Short Film: Project One

Today was the last day of post-production, which began with myself and the director sitting down and watching the film through and taking note of anything that he wanted changing to the edit, since our first meeting. Luckily there wasn’t much to change, only a few minor tweaks regarding the placement of some effects which didn’t take too long to change.

I then moved onto finalising the rough mix I had created earlier, then exporting the video and showing the final mix to the director which he signed off.

Today, I spent most of the time editing getting the last few Foley recordings, along with some sound effects before moving on to adding effects such as EQ and reverbs to various tracks.

One scene that required a lot of attention was the scene in which our main character confronts the warden as they circle the tree toward the end of the film. This recording, despite much effort on location, had the sound of a plane going overhead. Whilst with our setting there possibly could be a plane going overhead, it really didn’t seem likely for this to happen, therefore I tried my best to EQ the planes frequencies out of the dialogue. This worked quite well and cleaned to clarity of the dialogue up making it sit better in the mix.

I also tackled the scene in which our main character is running to the abandoned building at around 2 minutes 20, in the film. After consolidating my research, I really wanted to make this scene sound very empty and lacking with life. The scene itself looked really dark, with nothing but fields surrounding the area it really looked like there wasn’t going to be much life about, especially in the extreme conditions portrayed, there was unlikely to be bird song or much other human life about. Therefore, I took inspiration from the interview with the sound design team of the film ‘Oblivion’ from my research, in which they stated the lack of life they created was not by adding sound but by the lack of it, and how they used just harsh winds to make the scene sound very sparse.

After all this all the elements of the sound design were in the film and I could move onto mixing the project. I started by bringing the dialogue levels up, then mixing in the ambiences, footsteps and clothes rustle tracks, effects and finally music. With some automation added in, a basic mix was thus complete for me to show the director. I wanted to do this as I would be showing the pre-mix to the director before a final mix in case there were any large changes he wanted to make to the edit.

Today I wanted to make sure that we had all the audio we needed in the project, this meant any Foley, spot effects and music and any other additional sound.

I went through the ambiences of each scene first. Most scenes had good ambient sounds in them, however some scenes didn’t have audio in them, or the ambience was insufficient. Luckily, after taking inspiration from the lecture with Jez Riley French in which he stated that we should record everything for as long as possible. Myself and Aaron used a lot of our spare time on set to record extra wild tracks of all the locations which gave us extra forest ambience, and various room sounds for the abandoned buildings. Which meant I could build a natural ambience that would match with that of the dialogue bedding, which is highly important when referring to my research about the ambiences of a sound design.

Moving on to tackling the dialogue, most of the recordings were really clear and it was just a case of mixing them later on, however there were a couple of instances that needed some major attention. The first being the scene in which the main character is regaining consciousness and the other two characters are arguing about what to do with him. Unfortunately, not all of our mics recorded in this take so a lot of the sound is being picked up from the boom mic and the dialogue sounds really distant and some of the words are hard to make out.

It was at this point in which I decided to make a creative decision. As the main character is regaining consciousness, his hearing is still going to be coming back to normal, so mixed with the ringing of his ears this could be really effective. However, when he regains full consciousness the dialogue would have to become clear again, therefore, we decided to get the other two actors for ADR to replace the dialogue in these scenes.

Whilst the actors were in we also got them to act out some ad lib lines for a scene in which the main character is trying to elude them. This included them shouting and searching for him in the background. Layered with some guard dog sounds this added a busy sound to an otherwise quite empty scene. However, I did have to be careful to not clutter up this scene with extra sounds, much like Shaun Farley stated in his article about adding sound to an ambience, they have to seem randomly occurring, in order to sound natural.

I then moved on to the Foley recording that we needed to conduct for this film. A couple scenes that came back from picture edit without sound, or scenes which were shot from a long distance required almost a complete remake of sonic environment. This meant that after adding the ambiences mentioned earlier, with the aid of Aaron we recorded footsteps, clothes rustles and even some breathing tracks for each scene that required them. The breathing recordings were extremely useful in the aforementioned scene of the character regaining consciousness, as it is shot from his perspective and the breathing really emphasised this.

Today was the first day of sound editing, I used some techniques that Lucy Mitchell suggested to use in her lecture in previous weeks. The first being completely duplicating all the sound from the OMF import and then making the originals inactive. This allowed me to have a completely original copy of the audio in the same location to pull from if anything should go wrong with the copy I’m editing.

I then moved onto cleaning up the project, by naming, grouping and colour coding the tracks. I also chose to split the dialogue and its background ambience up, this allowed me to treat them separately when editing them.

Once the session was set and ready to go I chose to go through with the director and have a ‘spotting’ session. We watched the picture lock through several times and I made notes of directions given by the director for how he wanted the project to sound. We noted music placement, treatment of scenes along with any additions to the sonic environment. After this I went through on my own and made notes of things that I needed to adjust with regards to the audio over the next couple of days editing.

After reviewing the sound, we had recorded over the four days of filming it occurred to me that a large portion of our film was void of dialogue. This means that the ambiences and scene setting will be very important in creating the atmosphere, feel and emotion of our film. Therefore, I have conducted some research on how to effectively create ambiences in sound design.

One key aspect of making these ambiences interesting is going to be by adding extra tones, such as a room tone, extra wild tracks to buffer a quieter scene, and even the addition of voices or ‘life’ to make a scene sound ‘busier’. In my research, I have come across an article written by Shaun Farley in which he describes how he creates ambiences in video games. One of the key points I have taken from what he describes about adding sound is ‘too frequent a bunch of sounds together and you have a mess … therefore care must be taken to design the sounds in a pleasing, but apparently random manner’. Shaun states that things must sound natural, and often more than not even a really busy area doesn’t have constant sound but more periodic bursts of activity and this is an important mannerism to recreate.

Another key aspect that Shaun touches on is the frequencies of the ambiences you create. As these sounds don’t all occur naturally together with the sonic environment of your recording, the frequencies may clash, or blur together. You may come across phasing issues and loss of some sounds, so careful equalisation should be taken into consideration when mixing and editing the ambiences together.

http://designingsound.org/2012/12/creating-the-spaces-of-ambience/