I am aware this piece takes me over the 40 minute mark so please view this as my last portfolio piece and only count the desired minutes to take my portfolio to the 40 minute cut off period.
I
worked with Marina Ivanovic on the production and sound editing of
her Documentary about Rastko Dance group. I helped her film some of
the more recent footage of the dancers performance (Marina filmed the
interviews), and this included recording a backup audio track on my
Zoom H4N. I found this process a little challenging in itself; as
there was only me to film it and monitor the sound at the same time.
Unfortunately; both the backup track and the recorded camera audio,
suffered from noise distortion. The lady in charge of music playback
at the rehearsal often changed the volume in accordance to the song,
but all were very loud and despite being quite far away from the
playback speaker, both my camera and Zoom struggled and the distorted
quite badly due to the volume. Because I was trying to film the
dancing, this clipping was only noticed during the sound edit. The
'quieter' dances had recorded cleanly on both my camera and my Zoom
when played back to check the quality. Over 30 minutes of footage had
been recorded and we weren't able to sit and watch/listen through it
all which was why this distortion went unnoticed until it was too
late.
In
all honesty, I found this piece particularly challenging, due to the
quality of the video footage that the film is predominantly made up
of. The editor; Marina, had been given permission by the Rastko dance
teacher Nada, to compile very old footage and use it in her
documentary. All of this footage was originally recorded to VHS and
at some point transferred onto DVD, so the audio quality was
horrendously bad. Marina had to copy the video onto her computer and
edit it down into the core clips so there was a lot of miss matched
music and audio quality. These clips were edited in two different
editing programmes and later compiled onto one so I wasn't left with
much room to edit the audio. An example of what complicated things
quite majorly was the lack of 'handles' on the clips. This meant I
could only work with the immediate audio that was there and not
deviate from this where I have been able to on other projects. Being
able to extend the audio clip either side would have allowed me to
create some much cleaner fades. Another difficulty faced came about
with the age of the footage, some contained an awful lot of 'noise'
which was difficult to edit out. I EQ'd some of this and on some
clips; was able to almost completely mute out the 'hissing', but it
was replaced by a very high pitched sound instead. This wasn't as
noticeable though so I felt it was better to use that instead of the
original. Due to the version of my Pro Tools programme, I was unable
to import the OMF I had created in Premiere, to try and allow me more
editing options. I attempted to open it in Logic and even Sound
Track Pro, but for some reason it kept displaying error messages. I
was left with the only option of editing it all in Premiere Pro! This
in itself was a challenge as the interface is poorly designed for
audio editing. The fades were very specific and did not allow for
much change in the way that Pro Tools would. I had hoped to create
smooth transitional fades between each clip but it was difficult to
do this as the programme is quite unresponsive where fades are
concerned. The faders on the mixer did not respond as well as those
on Pro Tools, and without a audio control interface like a Command 8
I had to make do with using a mouse. On the voice over, I tried to
keep the volume levels equal, and EQ'd her voice so that it sounded
less boxy. I also added a low level of reverb to give the audio some
depth instead of it being completely flat (see
fig 1)
Fig.
1
Marina
had stated that she wanted the documentary to have a really retro
vibe to match the footage, but working with the older footage with no
audio handles really meant I was limited with what I could do and
this would be the same for any sound designer who had worked on it
unless they had access to higher version of pro tools. Overall Marina
was happy with the piece. As a Sound Designer it was a big learning
curve and I learnt that upgrading software; if an expensive outlay at
the time, is always worth it, as it could affect your abilities at
some point costing you a job. I also learnt that if the editor is
using footage taken from a dvd and cropped down; where possible, ask
them to 'over crop' so that there are some audio handles available.
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