My aim was to gather as many sounds as possible in my first day. This then gave me three more days to correct any sounds that weren’t quite right before I had to hand back my equipment. I am using a H4N Zoom to record everything for my visual content. Once I had my equipment at my disposal I went and bought plenty of batteries, and had a quick run through the manual to double check I knew how to do everything correcting. All my sounds were recorded in Stereo so everything was the same, even though many sounds will be manipulated in the editing process. Altogether I ended up with roughly 53 recordings, the majority of them being between 30 – 60 seconds long.
The majority of my recordings were in my parents garage. I chose this place because looking at my list of recordings it seemed like I would be able to find objects that could produce the sounds I was hoping for. It happened to be a windy day and my parents house is an end terrence (meaning that the distance between my parents house and the neighbours to the right created a wind tunnel and the garage was at the end of that), so many objects had to moved around to avoid catching any wind, as well as placing the cover on the microphones to minimise the wind. On the upper hand, the street in especially quiet during the day so I aimed to get as much recording between midday and 3pm. However, it rained heavily between noon and 2pm and with the metal roof I ended up recording between 2pm-5pm, just missing everyone coming home from work and having traffic in the background of all my recordings.
After each recording, I listened very carefully, through headphones and in the house, at least twice to be 100% sure I didn’t have any unwanted sounds beneath them. I also recorded each sound twice aiming and placing the microphones in different directions so I could use the recordings and provide the impression of distance. Once I was happy with the sounds (or even if I wasn’t) I numbered each take and noted down what I had recorded so when it came to transferring the sounds from recording to computer it would be easier to rename and organise them.
Overall, I was happy with each sound and was pleased with how the day went. I managed to capture a few more sounds that I couldn’t seem to capture in the garage. For example, popping a condom and latex glove. I chose to record both as the condom was very sharp and the latex glove gave a slight poof sound which was what I was aiming for as I had the sound in mind to use for the ghosts that pop in Rayman.
After double checking the list of what sounds I wanted and the sounds I had collected, I decided it was time to move on to music for my games.