Week 4 (Making A Canon Out Of A Plastic Bottle?)
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Hello! My name is Martin Månsson. I am the sound director for the game ”Potato Pirates”. As I promised last week I will talk about sound for the first time on this blog. Yes, sound is important, but that is something that never had a high priority in comparison to the graphics and codes for the game. We had to be sure that we had a decent working game in the first place. I finally get to talk about sound and this week I made a bunch of sound effects. I can however just talk about one of them in detail. The majority of the sound effects I recorded and edited myself. And I had a lot of fun making them. The best of them all (according to me), and also the most fun of them to make (also according to me) was the sound that is supposed to be heard whenever the player shoots away a potato with his/her “potato canon”. The canon is supposed to seem very harmless, even if it does quite some damage on the enemies. So I didn’t want any explosion sounds, nor did I want any big bang sounds. Instead I wanted a “poof” sound. To be more precise I wanted that special kind of “poof” which appears whenever pressure is released from a closed pipe, which is exactly how this “potato cannon” works. It is really easy to make this sound. I just had to get the materials to make it, and that material would be a plastic bottle. To be more specific I used a 1.5 liter plastic bottle for this task, since it makes a lower tone compared to a smaller plastic bottle and wanted that lower tone. What I did to make the desired sound was to put the opening of the bottle to my lips. There should be no gap between the opening and the lips. What I did was to add some pressure inside the bottle, so then I would have to blow air through the opening of it. While I keep blowing air into the bottle, I would then quickly pull away the bottle from my mouth to release the pressure. The sound will then appear. I do have a video showing how I made the sound, but I don’t want to show my face here because of reasons. So it will be hard to show you since I use a part of my face to make this sound. But I believe that I have given proper instructions for how to make this sound. So I will just give you the result. This is how it sounds:
What I want to do is to record that sound, or else this would serve no purpose at all. To collect the sound I used a microphone called “Blue Snowball”. It is very affordable for having such high quality. So if you want to record a lot of sound for a longer time, then this microphone is what I recommend. But a microphone is not everything that is needed. Microphones will only collect the surrounding sounds. I also need something that records my sound. I use the program “Audacity” which is great for both recording and editing. You can by the way download “Audacity” for free from this website: http://www.audacityteam.org/download/ As I said, I recorded my sound with the help of “Audacity”, but I also had to do some editing. I gave the sound some bass to make it sound a little more powerful. I also changed the pitch somewhat, but it is not necessary to do that. I just did what I felt was fitting for our game. Here is the outcome of the editing:
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