by Jace -

LO3 – Improving and refining Pro Tools audio post-production workflows to align them with industry practice

I will insert examples of my workflow for The real Pirate via screenshots of the project below.

The Real Pirate

Workflow is an incredibly important aspect of professional post-production sound and so a lot of effort went into managing and updating my workflow as I worked on The Real Pirate. from the ground-up, I organised the project to have the optimal organisation, putting anything involving ADR/Dialogue into a track folder labelled VX (Later renamed to DX to match industry standards for project organisation), Sound effects into a track folder called SFX, Ambience into a folder called Amb and any Music, including scoring I wrote, into a folder called Score. This allowed me to mute each category separately to check the mix for each group to make sure everything had it’s own place.

Before recording anything however, I ran a quick spotting session, with an example of some of this spotting in this post, which is a key aspect of correct audio post-production workflow (Cheung, 2023)

Research List

Cheung, R. (2023) Audio Post-Production Workflow Guide. Ottawa: MASV. available from https://massive.io/workflow/audio-post-production-workflow/

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Primary Research – ‘I Love You Dad/Father’s Day’

For this film we went into the sound theatre over the weekend to do foley and ADR work. Unfortunately large portions of the sound recorded in the outside scenes were unusable due to a combination of weather conditions and technical issues, some of the sound was missing due to a corrupted SD card, however the film also had a lot of good opportunities for really expressive sound design and foley choices, such as the director inserting an Edgar Wright style shot, for which I swung a hollow metal pole past a RODE mic for ‘whooshing’ sounds, something I learned when working on my post-production project last year (Everything Everywhere All At Once), for both the camera and the actor and, using a mixture of the on-set recording sounds and foley, put together the fast-paced sound effects necessary for the scene. We also put a bit of gravel on the stone tile in the foley room to recreate the ‘walking on a path’ effect for the characters walking outside. Some of the effects recorded on-set for certain actions needed to be re-recorded using objects from the foley room as the director felt they were too harsh or distracting, such as the moving and opening/closing of the toolbox. The sound from set was a very loud, metallic, scraping against the wooden floor, which we replaced with the sound of the foley room suitcase dragging across the floor.

All of the work I did on the sound for this film was conducted in roughly 5 days, all the way up to the night before the deadline, due to delays in the video editing process. Overall, I’m proud of what we managed to do in that time, conducting extensive sound design for the scenes and completely replacing the sound for both outdoor scenes, a total combined time of about 2 minutes, as well as working closely with the director to manage effects like the machine sound constantly playing for the first 2/3 of the film, and arranging the music, including levels and timing. I only wish we could’ve had more time to properly polish the film.

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A Wonderful Day in Purgatory – Sound Design

“A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one”

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself working on sound design for this animated short film with the very talented pair, Ellie Nielson and Cody Nichols. Ellie had prepared a spotting list from the animatic and, after a few quick watch-throughs, we had some great ideas. Some of the sounds were simple solutions, like using one of the bells in the foley room for the bell ‘Ding’ when the elevator arrives in heaven, and pulling the chair on a wooden board and sitting on it (though I have called this one simple, it took a good bit of co-ordination and trust between Cody and myself).

Thanks to the fact we were working with an animatic, some of the sounds took a bit of intuition, creativity and contextual assumptions to piece together, such as using the ‘clicks’ of the dial on a board in the foley room to emulate the number counter ticking over when a new character arrives in hell.

Creative process

Action Object Surface

Originating point/concept – Picking up a bowl from the fridge

We tried a few things for this. We immediately made the connection we should use a ceramic dish, considering that there might be a bowl in the Alfred Tennyson Buildings kitchen, but settled for one of the ceramic plates in the foley room. Having done some foley before, I knew that you could recreate the sound of picking something up just by moving the object slightly on a surface or another object, which would essentially function as a surface, similar to scraping your shoes on a surface by a microphone to mimic jumping. but finding a surface to move it on to create the sound we wanted was more troubling. We initially tried using the windowsill in the foley room but found it to be too solid sounding. We experimented with using another plate as a surface, which didn’t quite give us the sound we were looking for, so we then tried using the bottom of some plastic tubs in the foley room, starting with an ice cream tub, which sounded too hollow, then one of the large yellow tubs, which still sounded too hollow, then the bottom of one yellow tub with another yellow tub inside, which still wasn’t quite right. We knew we wanted something more glass-like, but in the absence of a plate of glass anywhere we were stumped for a moment, before I decided to use the actual window of the foley room as our surface. After a few takes we got the sound we were looking for.

