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/
Leave a comment