very limited time, like few seconds, when the establishing shot happens. The end result of this discussion was that we established that it could be a good idea for a dissertation and at the end of the meeting the draft question proposal was:

Setting the scene: Soundscape sound design in film.