Picking up a bowl from the fridge was recreated by pulling a ceramic plate from the window.

Similarly, we needed to create the sound of some money suddenly lighting on fire.

Originating point/concept – Money combusting (fire)

considering the basics of what sudden flames sound like, we knew we needed I kind of ‘whooshing’ sound. For this I removed my hoodie and flapped it by the microphone with a wind cover on.

Conclusion

Not every sound recreation required a lot of experimentation, but it did require a bit of intuition regarding how some materials interact with others, such as with the plate and the window, and how a listener would interpret different sounds we create with these intuitive solutions, such as the hoodie flapping by the microphone.

by Jace -

LO2 – ‘Sourcing and directing actors in the context of sound design’

I Love You Dad / Father’s Day

There was a lot of dialogue required for ADR. All outdoors shots needed to be redubbed as the weather conditions ruined any and all sound recordings, which hugely impacted the dialogue beyond anything. The first ADR we recorded was for Thomas Klos, who played a construction worker in the film. He required very little direction in terms of his ADR performance, besides reminding him to shout and getting extra takes for different inflections. Next we had to focus on the main actor, Alex Morningstar, who was great to meet and work with, and whose lines were the most important to get right as his availability was quite limited. Directing Alex was a great exercise in learning which words to use to get the right performance, such as suggesting he yell rather than shout, as “shout” was getting us rather timid results, whereas “yell” got us just the right sound on the first attempt. our final ADR performance was from Danny, who played the 2nd construction worker. Having him ADR was an interesting experience as his character had to respond to some ad-libbed lines from Tom as his first line, rather than scripted interaction. This meant having him run through some test responses to set levels and check inflection and volume before giving him the go ahead, which worked like a dream.

In technical terms, I adjusted the height of the microphone for each actor and reset the levels for each actors performance, as well as giving regular directions in terms of distance from microphone to prevent popping and proximity effect, such as suggesting that Alex be 3 feet from the microphone during his yell both to prevent popping and proximity. The microphone we used was an SE Electronics X1 as it had a cardioid pickup meaning we could avoid bleed from the sound theatre.

The Real Pirate

For this project, I am planning on taking on the animation team to have them perform some fun voice acting work for their film, as I feel that it would help with fostering that collaborative atmosphere and relationship I wanted with the team, as well as making sure the performance they have for these characters is as accurate as possible to their intentions with the film. However, for the project as it’s being submitted, the voice acting for the main character was done by myself and the scream from the man on the dock at the end was performed by Finn Thomas, whose setup choices were similar to that of the ADR done by Alex for ‘Fathers Day’.

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Primary research for ‘The Real Pirate’

Being the sound designer for an animated film, the vast majority of sounds not involving waves and seagulls had to be performed by either myself or another student, and some of these sounds proved harder to pin down than others.

One I am particularly happy with, in terms of figuring out a more creative method for creating the sound, was the creaking of the ship.

Creative Process

Action Object Surface

initial sound – Wooden Ship Creaking

My first thought for this sound was to attempt to bend a wooden board or a plastic pole to make a creaking noise however I didn’t want to break anything and I found my attempts were causing too much handling noise, so I went back to the basics.

I thought about what creaking itself sound like, rather than what sounds like creaking.

