Engaging Project on Audio Mixing & Soundtrack Creation

By Kari Milton, NBCT on October 4, 2015 • ( 0 )

As a career and technical education teacher I seek to give my middle school students experiences with authentic learning environments. I teach in a computer classroom with a myriad of tools open to me. I teach 2 classes of students where we focus on video and audio production.

Students should be aware of the many available careers open to them in the movie industry. We watch the ending credits of movies to show them all of the hundreds (even thousands) of people that go into the making of the movie. Some are the actors, but most are behind the scenes and they are the ones that create the actual movie in pre and post production.

To teach audio production, we used Garageband and a 10 minute animated video called Big Buck Bunny produced by the Bender Foundation (which I stripped the audio from). You are allowed to remix and change the video as long as you give attribution according to their Creative Commons license. I broke the movie down into 9 one minute sections and taught students how to add background music to fit the mood. I also taught them how to add sound effects. They used their understanding of the program, to put fade ins and out and added various tracks and sound effects.

Students worked in groups of about 3-5 kids working on a 1 minute section. They were able to get help from those around them and often shared their headphones in this task. When they were finished they changed their Video into a .mov file and put it on Edmodo for their group members (those that had the same part as them to watch and comment on). Group members then chose which project they liked the best, sometimes there were 2 and they had to remix both projects into one which they submitted to be part of the class movie which we published to YouTube.

I mashed the videos together so the class could see the entire video. The lesson built the foundation of the next step which is teaching students about movie storyboarding and video. Though we are moving on to focus on the video part of movies, they will be able to return to the tools they learned in audio as they go later into post production of the video.