Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Track and Field, 2018

In my Trends in Modern Sound Design class, we sometimes do an iterative hot-potato project called Track and Field.  It's an opportunity for the students to work on efficiency, conceptualization, and workflow. Here's how it works:

1) On the first day, each student brings in a 30-second piece of audio of their own creation.  The audio can be anything, from field recordings to original music to a short narrative. Students bring in both a rendered audio file and individual stems, and may spend no more than 60 minutes in the studio working on it.
2) Each submission gets passed to another student, then uses the original material as the starting point for their own work. Again, they must limit themselves to 60 minutes of studio time and 30 seconds in duration, but other than that, they can do anything they want. Students bring in both a rendered audio file and individual stems.
3) We repeat that over and over, with a matrix set up in such a way that each student gets to work on each thread.

This quarter, I had ten students, so there are ten threads.  I've taken each thread and strung each iteration together in sequence, so you can hear how one thread changes as different designers get their hands on the material.  Enjoy!













Tuesday, December 11, 2018

2018 Film Sound Projects

Every fall, all of the Sound Design MFA students take a course called Trends in Modern Sound Design.  The structure of the course is very loose, designed so that we can examine interesting avenues of sound design without having to stick to a strict course outline.

Over the past few years, one of the projects that I've done with the students is a film project.  The class is divided into groups, and each group is given two 60-second clips of film. One of the clips has more dialogue, and the other has more sound content.  The student groups are tasked with replacing all of the audio in the clips. This includes re-recording dialogue, recording and/or editing sounds, and creating and/or editing music.  It's a big project that takes most of the quarter, and while each group is responsible for their own final product, they help each other out with big foley sessions, dialogue sessions, and walla sessions.  Towards the end of the class, we watch the videos and engage in a discussion of the final work.

We don't spend a lot of time in class preparing for the project. We talked a little bit about spotting (ie identifying sonic events) and DAW organization for film projects, but this project really is designed to encourage the students to find their own solutions. And, when we review the final work, the conversation is generally more about the creative impact of their work than about the technical implementation.

Here are the videos from this year's project!  (and, I should note that I did not secure rights to use these film clips.  All the work was done for educational purposes only.  If you are or represent the rightsholder and want me to remove the clips, please let me know and I'll do so immediately).

Special thanks to the members and friends of the UCI Sound community who lent their voices to this project: Ezra Anisman, Jack Bueermann, Hailey Byerly, Toni Fajt, Garrett Gagnon, Joanna Hui, Caroline Jones, Joseph King, Hunter Long, Sophia Metcalf, Hunter Moody, Joaquin Palting, Malik Proctor, Andrew J. Tarr.


True Romance (UCI Sound replacement project) from Vincent Olivieri on Vimeo.
Triplets of Belleville (UCI Sound replacement project) from Vincent Olivieri on Vimeo.
Hacksaw Ridge (UCI Sound replacement project) from Vincent Olivieri on Vimeo.
Get Out (UCI Sound replacement project) from Vincent Olivieri on Vimeo.
The Conversation (UCI Sound replacement project) from Vincent Olivieri on Vimeo.
Arrival (UCI Sound replacement project) from Vincent Olivieri on Vimeo.