The stagecraft class at Redwood High School has been doing a sound project for about two weeks. What they have been doing is taking a scene from a movie and creating all the little sound effects that are in that scene using whatever they have available.
Abby Murrell ‘23 says that the sound project was really unexpected. “I’ve never done a drama class before, but this was an interesting opportunity to be creative and to I guess just open your problem-solving skills up because there’s a lot of times where you’re using a sound and it doesn’t work, so you have to try something else and it’s not the right material.”
For Brooklyn Burch ‘23, she said that the sound project was really fun because they got to work in teams just testing different ideas for the sounds that they needed to create for their scene. “You’re just testing random ideas that you wouldn’t think to use but you’re like ‘Oh wow that’s perfect!’ and you didn’t even realize it.”
Many of the students’ common struggle was finding objects that created the desired sound for their scene since they could not use the direct source and had to be created. Kyndall Correia ‘24 says that “it’s really hard to try to find an exact object to like match the sound that you’re trying to make in your video and like time it up is really hard.”
The objects that were used in order to create the desired sounds for the scenes range from forks, shoes, fabrics, video game controllers, umbrellas, fly swatters, sand in a box, and so much more that would be available in a stagecraft class.
Burch said that they “used a lot of stuff from our prop room and around the room. We used paint, spoons, we used a plastic baby, we used forks for like sparks noises and stuff like that. And we also used crash boxes.”
Murrell said that her team had used “a video game controller for that and then there was a lot of synthetic fabric sounds from a parachute, so we used life a flag and an umbrella to be the popping of the parachute and the like rubbing of fabrics is from the synthetic fabric and we used like a box of sand for footsteps and then, actually it was like a briefcase that we used for saddle against like a horse and a fly swatter to be a whip.”
These three students have all started their process of creating ideas for what they would use to make the sounds needed for their scene by creating a list, cutting out parts from the scene, and experimenting with different objects. When figuring out the sounds it was a lot of trial and error.
Murrell says “it’s a lot of like that just trying to see what works and just trying to get closer and closer to the target sound.The timing is really hard because you can’t watch the scene to figure out your timing because if you’re watching it then you’re going to be late with your sound.”
Correia says that she had underestimated how hard the sound project would be. She said that she and her partner were just going to just go straight into the project but then they realized that there were a lot of factors that played into everything.
What these students can take to use in the future is the skill of problem-solving, communication, and being able to create sounds with what is on hand.
Natalie Enriquez
Natalie Enriquez, '24, is in her second year of writing for the Redwood Gigantea. Outside of journalism, she likes to pass time reading or listening to music. Natalie hopes to make her time, as well as others, at Redwood High School fun and memorable.
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