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Some audio professionals will tell you that creating a soundscape for a movie should be left to large com- mercial studios with massive Foley pits, "tuned" recording rooms with live and dead areas, and a sound- design staff. But armed with a few easy concepts- and the will to experi- ment-anyone can craft sound design worthy of a Sundance winner with only the acoustic environments available in a home, and with a very modest studio setup.
What /s Sound Design?
If you hear it in a movie, and it's not music or dialog, it's sound design. It's the sounds of a street with honking cars, people yammering, and raging ambulances- the sounds of life moviegoers expect to hear in a scene. For this article, we will design a lakeside scene, using the famous painting by Georges-Pierre Seurat, "Seine Grande Jatte." I am using this still image because it's readily available to view online, making it an easy reference for the sound cues to follow. In the real world, this would be a film snippet of a few seconds or more.
Analyzing the Scene
When you view the painting, you'll notice a number of elements that require the sounds of motion: the water, the sailboat, and the oarsman. We also have a number of things in the scene that don't require primary motion-oriented sounds, but do need to provide background sounds and ambience, such as the wind through the trees, the flag in the distance, and overall environmental sounds.
Obtaining Audio Assets
Let's start with the ambience, as our scene is going to need some "environmental tone" and some "water tone." I could go out on location with a mie and a field recorder to capture these elements, but it would take too long, and all the trouble wouldn't buy me that much. So I go online to one of the many free sound effects libraries (such as www.pacdv.com/sounds/ ambience-sounds.html) and pick some options to use as sonic foundations.
Water, Water...