From the list of sounds required, I decided to first ceate the sound of a “moonjump”. I was confused by this being a required sound, as our game is set on a fictional planet in space, not the moon. I did not want to conform to the conventions of scientific space, where I would assume moonjumops make little to no sound due to the gravity of the moon and how that changes human movement.
I started creating the sound of these “moonjumps” using the sound of me jumping on rocks that we recorded in the foley studio as a group.
I started off by layering the initial “jumping” sound at varying speed and pitches, to create an alien-like sound that sound like it has been affected by a different effect of gravity than on earth. At this point, I decided I wanted to make a sequence of multiple steps, just dropping out some of these layers for some of the steps and manipulated the levels of them for each step, in order to make it sound more realistic that the player is jumping on this unkown planet.
I then moved onto creating the “button sounds”. The button sounds we recorded in the foley studio were very “clicky” in my opinion. Although this is obviously realistic to the sound a button actually makes, I felt it did not fit the theme of the game. I decided to repurpose one of the layers from the moonjump sound I made, and use synthesis to create a more melodic button sound. I then pitched the synth at different pitches, so that each sound could be used for a different button.
To create sounds for the VR collaboration, it was imposrtant to formulate an agreed upon plan between the whole group, which consists of six sound artists and two VR animators. This was to allow a steady and effiecient workflow, where tasks aren’t being left as an afterthought, or other tasks being done multiple times. I would have thought this would have looked like asigning particular tasks to different artists based on their strengnths, i.e. soemone who makes music to make any musical assets, someone who works with field recordings to take charge of foley, etc.
We decided to create a shared google doc for any assets, ideas and contributions towards the project. This allowed for us to collectively identify what needed to be done, and keep track of what had been done to better effectively assign when tasks should be done and by whom. We also identified between us sound artists key stages in creating sound assets, asigning ourselves deadlines for each stage. These stages included pre-production and experimentation, production and manipulating, and mixing in unity.
I would say the stage I felt most comfortable to particpate in was the pre-production and experimentation stage. We worked collaboritvely in the foley and composition studios to collect and create sounds that fit with the soundscape of the theme of our VR experience, which is a game set in space. To be able to use the time in these studios effectively, we created a list of sound assets we aimed to create, and had this list readily accessible to everyone in the shared google drive:
list of sound assets
Using a spreadhseet, the group kept notes on who created which assets, and a link to the asset so they could easily be accessed by anyone in the group. The sounds initially made could then be manipulated by anyone in the group, further adding the process of collaboration to the creation of sounds within the project.
I felt as though there were members of the group who participated more heavily in the initial recording and creation of sound assets, which should allow for others to particpate more heavily in the next stage in creating the sounds: production and manipulating. As I contributed a lot in the foley studio, I decided not to participate in the production stage as much. I did, however, create some ambient music that I thought was remnicsient of space, the theme of the game. It was quite a long piece of music that I thought could be nice as background ambience in one of the scenes, or even be used as a representation of the sound of space.
Although I contributed in the initial creation of sound assets, it would have shown better collaboration skills if I worked on manipulating the sounds that my peers had created, and therefore show my skills in production. The next stage, mixing in unity, requires learning a new skill for all sound artists in the group, therefore, I think it’s best if everyone assists each other by inputting the same level of contribution and effort.
