I wanted to do an exhibit about movies, and once I started looking into this extremely broad subject matter I was drawn to two specific areas: the early beginnings of motion picture technology and the fun of sound effects. I decided to combine these two areas into this one informative yet fun interactive exhibit.

I have been mulling over this project for a few weeks, and then I started building and researching in earnest about mid March. The project has essentially gone through three forms - all of them something to do with film-making but not really much to do with each other - and it now exists as an exploration of how technology enables enhanced utilisation of basic, organic sounds. It has been hugely fascinating for me, and rather a lot of work in the five days remaining after I finally got it all straight in my head and started building in earnest.

I am very happy with the Foley Studio mock-up, which is based around pictures and videos of real Foley Studios. It is a mock-up though, not a real Foley Studio, as I wanted to keep the 'film reel' screens at the sides for the nice sharp contrast against the carpeted rear wall, which is much more 'Foley'. I really wanted to build two boxes as props, which I would call 'clap boxes'. One with a smooth and hard interior and one with a soft, padded interior. The idea being of course that you clap in each box and demonstrate how the texture of the box's interior determines whether the clap will sound loud or muffled. This effect could easily be achieved in SL by loading the clap sounds in the box prims at different volumes, but it did not fit the Foley Studio concept so that remains out.


There are a lot of sounds that I have now in my SL sound library that I would have loved to have used on the project but I could not use them all. However, even just clicking them on in SL, and trying to tune my ears in to really 'hear' the depth and timbre of the sound have been a great deal of fun and has made me think about sound in a different way. Other elements I would have liked to have included in the exhibit but I didn't for reasons of resources (including space and time), were a waveform shot of a simple, organic sound effect like walking, and a computer screen showing an example of the software used by Sound Designers when mixing and blending literally hundreds of sounds into one scene.


I hope you enjoy this exhibit as much as I have.

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