Strengths and weaknesses

In this post, I will talk about my strengths and weaknesses throughout the first year of my degree. As I already mentioned, when I started this audio production course, I wasn't even able to identify a bass guitar in a mix, shame on me!! I started learning everything from scratch. When I studied fashion design, instead, it was different as I'm naturally talented in drawing (I've always been told to study fine art, but I never liked the easy way, that's not my style).

Definitely, my main weakness has been a lack of knowledge. Still, I'm a very hard worker, and I never lose my focus until I complete a task. I've spent the first two trimesters always watching tutorials on YouTube (bless all those engineers who make those incredibly helpful videos!!). I also have crazy attention for details which has been a good aspect for the quality of the work, however, sometimes it also made loose too much time and distracted me from the primary duty. Being aware of my weaknesses made me become much more organised with my work. During the second trimester, we had to record a band, so I started reading manuals and watched interviews about microphones placement methods. I made a plan of the techniques I wanted to use and a list of mics to use for each instrument and voice, and I managed to record everything smoothly in just one day!

In the third trimester, I had to do all the sounds and music for animation, and mix them in 5:1 (six-channel surround sound audio systems), I choose Fable. Fable is a cyclical fairy tale with a man and a woman who are cursed to be forever apart. In this assignment, I tried to use all my creativity, which is probably my strongest quality, to compensate with the lack of technical mixing skills, plus I had to learn how to use Ableton in a couple of weeks!. I researched foley techniques and worked on different ways to produce the sounds required. I'm mostly proud of sounds achieved for the bats, that I made using little bells layered with flapping gloves which I used to obtain the sound of wings. I was also very pleased with the resulting sound of roots that I made squeezing a leather belt and pitched it down. I also enjoyed making the soundtrack with my beloved Juno, that was my very first time and I'm please with the result. You can watch the stereo mix down here (I still have to change the volume of the music and fix a couple of effects and I will re upload it once I get access to the studios again), I hope you'll like it and please let me know your thoughts.