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.
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