I have been asked by a 2nd year student to record, sound design and score a short film they are currently working on. I intend to use an excerpt of this as my submission, however until they have finished filming, I wont be able to start doing and sound design or foley. As a result I have decided to set about doing so for the chase scene in the animation ‘Ghost in the Shell’ as practice for my final submission.
In order to start the process I have decided to record the atmospheres first. After having been introduced to the Sennheiser Ambeo Mic in our spatialisation lessons I thought it could be interesting to use this mic for this purpose in order to catch a 360 degree scope of sound, making the experience all the more immersive.
After renting both the Ambeo mic and the Zoom F4, I attempted to take some ambisonic recordings in my room but struggled to understand why the recorded files on the SD card showed up on my computer as wav files instead of ambisonic files.
As a result I decided to undertake some more research into how to successfully record ambisonically using these equipment. I learnt about the importance of linked gains in ambisonic recordings in order to get the accuracy of levels of each channel absolutely matched. Furthermore I realised I had not set the right recording format on the F4, thus changing it from stereo to the Ambisonics A format.
An interesting thing to note is that you can use a pink noise generator to get the pre fader levels matched in separate channels if without a a device that has the capacity to link the faders on each channel.
I now intend to record the atmospheres using the city as my resource.
Though normally atmospheres are recorded – out of an interest in ambisonic field recordings i decided to rent out the Sennheiser Ambeo VR Mic along with the portable multitrack recording device Zoom F4. Whilst I aim to experiment in a variety of ways using this equipment, I feel the urge to record atmospheres as a way of exploring the widened sound image given by ambisonic recordings… bringing an immersive element to my sound piece…