Our aim of this project was to create a cinematic response to the mute film that was given to us through audio. We were asked to create every single sound
Technical quality:
Since the first day Paul and Jon always stated they would make us go in groups. we at the end of the day choice the groups ourselves which we were very grateful about mainly because we can spilt it fair due to peoples commitment to actually tuning up. we knew a few people would be sloppy which we actually put in the group with th best people for that certain job. this was proved to be well thought of as many people didn’t turn up or disappeared throughout the day. the committed people were very committed, their each day, turned up early to start.
Jon set up production meetings at 9:30. in which we had to be there else we wouldn’t be allowed to do that day. which made people come in. this i thought was fantastic as it made people want to get up early to do it.once all the sounds were getting recorded a few certain people got sloppy but nothing that would slow us down. The first few sections of the film we got done very fast i.e ADR and sounds effects. but towards the end it got harder as the film got more into the action scene.
For the first few weeks we did ADR, we came in in exactly 9:30am and most of us had ago at ADR. i played two characters, the fat guy in the car and one of the military guys. We all had half an hour to remember our lines and all toke it in turns as he had a hour each to do our bits. i used a old groggy voice for one of my characters and also a liverpool accent for an other. we used garageband to record our voices under a wav format. one of the hardest things about doing ADR for vex ell was that we needed to make it look like the character is talking, but that was hard mainly because vexelle is a Japanese film so it is near enough impossible to get the lips in sync but i honestly thing we did a good job. There is not a lot of i think we could of improved much but i do believe a few voice actors could of done bait better. At one point i felt like i was the director for the voice actors as i was helping everyone stretch their vocal chords and making them shout.
The next 1 – 4 weeks we started working on foley, we all split into 5 teams to do 3minutes of the film. Me,Pete and Craig were in charge of footstep, snow and robots. We used various of metal clanks, bricks, washing machine, concrete floor, rocks, shoes, crates, doors, VCR players, tv’s and video cameras. We started to place them how ever sensitive we needed on the floor and put the mic very close to the object to record it properly. We spent the first week grabbing resources from various house holds and rooms from the college and spent the other two weeks recording them.
For the Atmospheric sound i spent 2 weeks on freesound.org spending time trying to find various wind, water, snow and explosion sounds. Most of the wind sound i actually went out with my Zoom mic and picked up a pretty windy day to get pure day time sounds.
i believe we all suited our roles fine and we got the video done in a very professional manor. one thing i did like was the fact that everyone who did played their part played it well. in on time and got the work done. we really pushed and work together very hard to produce all these sounds, some on set that one day and some in the edit suit editing together the sounds and the final result was nothing but brilliant. Personally i think we did very well. I think we handled the work better than expected. We had a plan A and B for when people never turned up but we never had one for people who don’t do the work, this is something we will work on for next time.
the one negative is that obviously there was about 5 nameless people who didn’t do much work, these people really slowed us down and i believe the whole group got abit annoyed, 2 kept leaving for early breaks, 2 didn’t show up and one didn’t get the work in on time. this made the work a lot harder on the people who were actually doing the work was was not acceptable pushing extra work on top.
Meeting deadlines were better than expected. we had 8 weeks to meet the deadline. We did sounds every Wednesday and some thursdays and fridays for 8 weeks. This gave us enough time to get all the sounds in on time and also get the edit done.
The edit went well. it was very time consuming because their were a lot of sourced sounds needed but that was more of a learning curve for me as i didn’t look for sourced sound first. i just did it on the day of the edit which was bad from my end.
After watching the final product a few months later i thought i would give you a rewind theatre (kind of like a rewind theatre) to discuss what i did, how i did it and why i did it. i did this so you could literally see it from my point of view, figure out why i did the things i did and see if you spot the things i did. i also went over a few things i wanted to do differently or even take out.
Create a sound design for the first 14 minutes of: ‘Vexille’ (2007)
As a whole group we will act as a re-dubbing sound design team for the Science Fiction Anime film ‘Vexille’ (2007). Our brief is to create a new sound design for the English language release of the film.
Here is the muted version of the opening 14 minutes of the film (with subtitles as a guide for dialogue).
