Tuesday 18th November - Sound Design contd.

This lesson ended up being a pivotal lesson for my project, and as part of my career at Ravensbourne as a whole. Having begun working on my jungle sound journey, I took a step back and realised that I hadn't thought much at all about what the piece meant; I had fallen into the same place that I had with photography, where I was making something engaging on a surface level but no deeper than that. I decided to talk to Seb about it, and together we identified that fear was the central theme to my piece, but that my current idea did a poor job of representing how I felt about fear. I began storyboarding things that scared me, both in terms of real-life things and abstract concepts, and settled upon the ideas of loneliness, powerlessness and loss of friendship as themes that were important to me. I decided initially to use a shark attack to represent these emotions, as I am scared of sharks to some degree, but further thought showed me that this was too divorced from most people's idea of fear to have any real, visceral impact. Not only this, but sharks are very quiet creatures, and it would be very difficult to represent one entirely sonically.

Jaws, the film that inspired what little genuine fear of sharks that exists in the modern world, despite them being one of the least dangerous animals to humans statistically. The iconic sound associated with Jaws is the deep, tense double bass music riff, but I felt using a similar technique would be too derivative and also spoil an entirely diegetic  sound piece.

I thus decided to move from the fear of sharks to the fear of water in general, and to drowning, since that is a much more commonplace and realistic fear. I also felt the ocean in general was a good place to explore loneliness and powerlessness, since it is an environment not designed for humans in any way and can be in fact very hostile and dangerous to those who stray too far into its waters. I decided to have my sound journey be that of a person arriving at the beach with a group of friends, becoming separated, then drowning. This let me explore every theme I had mentioned, and in a way I felt would be successful and relateable to an everyday audience.