I took a little while to mull over what to do with this project. I wanted to do something whimsical and fun, so either a crazy commercial for my book, Short Tales, or create a new little audio short story using a couple of characters from my book. In the end, I opted for the small vignette of Mr. Tidley, a dog-like being who resembles a large, upright walking and talking Jack Russell terrier, and Sivid Zwaak, a reprehensible reptilian creature. The story is centered around a bar scene on the planet Odious Plott a frontier world in the outer territories. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

As always in a project like this, I developed a script for the various parts, including the narrator, and noted what kind of sounds I wanted for the whole thing. Having the script ready, it was now time to record the parts in Adobe Audition. In this case, I did all of the parts and then modified the voices with the tools within Audition. That aspect is always fun! Next was to find the various sounds and music foto add increased ambience and power to the story. YouTube royalty free library is always my first stop for background/soundtrack music, and also some sound effects. I also recorded a good few of the Foley effects myself and worked with them in the effects rack in Audition.

After collecting everything I thought I would need (and a lot more, just in case) I put together the tracks. Each character in this story have their own track, as does the music. Normally I would have separate tracks for most all of the special sounds and effects, but for this little vignette I grouped many together on two tracks. Having taken AUD120 I have been taught the absolute importance of keeping characters, narration, music, and your special effects–door slams, breaking glass, walking sounds, etc.–on separate tracks, it makes it much more easier to work on a project, especially those that have a huge amount of everything, from characters, a slew of different sounds, varying music tracks, and so forth. Imagine trying to find and edit a specific sound or part of a character’s dialogue if you had everything on just one long track!

This was a very fun assignment and I look forward to the video project, where I think I will do that crazy commercial for my short stories.