Audio Collaboration
A further aspect of our final major project was to collaborate with an audio student from the UWL music technology course to provide sound for our projects. The way we went about finding someone to work on our project was presenting to a group and having them reach out to us if ours was a project that sounded interesting to them
My presentation for audio students
This is a form that was supplied to us by an audio lecturer. It allowed us to give information to the audio students about what we want in a succinct way
Here is some reference imagery/video that I also included to give a good sense of the project
Audio Collaboration slides
Here is the presentation that I made and delivered to the audio students
Audio student presentation outcome
I was very lucky as Koosha, level 5 audio student, decided that he would like to collaborate on my project fairly quickly after that presentation which meant I had a lot of time to work with him to hopefully make something great
Email communications throughout the project
This is the first email I received from Koosha, explaining that he did want to collaborate on the project
This is me sending along the resources to him, at this point nothing much had changed from the presentation but I sent my website so he could look at updates and also direct links to the resources in my presentation
Koosha asking about timings so that he can start working on the audio
At this stage I was nervous to commit to timings as the project wasn’t fully done. I was doing a lot of work on the 3D environment and therefore didnt have as much experience working on the portal and composition of the whole piece
This is a further discussion about timings. I was nervous to make sure that we made some audio so I said he could go ahead with the timings I was currently working to however he assured me that due to the speed that he could work at I had more time if I wanted to get the timings exactly right (which for him as an audio student is very important to the quality of the final output)
As we were going into Easter break at this point I decided that by the the end of Easter I would have the final timings to send to Koosha so that I could be confident I would have some audio for final submission. I achieved this and sent him the final timings on Wednesday April 23rd
This is a communication about deadlines and when I would like the audio by. I gave conservative deadlines as I thought it was best to do that instead of over extending. I tried to be mindful that he had other assignments to focus on too.
On the 5th (the deadline we agreed). I did receive my first audio file. It was so nice to actually hear something and I was really impressed with what he came up with. My feedback was that I really like the backing sound to the 3D environment but thought the portal sound effects could be improved. I did say this was optional though as it was a small tweak and we are deep into assessment season for both of us now
Here I sent him the a copy of project one with the audio and one without and again explained my portal feedback
Understandably Koosha then asked for references of what I was thinking for portal so I found a bunch of YouTube links and sent them across
In the end we didnt end up expanding the portal sound as Koosha was still unsure of how to improve it and I didnt want to put more deadline pressure on him. We ended up leaving the project as is which I still think is a very good result
Overall thoughts
Overall I think this was a good example of how to collaborate on a creative project. We experienced communication difficulties first hand but on the whole were able to overcome them. I think the end result is something we are both very happy with and it really adds to the overall piece. I think the biggest strength of our collaboration was how effectively we communicated, we didn’t have any long breaks in our communication and we were pleased to hear from each other.
I think if I could do the project again I would prioritise getting the overall project to a better place sooner so I could’ve sent it to Koosha sooner (ironed out the timings quicker) as having to navigate liaising audio and getting final project completed was a lot to juggle in the last few weeks.
Overall I enjoyed this collaboration, I am very happy with the result and I thank Koosha for agreeing to work with me