In my case study about trailers I mentioned that I was tasked to resound one myself. After a few weeks of work I finished and shared my trailer, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about my process, what went right, what I learned and the feedback that was given as well. First of all a little background detail about the project, I was tasked to resound the main trailer for the movie Arctic. I was given dialogue (without timestamps), some free music and some key sound effects including footsteps and some drum samples. Each person was responsible for their own mix but we were encouraged to work in groups for our recording sessions. We were given 6 weeks to complete the task to professional standard, mixing as if it were being uploaded to Youtube which I'll talk about later in another blog. First thing needed doing for the project was foley.
Foley Session:
As per usual I worked with Tom for my foley session in the C24 post production studio. The session went pretty well as we make a great team and didn't run into too many problems during the recordings. For equipment we used a shotgun mic and our newly acquired Neumann U87 condenser a famously sensitive and responsive microphone. We mostly stuck with our Sennheiser MKH416 shotgun mic as it worked best at eliminating background noise which the C24 has an abundance of. So our list of foley sounds included but wasn't limited to:
- Digging (Small metal pole hitting gravel
- Snow sounds for layering under impacts (dense black foam rubbed on itself)
- Equipment handling sounds (Mostly manipulating a metal lunch box)
- Stove bubbling (Tom making sounds with his mouth)
- Fishing (Playing with water in a bottle)
- Body impact (Dropping a bundle of fabric onto the ground)
- Clothing noise (Manipulating a cold weather jacket of mine)
Foley sessions are something Tom and I love doing as we both have a great passion for post production work like this. We both have a pretty good imagination when it comes to creating sound for films, games and any other project we're working on. In hindsight and with feedback from my project (which I will get into later) a way we could have made our trailer a bit more dynamic and involved is spending just a little more time fleshing out some parts of the trailer. You'll see in the final product there are still a few gaps in our work that could have been filled. Some moments that come to mind are the polar bear entering the cave, the fishing scene needs a few more elements and also the scene when the girl slides down the slope. If I were to go back and touch up and improve some scenes I would change those pieces first. All in all our foley worked really well with the scene but as always there is room for improvement. Next part of the project for me was editing everything we recording to build a rich soundscape.
Editing:
Once we had all our recording out of the way I started going through what we'd done and making everything fit. One key aspect I focused on during this time was getting the wind ambience just right. A huge part of this trailer is making the viewer feel for the two stuck in the Arctic my way of doing that was having en emphasis on their environment. So I went back through and old project of mine and finding my wind samples I used for other projects involving cold harsh wind.These are some loops I made for a project called Fight for Kindness set in a harsh frozen post apocalyptic Australia. The wind is made using a plugin called Falcon and has a randomized setting so each of the loops has a different ebb and flow. I used these in the arctic trailer to add some variance to the wind to make it feel more realistic. Another key part of getting the wind right was having a different kind of wind for inside and outside. Obviously if you're indoors the wind will fade out and you'll only really hear the lower frequencies of the wind. So I used my soft wind loop with a low-pass filter whenever the setting was inside rather than out.
The next part of my editing was the foley sounds making sure they were in time and doing any small types of edits they needed to fit in. Mostly this job involves pitch shifting, filtering out high-end frequencies and maybe some warping and noise removal.
After my foley was in place to save space and make sense of my session I bounced it as a stereo file and added it to my master session where I added dialogue and music.
Though the dialogue was provided for us it was up to us to decide what to use and make sure it was in time and cleaned up properly. The dialogue was purposefully out of sync and a little messy but it was a good exercise to help us work with these kinds of assets in the future. The first thing I did was do a little bit of cutting and cleaning using my RX de-noise plugin. This helped clean up the lines and I could start syncing them properly. I ended up stretching the pacing of one or two of the lines to match the actor's lips using the time stretch tool in Pro tools which is a neat trick to know for the future. I also used some subtle high end filtering for when you can't actually see the main character speaking. This adds the feeling like he is talking away from you but doesn't totally obscure what he is saying. The dialogue was a great little exercise for me and my experience with my podcast really came in handy as I knew where to best EQ his voice and tricks for removing unwanted noise. The final part of the project was the music.
