Issues of Intellectual Property, Sound, and Memory

I decided to add sound and a few more animations to my piece. However, it occurred to me that finding music and images might be difficult given issues of intellectual property. While I don't intend on distributing the piece and using it solely for educational purposes (which allows for exceptions along the lines of fair use), one issue I could have run into was faces; in publications, you have to have permission to include the faces of identifiable persons. Had I wanted to include a forward facing image of a whole person or face, I would have had to blur the image or, potentially, have a waiver signed. Now, while I was able to make do with some alterations on photographs and animations I made myself, I could see how music could be a different issue, especially given all the issues with illegal downloads in recent years.

I was able to find a website, free SFX that allows people to use sounds and some music in their productions. While I would have liked some different sounds included (such as TV background sound, which I could have made myself if I had a recording device and software), I did find some sounds that I would not have been able to access without great difficulty (like helicopter sounds and gunfire). The site also included some music, some of which was appropriate to help set the mood of the story lines.

However, one issue I ran into when trying to integrate the sound into the Flash movie was starting and stopping. While I was able to script the start and stop of music, and while I was able to use the "Fade In" effect to make the start of some sounds less pronounced, there was no such way to do this when stopping a sound--unless of course the entire duration of the original sound/song was played. So, while I liked the repetitive melody of one song, unless that part of the movie lasted the entire duration of the song, it would just end abruptly at the stopping point. I found that I might be able to fix this with a sound editor like audacity, but that would have required adding more sound files than my memory could have handled for one file. I could have let the song continue until its end, but if I started a new part of the movie that contained a different sound (without stopping the original sound), then I would have heard both sounds, which was neither pleasant nor the desired effect.

If I were to create another piece of ELit, I would definitely have to keep such issues in mind; more time would be required--likely through advanced planning, searching, and editing--to find and edit the images, movie clips, and sounds needed to pull the entire piece together in such a way that it creates the right tone, balance, and polish of multimedia.