Sound Design
VOICES ALL IN MY HEAD !!!!!
The process of sound design was something I was really looking forward to, I had a sound scape of the whole film in my head already thanks to my 3rd assessment that was done in my second unit. That helped me get a idea of what I can do without much preparations.
The idea of separate audio playing in different ears and that sense of space was something which I felt was not there in my project. It still felt fake and not natural. With this thought I firstly made a list of things I had to achieve during this sound design process
- Natural Sound Scape
- Every sound effect will be telling a story
- Establishing a spatial effect
- Chaotic at times
These were something things I wanted to achieve, Now as I was ready to sit on a ‘Software’ I realized that whatever is in my head is not at all enough and, this could create a problem. Imagine a film with some good parts but other things are just empty and in my head It felt empty even though I had a good amount of content.
SOUNDING CHAOTIC
The major thing I was very sacred of was that I did not want it to feel empty. I wanted voices every where and every time As one of the goal was to make it chaotic
So as moving on with research I looked back to the game I was inspired by,
Hellblade: Senua Sacrifice
This specific video was a very big inspiration for me to understand what I can do to make it feel chaotic.
I took this video for an example to James to have a small discussion about how I can go about it.
After listening to this he had some concerns, just like how I had. We realized that Its not just too many voices, there are very countable voice actors its the layer of dialogues and the effects on top of it that made it feel very chaotic.
A FANS REQUEST
I have always loved Zack Snyder and the recent film of his called Snyders Justice League, I am a big fan of it. So to give a small tribute to him there is this one specific sound effect that I really wanted to put in my film and I got to James for that particular effect.
Its a scene when Flash has to travel back in time to stop the explosion, when that sequence happens as he enters the speed force there is a reverse effect on his voice which sounds so good and give so much justice to the story telling. It gave the spatial feeling to the viewers that Its happening in speed force and everything is suppose to be weird.
That got me to James and he explained me the ways it was done and this teaching led me decide the software I was about to use for the edit.
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I had different experiments done in many different software and the three software I decided to test were.
- Audition
- FL Studio
- Pro Tools
AUDITION
One of the most used software out there for the sound design as It is very much compatible to any Adobe software, that itself attracted me because I was using Premier to edit, Let me correct, almost edit my film and that made sense.
According to James who helped me getting my sound effects on, I remember him saying that its not the number of voices in the film its the number of effects put on it, and the effect he asked me to do some research on was ‘REVERSE REVERB’
That was something I tried doing in Audition. I took one of the recording from my actor and tried playing with Audition and unfortunately it didn't give me the kind of feel I wanted from the effect.
FL Studio, I personally didn't chose to use it because I already knew the software and I also needed a license of it to use it which I did not have.
PRO TOOLS
I had James, he is the master of pro tools and he made me realize that the effect I wanted for my characters in the film is just a single tick in this software, We had a small session on pro tool where we learnt how to import, export, record and do some effects on top of the sounds.
The most fascinating thing I felt was that pro tool allowed me to put video clip side by side and create or put sound according to that. Well this was true for any audio software but by this time I started liking Pro Tools a lot and it is a industry standard tool and its good to learn it.
Process
It began with me importing the video that I got from Premier pro in form of AFF file in the pro tool, which allowed me to get access to all the dialogue that I had put in Premier without any changes. This made my life easy and then I started cutting the audio from the dialogue I recorded into the project.
By the end I ended up including 8 tracks in my project, it looked beautiful but scary at the same time as I had to put effects on top of it.
I used EQ to clear the weird sound issues from the recording of Kerrie. But it was still not as clear as I wanted it to be compared to Grace’s recording.
Panning
The most important part of the sound was the panning, as it told the story and gave a private space to the different voices.
Grace’s voice was always heard form the right side of the headphones and Kerrie was vice versa, My voice as the grounded one was always in the centre.
I wanted to use this panning as a familiarity to the viewers to understand who is speaking and what tone is it establishing. Also It gave a personal space to these characters, A space where they could live.
Sometime in some chaotic situations I made these voice continuously pan from one side to another representing the chaos in the head of Raz, And also wanted to represent the action of people when they are in panic.
The biggest issue I was facing was the levels of the sound, Because of so many sound effects playing on top of other the levels of the sound were sky rocketing. I kept this aside for a while as I was about to have a session of audio mixing soon and that would help me doing this.
After using certain number of EQ and other plugins.
Here was the final sound effects I went for after doing many trial and error.