Now I'm no Hans Zimmer and you probably know by now music isn't really my forte. However I gave it a crack and the music assets provided and added my own contribution as well. For the start of the trailer I wanted a focus on the environment and actions of him digging the SOS so I didn't have music start until the shot panned up to reveal what we was doing. The music I used for this part was this royalty free song which I pitch shifted because it was too bright and in doing so added an eerie distorted effect as well. The next scene to include music was the inside the plane which i originally used free somber piano music for as well but I realised I could do that myself as many students used the same music I did for that scene. So I ended up using my MIDI controller and playing some A minor chords to the video in Pro Tools I was was proud of the result as I don't usually do my own music for these kinds of projects. One cue I missed during the trailer was the energy shift when the main character leaves the plane and risks it all to travel across the tundra. For that moment I was still playing sad piano so it doesn't match up very well. The next piece of music I used was another piece they provided with I used as a growing bass layer and over the top I used some tense strings. My strings however didn't really match the action on screen and they are kind of jarring. I need t improve on making the music mesh together better and working to build tension rather than just filling space in the mix. I ended finishing the trailer with the same piano chords to tie to back together which I feel was a nice touch musically but now in hind sight it seems a little lazy as well. Overall my music was hit and miss but I did learn a lot with the over all process about building tension and writing music in the right key as well.
Overall the project went well as a learning exercise but I'm not really too happy with the end result. I intend to go back and improve this trailer and even to a 5.1 version as well to familiarize myself with mixing in surround sound. Without any more talking at you here my my end result ( please ignore the colour I think I bounced it wrong).
With hindsight and the feedback I received these are some of the changes I want to make are:
- Duplicate the wind in most scenes and pitch one down and one up to get a more realistic and thicker ambience (also cover more frequencies as I was told mine were a little thin).
- Pitch some of my brighter foley down to match the scene (Main example of this is the digging at the start, my flare during the bear scene and the squeaky equipment noise)
- Balance my volumes better throughout the mix.
- Mix using proper speakers rather than my headphones to get a real feel of my stereo and frequency response which was lacking on the theater speakers.
- Fix my music and use more crescendos to build tension.
- Master the mix properly so it is louder and stands out more.
- Add more foley to missing gaps
Post Reflection Reflection:
Looking back at some of the observations I've made about this project I realised that I could have been a lot more critical of my work. Being a sound designer is creating a world of audio that not only fits in place and makes sense but emotes and conveys how the creator wants you to feel. Looking back at this project I missed that goal by a mile, so to improve my work I need to truly critique my decisions and outcomes. To do so I am going to re-watch the trailer I made and critique as though I had no hand in making it just to see how much room there is for improvement. I believe this is a process I need to become much more familiar with as I enter this truly critical world of sound design.
First things first this trailer is designed to make you feel specific emotions, mainly fear, isolation and subdued hope of survival. I don't believe this version of the trailer invokes those feelings at all. The use of environmental wind is a nice touch and they change from scene to scene increasing and decreasing as they should but it's never enough to make you worry for the people on screen. A more dynamic and larger sounding wind effect would have added more meaning to the scenes and made the viewer more afraid and worried of their environment. Much of the music used as well didn't do enough to add to the intensity. The music during the opening of the trailer after the SOS is showed is more curious in nature rather than frightening or unnerving which is what the start of the trailer is meant to develop. In that particular part of the trailer you are meant to feel how alone and isolated the character must be. To do that with music is hard but instead the focus should be on the environment and foley as well as sounds from the character. This was not achieved in this remake of the trailer, in particular the foley of digging at the beginning of the trailer was much too bright and don't really match the actions on screen which immediately disconnects you from the narrative. Going back to the music the next scene is an intimate exchange between the two characters fearing deeply for one another's survival mostly due to the girl's condition. The piano chords being played in the scene are sad due to them being in A minor however there isn't enough there to actually make you feel sad or worried for either two, it's like someone telling you to be sad rather than making you actually feel it. There is also a crucial missed transition in the trailer when the main character decides to leave their shelter and try and risk everything outside. The music doesn't change during this transition and skips these feelings completely which misses the entire point of the music in the first place. Rest rest of the music used in the trailer is also kind of misplaced, the use of strings to convey tension seem extremely out of place and seem to be just slotted in as a cheap attempt to scare people. There could have been many opportunities to build tension over time by using risers and crescendos but they too were missed. The end of the trailer as well has the same piano chords as the piece in the plane which is a nice call back to a pre-established theme but that theme needs to make sense in the first place so this technique is also quite a dud. All in all the music didn't really make sense at all in this trailer and needs great improvement if it were to be attempted again. I believe that is the biggest flaw in this project, if the music had set the right tone and made the audience feel what they were meant to this trailer would have achieved it's goal. It fell short due to disconnected score and lack of conveyance of emotion. The dialogue and foley did fit alright and the environment sounds also worked but could have been improved. Overall it was the music that let this attempt down and now that I know this when or if I go back to this I know where to start to improve myself.
Going through this process really has helped my understanding of my workflow and what I missed and in the future if I feel I let a project down or made some key mistakes this will by my first port of call to correct those issues. Also I should practice this process by analysing other media as well particularly games I wish to emulate or learn from.
Thank you for reading and feel free to leave any feedback you like.
Comentarios