Category Archives: Past Student Work

Voice thing P4

For this project I wanted to make something cool that was inspired by something I like, and content I enjoy. Projects like this are to me: tedious; and it helps to be doing something you enjoy, spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. This project was inspired by the internet writing community known as the “SCP Foundation” which centers around a fictional organization that captures horrible creatures beyond understanding. The main inspiration for this projects format was a youtuber by the name of “TheVolgun” who does very similar audio drama’s covering the entry’s on the SCP foundation wiki.

My goal in this project was to possibly introduce some people to the concept of SCP and grow peoples awareness of so good horror media, although I have to admit the greatest drive to finish this project is to get credit. I do not think I performed immaculately during this experience, and looking back there I things I would have changed, namely getting a better microphone, and using a stronger speaking voice, but what’s done is done. The least I could hope to accomplish in an artistic sense is raise some interest within listeners, people wanting to learn more about an interesting writing community. Here’s to a passing grade.

-Max Ryan

Static City

My goal with the Static City audio was to create something caught on the radio that wasn’t meant for us to be hearing—a sort of stray transmission that got snagged by someone idly fiddling with their clock radio that’s outdated by several years and has probably been chewed on by a dog. Any identifiable names have been drowned beneath static, and the subject of the announcement itself doesn’t entirely make sense. It’s understandable enough, sure, but it’s definitely not quite original to our world.

Overall, I’m decently pleased with how it all turned out. My biggest annoyance was keeping my speech audible; I’d liked to have had more interference and distortion, but figuring out how to accomplish that without making it needlessly difficult to understand ended up being too much for my very beginner-level skills at this point in time. It was enjoyable to work on Static City once I got over my voice and got better at using Audacity—don’t even ask how many times I looped things without meaning to. I’ve now got sound effect files scattered across my desktop that need to be cleaned up, so if you’ll excuse me, I should go take care of that.

By Kaitlyn Harper

fifteen years.

For this project I wanted to create something cerebral while at the same time semi-autobiographical but also silly and bizarre. Essentially I wanted all flavors of ice cream on one cone. Conceptually I got the idea of doing this piece walking past an electrical pole on the side of the road, something about the sound of the traffic and the visual of the pole with its numbering system, which I had never glanced at or paid any attention to intrigued me. I had a vision of a character being sucked into another world via getting too close to the pole.

I modeled the story autobiographically after myself after I discovered international travel while studying at the University of Oregon, one which felt like an electric shock which transported me to other worlds. As for the actual sound production I used music and effects from my mixed media artist friend in Bangkok, Swordfish, who uses various made and found synthesizers to do similar work as the one I am presenting here. Also within the grooves of this particular audio realm I inserted various open source ambient and airport/airplane sounds in hopes of idiomatically sending the listener on a journey into a mystical sugary realm of bizarre offerings.

-danaan.

Come Aboard Our Cruise!

With this assignment, I just wanted to mess around with having another voice as a voice-over that was not me. So I used AI-generated voices to voice over my script. I have been playing a lot of Portal lately so that is why the voice is similar to Glados :p. I used https://uberduck.ai/ to create the voices with reference audio of me talking for the AI to create the robotic voice for most of the project. I also drew a robot in touristy clothes in photoshop to fit the cruise theme. I tried to pick colorful colors that you would maybe see in an ad for a trip.

I tried to add background music that wasn’t too obnoxious and didn’t drown out the talking. I kind of found random SFX that fit in with different parts of the audio, but I wish I added a little more to different parts that felt a little empty.

This was a very fun project to do! It was fun to mess with and get creative with it!

-Mary K

P6 Final Project

My original idea was to make a short film. At that point, I had already prepared a script, found actors, and locations, and timed everything, but at the last minute, I got sick with covid. I had to shoot at home, and it was quite difficult because it was not easy to find unusual and interesting subjects. To change the atmosphere at home, I used different colored lights. I also shot a lot of the scenes with the lights off in the dark so other objects would not be caught in the shot.
During the course of the project I was watching a movie called “Taxi Driver” and I was very inspired by it. I loved the angles, the color work, the atmosphere of the film, and the music. In the first half of the video, I tried to recreate that atmosphere by adding noise, warm colors, and calm jazz music.
In the second half of the video I experimented with color, and I got the idea to shoot the same video with rotation several times, using different colors to make one video out of them later. While cutting the video, I was looking for black frames to make smooth transitions between videos. It didn’t turn out as smoothly as I would have liked, but the result was still satisfactory to me.
There is no message or concept in this video. I tried to create an eye-catching image and experiment with the equipment. I also wanted to try and create footage without any post-editing that looked like a montage.
I originally had no expectations for the project, so I’m kind of happy with the result. Thanks for your attention!

The Crash (P6)

I had a lot of fun while recording for this project! My sister agreed to help me by being my talent for my story. While I was filming, my parents were actually watching TV in the living room. I didn’t want to bother them, so I did not care about the sound that was happening while I was working; I ultimately was going to mute everything. To combat this, I decided to recreate all the sound effects. I had some experience from my previous audio production class, so I enjoyed doing that. I used my phone to record my audio and took a look at my film to get the timing just right.

Filming the ending with my cat was kind of funny. As soon as I staged the food scattered on the ground, he immediately started eating. He is a very food motivated cat. After I did that, I tried to capture some audio of him purring. He is always very happy when he’s around people. He started to rub his head on my tripod while I was filming.

If I were to re-do this project, I would’ve liked to experiment with lighting equipment. I felt that some of the darker scenes didn’t look as smooth as I’d like. I was filming in the evening, so I was not able to get enough natural lighting.

P6 – Final Project. Kitty Vlog!

The experience of making this movie has been extremely fun. Choosing a subject that I enjoy (my cat) was definitely the best thing that I could have done for this project. I was able to just “do” my homework by filming my cat at various points throughout the day and it would literally just be beneficial to the making of this project.

The plan definitely wasn’t perfect. The original intention was to have the movie read like an episode of The Office. I wanted it to be more of a comedy that included lots of talent and cut scenes that involved interviews and things such as that. Unfortunately, most of my talent got Covid-19 in the time that I was going to film their parts of the movie. This obviously made it difficult to complete. This made me make the difficult decision to turn the footage that I had into more of a vlog of Figaro’s life, as if he were a YouTuber.

The one last minute decision that I made was having my best friend Victoria actually be the voice of Figaro. She recovered speedily and was able to come over today (6/4) right before I finished editing everything can gave me that final piece of audio that I needed for me to be completely happy with the way that this movie turned out.

Image Editing

For this assignment I had a hard time thinking about what I wanted to film and edit. It took me a while, but I finally decided to do it on all of the pets that I have in my house. With that decided, I went around and recorded short clips of all of them and put them together into one video using Adobe After Effects. I have experimented with video editing before but definitely learned some helpful things from this, including being able to fade in and out of video and audio.

By Braden Ivey