Week 13 – Critical Reflection

 

What significant insights related to audio have you learnt about through the research completed for this entire module?

• The importance of recognising and understanding genre

  • understanding genre is an important part of  categorising and understanding any media be it music, film, or games. It is also an invaluable tool for identifying the target audience for any produced media.

• An enhanced general idea of how the industry works

  • Coming into this course, i had a very limited understanding of the audio industry and its inner workings. Since starting i have had the opportunity to gain a further understanding from fellow students and lecturers and various other people that i have met through the course of my studies so far.

• The importance of making and keeping contacts

  •  The importance of making contacts and building and maintaining rapport with industry relevant professionals is something that seems to me to be a very important part of any fledgling career, and is something that i have already seen the value of first hand.

• recognising and refining my direction .

  • Probably the most important insight that i have gained so far during this first trimester of my studies, the just the fact that i know that i am on the right path to doing what i truly want to do. Learning more about audio and discovering new relevant information every time i step into a class has been the biggest inspiration and has only served to motivate me further.

How would you define your own audio related interests as a career?

My own chosen path within the audio industry is Audio design for film and other media.  i am interested in designing sound effects both digitally and with foley. Foley is the art of performing Sound effects and noises in synchronisation to a video track in order to provide a more natural and visually accepting audio component to film, television, games and other media

While doing the outlined work for this c, it has been required that i do extensive research on related practitioners in foley and sound effects . This has been an amazing journey of discovery and has done a lot to cement my passion for audio. i am now even more excited about pursuing a career in the audio industry

What types of challenges could you expect to encounter within your chosen audio field / discipline?

I only really foresee two challenges in pursuing a career in foley.

• Location

  • The first challenge would be my current location. Living in Perth W.A., does not provide a great deal of opportunity to work or grow as a foley artist. this could be relatively easily overcome by relocating to a more industry appropriate location.

• Digital Technology

  •        The other challenge i can see that might be a hindrance is the fact that sound effects and audio production in general is becoming easier to achieve digitally. With the progress of digital technology, the quality of the audio that can be produced increases exponentially. I believe that this could be a challenge to the foley industry in the sense that sound effects could be produced cheaply and quickly, eliminating the need for foley artists in some instances.

What areas of learning, knowledge or skills could you improve upon?

There are two areas that i have personally recognised as needing to improve and enhance. The first is my general punctuation, grammar and my writing skills as a whole. this is something that will not be hard for me to improve on but is very much something that i still need to work on and keep up with.

      The other area is feedback. Over this trimester i have certainly learned the importance of receiving and giving feedback. The area that i need to work on is the way that i personally receive and use the feedback that is given to me. I can often take some feedback to personally and can almost become discouraged for the wrong reasons.