I determined that, at it’s core, a wooden ship creaking sounds like a light, hollow, tapping of two pieces of wood. I started by grabbing a small drumstick-style stick from the shelf and tapping it on the table in the foley room, however the metallic sound of the table legs proved to be too loud, so I eventually, created this sound by tapping the small drumstick on a wooden board kept in the foley room. After some initial listening and lining up, I realised it felt too close, too clean and too high, so, in pro tools, I applied a pitch changer to down pitch the sound about an octave, on a 50/50 split for the wet/dry, and a low pass filter to make the creaking sound feel deeper, as well as automating a reverb on/off for when a scene would take place inside a ship as opposed to on the ships deck.

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Project Updates 14.04.24

The Real Pirate

I met with the students behind ‘The Real Pirate’ on the 26th of March to get a better idea of what they were looking for as well as to discuss establishing a future timeline with them and to gather feedback on my work, meeting some of them for the first time and creating a more collaborative working relationship with the group.

There is a newly updated version of the project which I will embed below, showing marked improvements in terms of the chosen and recorded sound FX as well as some voice acting performances from myself.

I am yet to receive any updated visuals from the group however form the meeting I gather that some of the scenes have been reshuffled and there is a newly added scene at the end of the film where there was previously a fairly long blank space.

We also discussed having them come in to record some of the voice work and they seemed to be receptive to that idea, including performing the VA for the monkey character, further driving the collaborative aspect. Despite some minor notes that essentially came together into pieces that weren’t there visually yet, they enjoyed the version they saw and the work is going ahead as planned. However, the teams submission date for the animation is the 26th of May, meaning the version I submit with my sound design will be incomplete visually, which is rather unfortunate, however I have resolved to finish the sound design afterwards regardless, as it’s something I’m enjoying doing and I want to continue our collaborative relationship in good faith.

I have also started some light scoring as an extra addition to the projects sound.

Film Sound

‘I love you, dad’

My post-production sound editing and recording will begin for ‘I love you, dad’ this coming Tuesday (16.04.24), and I have remained in contact with the films director and sound recordist so I can best prepare my ideas for post-production sound.

‘Questioning’

On this film I have been both the boom operator and sound recordist on various occasions, including during both reshoot sessions and during 2 of the 3 standard shoot days. The crew were great fun to work with and I look forward to a continued positive working relationship with them. I am not sure when the film will be out but I look forward to its release.

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Another successful studio session

Last friday I embarked on a foley mission into the ATB audio theatre to record several base AFX for ‘The Real Pirate’, pictured below is me organising tracks and recording some foley audio myself. I used Rode NTG-2s for the foley, and I recorded most sounds from between 1 and 2 feet away to prevent any proximity effect.

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The Real Pirate – post 2 – Progress

This week I focussed on starting the collection of various sounds, largely centred around the ambience for the animation (waves, seagulls n such). While I did experiment with a few other sounds such as blinking and footsteps these are still in the early stages. I started this process with my initial spotting sheet done for the first 40 seconds of the animation to give myself a contained area to analyse, then creating what I call a “Solutions Sheet” which basically describes what I want to do to find or create the sounds I noted on the spotting sheet.

Spotting sheet 1 (intro)
Solutions sheet 1 (intro)

After this I used freesound.org to source as many effects as I could find that I thought fit the category of sounds I can’t recreate (gulls, waves n such) and put them into various bookmarked folders associated with my general mindmaps (cartoony, cliche and basic) with an extra folder called “who know” for things I was sure I liked but didn’t yet have a use for.

Here is the WIP so far.

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The Real Pirate – first post

After an arduous process of reformatting this blog for multiple projects, and not just the one I completed last semester, the first post for ‘The Real Pirate’ is finally here!

so, what have we got so far? besides an animatic of the full short with a basic scratch track provided by the animators, nothing to actually show on the blog just yet. I have a basic spotting sheet with some technical solutions and a few mind-maps put together with an aim to have my own scratch tracks (yes, plural) to be completed over the next week or two, and then brought to the animators for opinions.

I am optimistic about the future of this project as the animators seem very passionate about their creation and it’s really a very fun little animation.

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Development Notes – Final Week

As my final post of notes I’ll be rounding out any last minute changes as well as attempting to solidify any things I haven’t outright stated in any previous posts.