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Assessment Task 3: ‘From the Ground Up’ – Building a Sound – Criteria: 2.1 & 3.1
After creating all the sounds and ADR we edited together a few tests:
Create a sound design for the first 14 minutes of: ‘Vexille’ (2007)
As a whole group we will act as a re-dubbing sound design team for the Science Fiction Anime film ‘Vexille’ (2007). Our brief is to create a new sound design for the English language release of the film.
Here is the muted version of the opening 14 minutes of the film (with subtitles as a guide for dialogue).
Want to see our Progress?
Check
Assessment Task 3. Criteria: 2.1 & 3.1
After creating all the sounds and ADR we edited together a few tests:
We used RODE microphones for the foley which are perfect because they direct the sound to ward the microphone. to power these mics we need phantom power. Phantom power is a method for transmitting DC electric power through microphone cables to operate microphones that contain active electronic circuitry. It is best known as a convenient power source for condenser microphones, though many active direct boxes also use it. The technique is also used in other applications where power supply and signal communication take place over the same wires.
Recording
To record these sounds we used Garageband.
Source materials
To get sounds that we cant perform ourselves we have to use a website named http://www.freesound.org on this site professional sound designers create their sounds and upload them on there for free. all we have to do is give them credit for their sound. i only research sounds i need and cant create myself i.e futuristic noises and explosions.
Editing:
After we recorded all the sounds we each had to create a individual edit. While we were creating the sounds a couple of students were taking all the sounds and transporting them from hard drive to another mac. enter them all in garageband and export them as a whole sound track and many individual tracks so that people can place them where ever they want in the edit. We then put all the sounds on Google Drive so we could all take the sounds home with us. We then arranged them into a file network. This makes work easy for all of us as it now will be a drag and drop process into premiere pro or other programmes as the students preference.
In the Google Drive, Vexille (The movie we are sound designing) i dragged onto my laptop. clicked “Get info” and read the movie ratio which read 1280 x 718. By seeing this ratio i can set my Premiere Pro project to the same ratio here i made a project 1280 x 718 and 50FPS
I had a little play around with the audio and visuals and noticed that some of the audio wasn’t exported right. They were Mono when we asked for Stereo this was easily fixed using the fill right or fill left.
While looking and labelling my workflow i realised to saved time i would create a lot of sound tracks so i can play each sound on individually. At the end of the time i created about 300+ tracks, i then named the track after what sound i would put on i.e if there was a ADR sound track from a student i would put “ADR Track 1” and if it was Richard i would put “ADR Track 2”. i did the same with Sound effects and Foley. At this point it was a very drag and drop starter. we actually ended up with about 7 pre made sounds which would fill up the whole film but there was still quiet a few missing sounds in which we need to bring the movie come alive.
ADR
Thankfully the class already synced up all the ADR for all the characters in one .AIF codec. (which indicates that the sound has been recorded on Garageband) bar a few words. which i have to chase down from several students. the ADR on a whole i thought was okay. on the set i had to direct a few voice actors to really shout from their lungs as it would just make the movie terrible if it wasn’t voice acted aswel. I.e Vicky was one of the main characters and she didn’t like scramming and plus she has a very soft voice. i was listening to her say her lines and i told her to stop and project. Also i thought Craig could of lost the way he did his character but i digress. Once all the ADR was on the timeline i started to play around with the EQ, Reverb and quiet a few other settings. one i was very happy with was when all the characters were in their space suits. what i did was drag and drop a EQ on, clicked the Low, MID1,MID2,MID3 and High check boxes and dragged M3 all the way up to the drop and dropped all the others down. this sounded like they were talking into a microphone in their suits which i really think suited their armour. Also for the spaceship i added bait of reverb to their voices so it sounded like there was a lot of echo in the metal tin can spaceship. as the vocals would bounce across the room.
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Atmosphere
With the Atmosphere we had to watch the film through and try and figure out all the sounds we would hear in the atmosphere surrounding the characters. For the whole film it was snowing so we all had wind in mind. Once all the characters were in the mansion or space ship we will need ambients of their surroundings. Atmosphere personally for me was the easiest thing to do we could source out the sounds from free sound.org or go out and use my zoom and record everything on our own in fields or so.
