/ There is something wrong with Teddy /

The above is a YouTube video posted by user ZeFrank1.

This little video is something my brother showed me the other day. I was a little confused at first because I didn’t understand the reason for it, but as it went on, I became more interested in it and I wanted to know what happened next.

The video is classified as a ‘dark-humour’, which explores the notion of a stuffed Teddy Bear having a medical procedure to remove ‘bad things’ from his body. Some of the contents within him include gangrene kidney crayons as well as cigarette butt filled bon-bons (which made me feel sick lol).

The whole video surrounds this teddy and we question how it got so sick. We find out that, “Teddy loved a bad boy. What did the bad boy do, Teddy? Oh Teddy, the bad boy broke Teddy’s heart’s heart.

This made me feel a little emotional because I always used to think (and still kind of do) that toys have hearts and they get hurt too. Growing up, I used to take care of my toys as if they were my babies because I had a genuine care for them. It is interesting to think about this as they obviously do not have an actual alive heart and they cannot breathe. But this video basically says that they do and this teddy has been affected by a bad little boy who was his owner.

I don’t know, maybe it sounds silly but this definitely grabbed me because of the content surrounding what we see. Maybe I am just a very emotional person. I don’t know… I loved the video though.

I definitely recommend you have a watch. 🙂

/ Sound Design /

Nobody understands the excitement I feel to be starting a new elective next semester. Cinema has been great but the subject as a whole is not where my heart lies. Sound Design is one of my many passions and I just cannot wait to learn how to use particular programs to create sounds even if it is for film.

So what is Sound Design?

According to Google: Sound design is the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating audio elements. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking, television production, theatre, sound recording and reproduction, live performance, sound art, post-production, and video game software development.

Here are several different links you can follow to some of my favourite all time soundtracks/songs from movies in the past 20 years. Everyone hypes over movies like Frozen but I hype over those movies that have the most beautiful instrumental pieces.

In some particular order:

Social Network; David Fincher (2010) (Music by: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yydZbVoCbn0

The Imitation Game; Morten Tyldum (2014) (Music by: Alexandre Desplat) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVDQ9eHYJqk

Interstellar; Christopher Nolan (2014) (Music by: Hans Zimmer) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDVtMYqUAyw

American Beauty; Sam Mendes (1999) (Music by: Thomas Newman) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al21Vtlsg4A

Here is a long video with quite a few different songs from several different films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nM33VDmzvk (It’s important to note that Hans Zimmer appears quite a few times suggesting that he has done pretty well for himself and is now a well-respected Sound Designer).

Happy Listening!