Last changes

following my last tutoring session on this project, I will be making some alterations to the sounds of the scream in the intro to make it sound more haunting, as well as actually uploading my fabled scene 3 as I believe it fits in well with the learning objective I had for conveying position in a 3d audio environment.

DeadFright and the market gap

During my research into the games industry, to see which games inspired my decisions, I stumbled upon a game called DeadFright, a kickstarter crowdfunded videogame designed in, seemingly, the exact same way I had envisioned my game being designed. To be clear, I discovered this long after I had come to most of the same conclusions around how an audio-based horror game should be designed. The game never got a full release, however there is a playable demo available on itch.io and the steam page is still up, implying that it is still being developed, but the kickstarter page hasn’t been updated since 2020 and it failed to reach it’s initial $21,000 funding goal, with it’s kickstarter campaign ending in November of the same year having reached only $2,193.

This game’s potential existence highlighted what is essentially a gap in the market for these kinds of games, as the people who’ve played the demo seemed to have largely positive things to say about the experience, and the few websites that wrote articles about the game’s progressing development seemed to be . I think it’s telling, though, how I, someone who actively plays a lot of video games and is generally very aware of interesting and innovative gaming experiences in development, only managed to discover this game by accident while researching how a game like this should be made. I think that what essentially killed this project was a lack of marketing. it has a twitter page with one post, which is just a link to the kickstarter page, a fairly barebones instagram page which seems to be built purely to direct people to the kickstarter page, a facebook page with a few posts, some of which that do actually talk about some aspects of the game besides the kickstarter page, but with very little engagement and only being posted directly to the page and without any visible attempt to appeal to any kind of audience, their website, which seems to no longer be operable, and their itch.IO page, which is about as barebones as you can get. Despite this seeming lack of attempt to attract people to the game, it did get positive responses form the people that discovered it, which begs the question of what could’ve been, had this game had more powerful marketing and financing behind it. The main developer, Jorge Orta, also seems to have dropped off the face of the earth after the final post related to the game appeared on their facebook page on the 5th of November 2020, although his linkedin page still lists him as the head developer and founder of the company behind it, Korta Interactive.

Construction of the Sound Library

In organising my sound asset library, I based my structure on an article from ASoundLibrary.com called “How To Create A Sound Effect Library”. In this guide, it is recommended that sounds are broken down into sections to make the desired sounds easier to find. to follow this, I separated the effects I recorded or downloaded into 3 folders, Field recordings – for the recordings I did in the West Commons, Foley recordings – for the recordings I did in the Foley room in the audio theatre, and Freesound.com – for the sounds I downloaded from freesound, with the file names unchanged as to retain all information left by the original uploaders. Within the 2 folders of sounds I recorded, the recordings have been separated based on the main object used in creating the sound e.g. “stick vs rock” went into “stick”, and from there the sounds, if there were a lot, were further divided, e.g. “Stick vs Rock” went into “Impacts”. This meant that if I wanted the sound of a stick being thrown at a tree I could go Field Recordings -> Stick -> Impacts, and I would find every recording I did of a stick hitting a tree.

Variation in project concept

There were various points in development where I lost focus and started to talk or think more about what the actual game would be like as opposed to what the sound should be, like debating control schemes and plot elements etc. Early on I also threw around a UI concept which obviously wouldn’t exactly be necessary in a game made for people who can’t see, and definitely wouldn’t be necessary for an audio project focussed on the sound side of that game instead of the visuals.

The Name

I named the project “Teneberis Tenebris” because, to be perfectly honest, I was messing around on google translate seeing what some words were like in Latin. I started with blind and somehow ended up on darkness, which came out as Tenebris. I then accidentally typed Teneberis in when reverse translating to see how it translated from Latin to English, as google translate has a bit of a reputation for spitting out strange translations, and it came out “You will be kept”. putting these two together you get “you will be kept in darkness” or “Teneberis Tenebris”, which I found to be a pretty apt summation of the games premise, as well as being a strangely nice title.