Sound Design
One of the hardest departments on this project was the Sound Design. This was obvious mainly because elf the hardcore action sequences within the last 6 minutes of the piece also with all of the futureistc parts that stud out including robots and weapon sounds. With this in mind i added 100+ new tracks to fit the idea of all these sound effects i would add in. i ended up using them all. Once again the tracks were all pretty much Stereo tracks with the Odd Mono track. There were many things missing from the sounds mainly because most of the sounds we couldn’t recreate win the studio because of the equipment we couldn’t find. Most sounds that were in the film were made to sound out of this word and very out of our reach so the only way to do this was to find them online or make them yourself on garageband or any other programme. I Hunted for about 2 weeks to try and find the perfect sounds. i typed in key words like “robot, electric, alien and future”. I tried to make sure these sounds were Stereo and matched my project settings as much as possible. i then edited all the sounds firstly by dipping down the audio volumes so the sound system doesn’t pop then added EQ, Volume and Reverb if necessary which it usually was.
One of the Hardest sounds to source and make were the gun shots. now its was almost impossible to create a gun shot with the equipment we had and it was very hard to find the sounds online mainly because they didn’t have the perfect sound for the gun the characters/robots were holding and they didn’t have the sound of a futurist weapon.
Foley
i was part of the Foley team and to create the sounds was very easy, we just watched the film and tried to find similar sounds to match what happened on screen. The track spanned the length of the movie and had already been synched up to the images to save time.
Most of the Sounds in the Foley i actually did not use. including most of the helicopter and atmospheric sound, i decided not to use these mainly because i did not like them. weather they were too strong or too timid. other reasons include the quote “More is Less” so i only used sounds that would impact the story and not show up everything on screen. This was a personal choice.
Music
The music to me sounded robotic, futuristic and crazy. Just like the story. the music i used was The Glitch Mob – How To Be Eaten By A Woman. i used this because it was many layers to it. it can go slow to fast, to slow to fast. the dub step elements made me think of the futuristic side of the film with robots and the fighting. The calmer elements made me think of the scenes with the bad guy talking on the monitor. and the whole music itself made me think of quiet simply a action scene. this made me realise this music is perfect. What i did is cut the music so it matches the pace of the film. One part i am particularly proud of is when the music kicks in when the robot punches the other robot.
Creating our Film.
First we had to look at the roles of a sound design team, they came in three subjects.
1 – Production Audio.
Boom operator – No
Mixer – No
We are Creating sound for an Anime so we will have have on set audio as it is all drawn. So we need no production audio.
2 – Post productions.
Supervisor Sound Editor – John
Dialogue Editor
ADR Editor
Background Editor
Sound effects editor
Foley artist
Music editor
3 – Final mix.
Re-Recording mixer
As it is 14 minutes long we decided to split the whole scene into sections, we will define these by the time code on the film. We will look at this time code via QuickTime media player then we will add description to the scenes so it would help us in the long run.
We then divided out the workload equality across the team. We said that the ADR could be done in a day so once we set up a team they will have a day to get it done and then join all the others and their team.
The spot effects has to be 50% self generated which means that we should create half the spot effects from the scene! I personally am very happy with that’s as once I was watching it I thought the explosions would be very hard to make! and also with the health and safety it would be near Enough impossible to do it in our time limit and in college, also another is the helicopter blades I can’t imagine us getting a real helicopter. Most natural sounds like the snow crunches can be made by us, but we workout that only the footsteps are in foley and the robots and car snow crunches will come in atmosphere. Impact sounds I think will be very easy todo as we have everything we need and that’s usually our person or slot of junk in our studio.
Foley has to be 100% self generated, we have to create all the foley across scenes. We thought that foley could be done in a day if we stay from 9am till 8pm
With atmosphere we all decided we will all individually do that our selves. One big thing we would want is some wind sounds, we figured out that recording wind on our own will sound terrible as the nose hitting the microphone will sound horrible and not like wind at all. We said that we could go to a woodlands and record the wind through tenses to get that whistling sound or we should source and not waste any time, there are some good quality wind sounds out there so most of us will choose to source the files.
