Errands in the Snowy Woods

     What's up bloggers! Today I want to present a new project my friend and I have been working on behind the scenes. We worked to achieve a sound story, which is using only sounds to create a plot, without any visuals at all! Sounds fantastic, right? Anyways, let's dive right into it.

    We went for a story about a man going out of his cabin to chop a tree down. Simple, right? Well, not exactly. We never accounted for how difficult brainstorming ideas to create these sounds were, and ultimately, we had to call upon a few sample sounds from online to create the aesthetic of the project. However, we were able to come up with various sound effects for our scene. To start off with, we had our protagonist open his front door to leave, allowing the sound of the icy wind to blow into your ears. Davin simply used his door to create the sound, a good start to our project. Following that, we have sounds, created by me, to mimic the sounds of heavy footsteps on a wooden porch, mimicking the scene of our protagonist leaving his house and heading to the snow. Right after, we have the man step onto the snow and walk in it for a bit. This was created by myself by stepping on my backpack savagely to create the depth of the snow sounds. It is not perfect, but we are glad to have reached that solution.

    Following along, the man stops in the snow in front of a tree, the wind continues to blow to keep the continuity of the story going. The protagonist picks up an axe from the snowy ground and begins to chop down a small tree for fire wood. We were able to accomplish this with sounds created by yours truly, which involve me removing a shovel from dirt to mimic the sound of the axe being picked up, as well as punching my bed to create the sound of chopping wood. Sounds pretty realistic, doesn't it? We ended up pulling up a sample sound of a tree falling, as attempting to make the sound of a tree fall without an actual tree is quite difficult. Next up, the man picks up the fallen tree, dragging it through the snow all the way home to chop up later. Davin was able to grab a large branch with leaves and drag it through grass and dirt, then he layered my audio of walking through snow onto it to create the sound of dragging a tree through snow. Afterwards, my audio of dropping the tree onto the ground was produced by dropping wooden planks onto dirt. We input the porch footsteps to show that he man is going back inside, opens the door, and the audience is able to listen to crackling fire as the man makes his way onto his couch. With sounds created by myself, we mimic the man sitting down, picking up a newspaper to read, and drinking from a mug full of hot coco. What an adventure that was!