Jonathan Williams: October 2015

Maps and Journeys: A proof of concept

Share |

Sound Project: Football Stadium

Sound, being one of the modules available for the professional tool kit unit presents the challenge of creating a thirty to sixty second sound scape for a written or spoken passage utilising diagetic and non diagetic sound.

My transcript is a 1 minute football highlight from the 1993/94 FA cup Semi Final in which Eric Cantona scores a famous volley from seemingly nowhere. This is a very famous piece of football commentary and I believed it to show incredible promise and the opportunity for rich sound design

The goal is to build a narrative using sounds rather than using voice over, i.e. focussing on the things described or implied at by the piece to add to the narrative and overall atmosphere.

For my idea I would love to create my piece in a football stadium from the perspective of the player scoring the goal, with commentary in the background. My goal is to immerse the listener into the centre of this stadium, with crowds cheering and heckling, the players on the pitch communicating, footsteps, balls being kicked, footballs rolling through the grass, wind rushing through the players ears etc.

Perhaps the largest challenge presented by this project was creating the atmosphere of a stadium and creating a believable crowd that could immerse a listener. My initial research was by watching the advertising campaigns for Fifa 12-16, I turned my monitors off and listened to the sound of the crowds and the chanting. I also listened to football matches without commentary, and also researched how engineers and sound engineers create the ambience of a stadium.

In this video, uploaded by Bosch during the 2014 Brazil World Cup, they interviewed one of the stadium announcers/commentators. Basically they have 500 loudspeakers set up across the entire stadium, The roofs of the stadium also bounce sound and allow it to reverberate all around the stadium. The seats are also placed as close to the pitch as they possibly can (Source).

After speaking to my tutor, he advised that perhaps one way to simulate the sound was by recording lots and lots of voice samples (say 20-30) and layering them over several tracks of background noise. The background noise was recorded in the quad recreational area in my university. I stood in six different positions. recording approximately 2 minutes in each position. This was to achieve some semblance of 360 degree noise. After layering this all up in ProTools, with the 15 or so samples I recorded in the sound studio using the Marantz recorder, I found that it was nowhere near to the standard that I wanted. The chanting sounded unnatural and were clipping, and the ambience tracks were simply not working out. So from this I decided that I needed to go into a football match and physically record the sound. Eventually I ended up going to the Football Stadium in reading and capturing approximately 1 hour of recording. Although it was an expensive trip, it was extremely worthwhile. I also created some In fact, it made my project what it is, as it completely set the atmosphere.

I created lots of me running through grass with my football boots on, layered them all up and panned the sound and volume left and right. This was to create some semblance that the players were running in 3d space around a football pitch.

sprinting layers + panning and volume keyframes

For the voice over I used 3 plugins, a modified EQ preset, a pitch change and an instrumental amp plugin called Eleven Free. The amp plugin and the modified EQ preset were used in conjunction to create the effect of being in a voice over box commentating on the game. The challenge here was to make it clear that the commentator and the in game sound were distinctly separate from one another. I think that the Eleven Free plugin, suggested by my tutor really helped create that atmosphere and gave the microphone a sort of crackle that you sometimes hear when commentators get excited in football matches.

There were two commentators, one English and one Scottish. This is why I altered the pitch of my voice overs minutely, to attempt to make them more authentic. Of course, if I had wanted to make it fully authentic I would have found a person with a strong Scottish accent. I didn't because it only occurred to me 1 day before the deadline.

V/O volume keyframes and EQ panel

Voiceover 1 Eleven Free plugin screen

V/O 1 Pitch II plugin panel

Creating the sounds of footballs being passed, dribbled, hoofed crossfield and volleyed into the net were definitely a challenge. To record the football sound I soaked a tea towel in water and hit it repetitively with my football boot. This was both therapeutic created a nice 'thud' sound which would make up one part of my football hit sound effect. For the second layer, I slammed my football boot against the concrete, making more of a slap effect. The third layer was a towel being thrown against a wall. Because the towel spreads out as it is thrown, by the time it impacted against the wall it had spread out, creating a very soft sound that added some lower frequencies to my ball hit. experimented with the pitch and reverb on top to eventually create the big, primary football hit. For the dribbling I used the same sound, but cut them short and made them significantly quieter and removed all the effects from it.

I panned all of these hits from left to right, to get a sense of the ball being kicked away and progressed down the pitch. I also created the sound of the ball being caught by the net by recording a jumper being dropped on the floor (using a zoom H4n recorder) and panning it from right to left and combining that with a metallic hit created by tapping a brick with a monkey wrench. These two combined made it feel like the ball was hitting the bar and the net was reacting to the ball going into it and thus creating the reaction of the crowd. This little detail really gave the piece some depth as well as context, and I learnt that the subtleties and little details can really bring a piece together.