(Unlisted due to it needing to be private before being released at Film Festivals
Disappear
is a film directed by Greg Anthony James, about three contestants who
sign their lives away, in the hope to win a competition that will
make them rich. It is set in the present day, and revolves around the
characters Damian, Ross and Alice, having to secretly give up their
identities and find ways to survive. The piece is very naturalistic
and I found this to be an interesting concept because one may assume
it would be set in a dystopian future or set fictional world, but
instead it takes place in modern day London. I worked alongside
another Sound Designer- George Anckorn, and we had initially agreed
to split the 15 minute video in half at the musical montage. It was
later decided we would take a specific role for the full 15 minutes
in order to keep the consistency of effects and mixing between the
two halves. George was in assigned to recording and editing the
Foley/ Sound Effects and then editing (including EQ'ing). I was
assigned to editing and EQ'ing the dialogue and atmos. Once we had
completed our individual tasks, we combined the two components and
edited some of the parts together. I then took this piece and mixed
all of it mainly using a post production edit suite as I found it
much more effective for monitoring levels and increasing my work flow
speed.
Upon
first inspection of the video, it seemed like there wasn't a lot that
needed doing. Most of it had been recorded on Sennheiser Radio Mic's
and there had been a location sound operator present using a
Sennheiser 416 shotgun microphone. It then became apparent that the
spill of noise from each location they had recorded in, would make it
difficult to find atmos to match. A lot of the dialogue was quite
'clear' but other parts had a noticeable background 'hum' or some
slight muffled or distorted qualities. This was mainly due to the
radio microphones used, being on the actor's clothes and under
jackets etc. To try and work around this, I extended the audio
handles on most of the clips. From here I edited the in and out fade
points; so that the jumps between locations weren't so apparent, and
any hum faded in and out only lasting for a short period of time. I
tried to EQ the voices in relation to the character's location; so
for example in the opening scene, I wanted to keep the 'bassiness'
to the Adjudicators voice. As it is set in an ominously lit room, I
thought keeping a sharp but 'bassy' timbre, make him sound more
threatening and powerful. I didn't need to use any reverb plugin's
because the radio mic's captured the rooms ambience optimally. but
sometimes the recordings that were a bit muffled already, didn't
greatly benefit from being EQ'd.
Another
role I undertook was track laying and organising all of the foley
George had recorded and the editor Naomi had organised in the OMF
file. Before I did this, all the audio was quite jumbled up; with
some foley on the rough dialogue tracks and vice versa. I went
through each line of audio and then separated it all out into
character order; starting with the first person in the scene,
followed by Foley 1, 2 and 3 etc. I then colour coordinated all
related tracks and this was so I had a quick visual aid for when I
was mixing. I tried to keep tracks to a minimum but due to the two
types of microphone being used on set, each character had 2 tracks
and 2 lots of audio options rather than one. Some of which contained
full vocals from microphones and other's lacked any audio where the
microphone hadn't picked up any sound. George and I decided to mute
some and keep others, as it was sometimes useful to have another file
to 'pad out' the dominant microphone and enhance it slightly or use
to extend and merge atmos. Below
(Fig 1 and 2) are two screenshot examples of before and after I had
organised the tracks.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
The
task of implementing and blending in atmos took quite a lot longer,
due to there being lots of audio breaks, location noise spill and
blunt cuts. An example of this found during the cafe and restaurant
scenes; where the music and general background chatter was often
quite overbearing but then abruptly would come to a stop when the
character's line was over. there were no matching location ambience
recordings to go with it so I had to find atmos that could play on
top, and work as a natural progressive element when there are breaks
in voices but the scene is still happening. (See Image of Cafe audio
breaks)
When
I was given the piece, there was a lot of differentiating volumes in
the sound due to it being shot in different places; such as traffic
congested roads, or totally quiet houses. This meant that mixing
became more difficult than I had initially anticipated. The
combination of choppy shots; that switched between almost total
silence to loudness, required me to keep going over small sections at
a time to make sure it all flowed naturally. An example of a
particularly tricky part was whilst they the character's were on
their phones or in public places. I firstly had to be mindful of how
I EQ'd the character's voices and secondly, try and merge the
location atmos overspill, with my added atmos. Damian's vocal
recordings in the cafe scene were louder (due to the cafe music and
chatter), so I kept this running continuously, even when the edit
changed to show Ross or Alice speaking on the phone. I dipped the
cafe atmos' volume down and placed a high pass filter on top; which
was automated to only kick in when the shot changed to Ross or Alice.
This made it sound like you could hear Damian's location quietly
through Ross's or Alice's phone (See fig 3). I used this technique
later on when Damian stands on the motorway bridge.
Fig. 3
During
the montage scene, George and I decided to use some null extensive
techniques for example when Damian is in the phone box. The montage
music is playing over the top, so you do not hear any atmos or other
sound effects; which we could have left like this, but decided there
were a few single effects that we wanted the audience to hear. In
this scene you only hear him hitting the handset against the
telephone. Later on you hear Damian dump his bags down and Ross
flick his lighter switch; but not any of the other sounds, to imply
that they are completely lost in their own solitary world. Overall
the piece was more challenging than I had anticipated but I think the
edits that George and I made have made the piece sound a lot more
natural and therefore appropriate for it to be entered into a film
festival; which Greg, the Director, intends to do.
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