Sound design

Step 1: 

After my research in musical conventions in music documentaries, I realised the sound is very upbeat and takes you almost by surprise, however it engaged me in their documentaries so I wanted to achieve a similar effect. I started by using a software named WAVE however I soon realised that the software was quite problematic to get around, thankfully a friend of mine allowed me to use their laptop and I was able to use a software I was more familiar with being Garageband. I started creating my sound by messing around with the instruments at hand starting with the Piano section. I created the first piece of sound that I liked however it didn't match the conventions of a fashion documentary so I decided to attempt something else.  

Step 2: 

In the next step, I muted my piano segment and attempted with a drum rhythm using the snares, this was much more effective in creating an opening piece of music that would match the conventions required to be upbeat. I attempted two different drum rhythms that I set on rotation, I felt that the combination between the snares rhythm and the hightop rhythm gave me a good foundation in my opening music for my documentary. I altered the sound on this so that it was louder and more distorted this was so that when I came to add other instrumentals this would be the tempo I was trying to follow and the sound would work well together on the correct beat. 

Step 3: 

After adding the two different drum rhythms and was happy with how they sounded I added a guitar pattern that was already available on the software, this gave more layers to the sound as well as started to give the introduction music more of a shape and an ease to listen to. After finding a guitar sound I was happy with I had to change the output as the speed of the guitar track was not aligning with my drum sound, I changed it to be lower and added more compression until it started to match my drums. 

Step 4: 

After I was happy with the match of the drums and the guitar I moved on to adding a voice audio that said the title of the documentary as I felt it added a sense of old-style pop as well as fully introduced 'Young fashion'. For this I got a recording of my mum saying the words 'Young fashion'.Once I had this recording I removed any extra audio which had no sound in it and cut the audio into different sections being young and fashion, after this I muted the drums and the guitar so that I could check the quality of the recording. I took multiple recordings of my mum saying the words using my friend's laptop speakers until I was happy with how the audio was sounding. 

 Step 5:

Once I was happy with the audio recording, I cut up and reordered the audio to add more of a rhythm, so that it corresponded with the drums and guitar. The voice in comparison to the instruments seemed to be very low and too high pitch in response to this I increased the volume of the voice and changed some elements of the output such as increasing how low it is. After this, I wanted to add an element of sound that reflected the interview such as the competition Lucas competed in to do this I added a convention of competitions being a cheer from a crowd (represented by the orange segment), I then did the same alterations on the sound as the voice so that it would match the tone and rhythm. 

 

Step 6: 
After listening to the whole thing together I was not happy with the audio of the voice as it was too high pitch, in my first attempts to fix this I changed the controls of that track and changed its EQ in the master settings. I started with changing the pitch to a lower one on the mid settings and turning up the reverb and ambience. This started to change the audio but not by much so I turned up the compression very high after doing this I was still not happy with the voice audio. 

Step 7: 

Following step 6, I revisited the EQ settings and started to change this section up again, I changed the frequency at the main segments of the audio and it started to flow better with the rest of the tracks, after spending some time changing different segments of the audio I finally got to a point where I was content with the audio and was able ti have the whole track play together and follow the conventions of an opening musical sequence shown in fashion documentaries. 

 Final Product :