Foley workshop – Bruitage – Geluidseffectenworkshop
Cybersoda – Fête de l’internet – Digitale week – Celebration of internet
On March the 22nd I gave a workshop in Interface3. My prime public was between 9 and sixteen years old. I started out by explaining a little what downloading is and where you can download films legally. I gave one example, also the source of my workshop, namely www.archive.org.
These are the two films I chose for the workshop, a one minute fragment from both:
This is coffee -> about where coffee comes from and how you make it.
A is for Atom -> incredible beautifully animated film on how atoms work and what nuclear energy is.
Both films are in the public domain, from the Prelinger archive, so perfect for my intentions!
What were my noble intentions: to show how sound works with a film, to emphasize that a lot of sound accompanying a film is added later (look at the definition of foley in Wikipedia ), to show that you change the meaning of an image when you change the accompanying sound. All these examples I illustrated with some self-made sounds and imagined stories. Also showing a film totally void of sound also emphasizes the importance of the sound part.
Next on the agenda was showing two one minute-long fragments of my archive.org treasures. I let the participants choose what filmfragment they would like to add sound to. Then both groups, one after the other, tried to add live sound to the films. It was not easy!
Next, everybody had the film on their own computer, and they had to determine what sounds to make at what time in the film (so a more controlled way of adding the sound through pre-recording and editing). At this point of the workshop I felt that some were really very very interested, some I had “lost” to online games (inevitable). I managed to retrieve one young man, I asked him why he didn’t want to make sound and he just plainly told me he was too timid to make sound in a microphone… I was touched. So I showed him how Audacity works and how he can play with the effects and with the generated sounds. Soon the beeps and bleeps were coming though his headphones 🙂
One little girl was a bit too young for all this computer stuff, she was nine years old. But we had some fun trying to add live sound to the a is for atom film. The following stage for the group of “This is coffee” was the fun bit: recording. The film started out with an alarm clock ticking, a lady sleeping, the alarm going off (visible through the movements of the clock on the table) the lady getting up, down the stairs and starting to make coffee (including a close-up of a dripping tap). So it was very very visual and easy to imagine the sounds. Soon the group was tapping away, pouring water, snoring, ringing a fake bell etc etc.
I also showed the Interface 3 stagaires what archive.org is like and I gave them a quick intro on how to edit sound, so that they could help the young participants. Unfortunately we ran out of time. Some sound was edited but it was not possible to show the finished result. I will edit their work myself and hopefully soon the filmproducts will be online. Legally downloadable remixes 🙂
I would like to thank the staigaires for their help and the young participants for their enthousiasm. It was great fun.