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.
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