Sci-Fi Soundscapes

Last year I decided that I wanted to do a project with Garage Band but did not want to do a music project or a podcast.  I was searching around and I came upon some very cool science fiction soundscapes on Youtube.  I shared this with a few of my students and they thought it was awesome.  I did the project with a few of my classes and they loved it.

It was a great project, it taught students about audio production, and the science fiction genre.  It tied in nicely to some novel studies that they were doing in other classes, while keeping relevant with popular culture.

 Below I have posted an quick outline of what I did, feel free to use it if you would like.

Sci Fi Soundscape Audio Processing Assignment

Work in groups of two, you will need to use an Imac Computer.

You will learn about the science fiction genre of films, how to process and alter audio recordings, and how to use and move files using an Imac.

Here are some important definitions before you start.

Science Fiction: A genre of fiction based on an imagined or speculative future portraying technological advances and/or major social and environmental changes. Examples would be films such as Star Wars, Transformers, The Avengers, etc

Soundscape: A collage of different sounds portraying a certain theme.

Audio Processing: When you intentionally alter audio signals

1.  Listen to one of the following youtube clips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6l0X5CHDsk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHQIiB4dJfs&feature=relmfu

These are science fiction sound scapes.  These are heavily processed and altered sounds.

2.  Go to http://www.soundjay.com/mechanical-sounds.html
You need to download a few of these sounds.  To do so do a control + click on the mp3 and select save link as.  This will download the sound file to your downloads folder.  To check if it is there, click the finder icon on the dock and then click your name on the left.  This opens up your user directory.  Select downloads to make sure that the file is there.

3.  Open up Garage Band from the dock.  Create a new project and leave all of the settings on their defaults.  

4.  Open up your downloads in the finder and drag each sound file that you downloaded into Garage Band.  Be sure to place each file on its own track.

5.  Double click one of the tracks on the far left.  Click where it lists the track instrument.  This will open up a menu on the right that allows you to select track effects.  Experiment with these until you find a really creepy science fiction like sound.  Repeat for each of the sounds you downloaded.

6.  Arrange your sounds so that they overlap, if you want you can add more sounds.  

Congratulations you have created a science fiction sound scape.

Middle School Podcasts, outline and script examples

Making a podcast can be a fun and educational experience for middle school students and teachers.  They can learn about audio production, public speaking, technology, and more.  Although podcasting can be a difficult project when you are first trying it, eventually you get some pretty phenomenal results.

This is a sample podcast outline that I used with my students last year, you can see the original post on my other blog lnmedialab.blogspot.ca.  I found that is was a useful model that they could follow to make an outline, which they could then turn into a script.  There is more to making a middle school podcast than this,  but feel free to use it if you would like.

I hope to post some more thoughts on middle school podcasting later.

A Sample Podcast Outline and Script Example 

Outline Example

1. Opening-A quick musical jingle 
2. Introduction-A monologue style introduction introducing your hosts and what you will talk about on your show
3. Segway-Could be musical or a sound effect
4. Topic 1:Talk for about 3 minutes
5. Vocal Segway--"We are going to move on and talk about..."
6. Topic 2:  Talk for about 3 minutes
7. Musical segway
8. Topic 3:  Talk for about 3 minutes
9. Closing remarks, thank the audience, guests, what will be on the next show
10. Closing musical Jingle

Rough Script Example

Opening musical jingle:  First 30 seconds of Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne

Jim:   Hi welcome to the great Sports Guru Podcast.  I am Joe Smith, and with me today is Timothy Carter.  We have a great show for you today.  Today we are going to talk about our super bowl predictions, bring in our guest speaker Alexander Ovechkin to talk about the recent success of the Washington Capitals, and finish with our thoughts on the first few games of the NBA season.

Sound Effect 1-Whistle

Topic 1.

Jim:  So Tim, who do you think is going to be in the Super Bowl this year.

Tim:  Its got to be the Ravens, there is no way that they are losing to the Patriots.  Their defence is too solid.  

Jim:  I just don't see them being able to shut down the Patriots.  There is no way Joe Flacco will outscore Tom Brady.

