In honor of hunting season, I decided to do the “Sound Effects Story” (3.5 stars) of someone shooting a deer with a bow. I obviously could have made it much longer because the background noise could have gone on forever before the deer walked up but I didn’t because it had to be less than 90 seconds. Here is the story:

How I did it:

Using Free Sound I pulled different sound effects that I hear (or hopefully hear) when I am sitting in a tree stand. First you hear the ambient noise of the woods, including some annoying crows. Then you hopefully hear (or see) a deer walk up. You draw your bow and let it go and hopefully hear the thump when it goes into the deer. Then you hear the deer walk a couple of steps and hopefully see it lay down.

Once I had all of these sounds downloaded I imported them into Audacity so I could edit them together to make a cohesive story. Obviously the order that I said up there was the way in which it happened in the sound story. I had to fade in the deer walking up because as it gets closer it gets louder. Then I had to make sure that the bow release and the thump were not too far apart or it wouldn’t sound real. I also had to make sure that the deer didn’t wait after it got hit to move away because generally that happens immediately. I faded out the deer walking away because it is getting farther away from you (generally). I also had to make sure that much of the ambient noise in between the crows cawing wasn’t in my sound story or it would have been distracting. Unfortunately I didn’t know what to do with the ambient noise behind the crows actually cawing, so that stayed in there.

Overall I am happy with how it turned out. Though to the casual observer it  may be hard to figure out, once you know what it is, you can pick out the noises and what they represent.