This week, working with sound was a very fun and insightful learning experience. Beginning with our very first assignments, of drawing sound and recording sounds depicting a journey, my view and understanding of sound and its importance grew massively. I hadn’t been so hyper aware of all the various noises and sounds that are made from various things in our everyday life and paying attention to that opened up my mind to the many possibilities of sound.

For the final piece, in which we had to create three sound worlds, I reused some imagery from previously silent animations to now bring it in a different light. The first hand drawn animation of the rain and obscure scene of a cat holding up an umbrella for a girl was almost incomplete without the sounds of rain setting the scene. Instead of using actual rain, I filmed a cooking pot of rice where the oil and pan were sizzling in a way that sounded almost identical to rain, reminding me of the foley techniques used in films and media. However, the small tappings of the spoon in the pot and the sizzling do give it a more interesting feel than just ordinary rain.

The second animation was a stop motion piece bringing life to the intricate patterns of my culturally designed carpet. I found that the disjointed and jumpy stop motion shots created a sense of chaos, rush and disorientation. This was then reflected in the sound, created by some friends and I hitting, kicking and slapping a pole all simultaneously but also at different rates. I really enjoyed the chaos of this piece contrasting the quite mellow and somber scene of the rain falling in the first animation.

The final video was one of my first attempts at pose to pose animation over a year ago. I played around with objects shifting and transforming, which is what I then drew upon for the sound. Using the end of a spoon and my paper yogurt lid, I scratched onto the surface in a way that sounded like a noise ascending and descending, similar to how the shapes in this piece were growing and shrinking.