Tim:  You can't even compare the Ravens defence to the Patriots.

Jim:  Well I think the Patriots will be in the game.  Who is going to win between the Giants and the 49ers.

Tim:  Giants, they can put up the points.  San Francisco can't

Jim:  I agree with you there.  But it could be close.  I think that the game will be decided by a field goal.

Tim:  Anyways time to move on, please welcome our guest Alex Ovechkin

Applause Sound Effect

Bob Dylan, TImes are Changing, MTS Centre Winnipeg

Ok, I am a big Bob Dylan fan, I like his old stuff and I like his new stuff.  Whenever I bring this up with friends or family there is always someone who wants to do their Bob Dylan impression.  Now I will admit that Dylan does not sound anything like some of his old albums, in fact he sounds totally different.  I fortunate a couple of weeks ago to see Dylan for the first time.  Near the end of the show someone yelled out "Play a hit".  This got me thinking.

Now before I get started I do have to say that I was impressed by Mark Knopfler who opened up the show.  Although I had not heard much of his music before, I enjoyed the variety of his rich guitar sounds mixed with other instruments such as the flute.  I was blown away.

Now when Dylan took the stage the best way I can describe what he does these days is a gritty, bluesy, guessing game of old songs.  If you listen to a lot of Dylan tracks, I would say that most of the songs are recognizable, but for a casual fan this may not be the case.  Despite his raspy voice, I still think that Dylan can carry his songs, he uses lyrics and emphasis in way that tells a compelling story whether it is an older song like "Tangled Up in Blue", or a new ballad such as "Scarlet Town".

Seeing Dylan to hear the "hits" puts you in the wrong place.  You might be better off listening to a concert cd or dvd at home.  If you want to go see Dylan playing fresh but raspy versions of old songs, go see the show.   If you want to go listen to the songs as they were recorded, stay at home.

Middle Years Student Screenplays

I had my students write screenplays before and although they produced a decent script, I was not totally content with the group work I saw.  Because the films they were making would be larger groups of four or five students,  most of the time I noticed that one or two students who had a knack for writing would take control and do most of the work.  The real teamwork and collaboration happened when they produced the screenplays as films, which was good, but I still wanted to improve the collaboration that went into the screenplay.  This year I decided to change my process a little bit.

What I started with was talking about what makes a good movie.  We had a brainstorm discussion and came up with a plethora of ideas, but the elements that I really wanted to focus on were conflict and action.

Following this I did a lesson on what a treatment was, and I had my students rush produce a one page treatment with the premise that it was easy to film and that we could film it in our school.  I took the treatments that were best suited for a quick middle school production and assigned them out to two person groups to write out a screenplay.

I did a brief overview lesson on what is a screenplay, looking at how we write them, and how we format them.
I found this AFI Screen Nation document useful for my students at it contains good reference information and some excellent examples.

AFI Basics Handout

I didn't go crazy with margins and such, instead focusing on concepts like showing not telling how a character is feeling, using the proper font, and giving location headings.  We spent a lot of time discussing examples from movies, and brainstorming questions about how to show how a character if a character is lonely, popular, happy, etc.

I handed out the treatments and suggested that my students work on these by using a collaborative document environment like Google Docs.  As students were working in groups of two or three I found that in class there was a lot of conversation about creative choices that I didn't see in earlier projects.  At the end of the project I don't know if we will be able to use everyone's screenplay, but I really like the way the project is going right now.  I plan on writing more about this in the future as I continue to develop new media production projects in my classroom.

AFI Screen Nation Tool Kit

I came across this AFI Screen Nation film tool kit.  

It can be found here http://myhero.com/natework/AFI_BasicsHandbook.pdf

When I was shooting films in University, this would of been handy.  Most of the templates seem like they would apply in many situations, and the pdf also contains a lot of reference information that is valuable as well.  It is very useful to young filmmakers as it goes over a variety of concepts and terms.  It provides some great storyboard and screenwriting examples that could be useful to follow.  It is worth a read

NM