No one of was was taught how to create music so we will source that on either youtube or some other royalty free sound website.
In this task i was asked to create a historical timeline in a written, graphical or video format that critically reviews the development of sound design in the film industry.
A Small Timeline of Sound
1877
The Phonograph was the first machine used to record analog sound, it was invented by Thomas Edison. Analog goes through 3 simple steps, first the sound enters a cone component of the device (The Diaphragm) Secondly the sound then causes the microphone diagram which is connected to the small needle. the needle then vibrates causes the sharp tip to give the distinctive groove in the cylinder which used to be made from tin foil.
Sound Effects
Sound effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds that are contents of many TV shows, Video Games, music, animation and so on and so fourth. the Sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or create point without the use of dialogue or music. This process is applied to a recording without necessarily referring to the actual sound itself, i watched a documentary recently about the sound design of Lord of the Ring: The Two towers and to create a Dragon noise they used a Donkey howl and to create shredded paper sounds as grass. In TV and Film the sound design is treated as a separate form of production.
In the context of motion pictures and television, sound effects refers to an entire hierarchy of sound elements, whose production encompasses many different disciplines, including:
Hard sound effects are common sounds that appear on screen, such as door alarms, weapons firing, and cars driving by.
Background (or BG) sound effects are sounds that do not explicitly synchronize with the picture, but indicate setting to the audience, such as forest sounds, the buzzing of fluorescent lights, and car interiors. The sound of people talking in the background is also considered a “BG,” but only if the speaker is unintelligible and the language is unrecognizable (this is known as walla). These background noises are also called ambience or atmos(“atmosphere”).
Foley sound effects are sounds that synchronize on screen, and require the expertise of a Foley artist to record properly. Footsteps, the movement of hand props (e.g., a tea cup and saucer), and the rustling of cloth are common foley units.
Design sound effects are sounds that do not normally occur in nature, or are impossible to record in nature. These sounds are used to suggest futuristic technology in a science fiction film, or are used in a musical fashion to create an emotional mood.
1889 – 1892 – William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was a inventor in born and raised in Scotland who worked for Thomas Edison and invented one of the first morion picture cameras “The Kinetoscope”. The kinetoscope is described as a movie projector by many people but it is so much more than that, it was introduced the basic approach that would be the standerd for all projections until video. this was because they invited one single strip of film that would perforated film in separate images over a light force with a very high shutter speed.
1925 – 1972 – George Robert Groves
George Robert Groves was a film engineer that developed sound for the silent screen. He also obtained a position with the research team at Bell laboratories who were developing sound for film technology using the sound on disc process. he is also credited as being the sound man in all of Hollywood. He won two Academy Awards and became the Director of Sound for Warner Brother and also in the Jazz Singer and The little quiet Englishman he was the recording engineer.
1926
Don Juan a classic tail of a womaniser living a high tale life was one of the first film with a recorded soundtrack. This was created by George Glove with a 107 strong orchestra live with a multi microphone technique. by doing this he became the first music mixer in film history.
ADR
ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement but also known as Dubbing) Is a form of sound recording that is to ensure the best quality of sound for your film. Once recorded they drop the sound file onto the editing software and placed accurately to the characters mouth movements. In big budget films the ADR editor and Dialogue Editor are usually two different people, but in low budget its usually one. ADR/Dialogue Editors may be freelance, or they may be employed by an Audio Post Production House. The ADR is usually done in a sound booth to get the perfect crystal clear audio after the filming is done. Also another kind of ADR in which the original actors re-record and edit together/sync audio segments. Outside of the film industry.
Some of the most Famous ADR/Dubbing is Tom Hardy, who portrayed Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, re-dubbed all of his own lines for ease of viewer comprehension as once the first trailer came out none could understand what Bane was saying. Another was the Star Wars characters Darth Vader and Beru Lars (who was portrayed by Scottish actress Shelagh Fraser). In post-production, James Earl Jones dubbed the voice of Vader and an unknown actress dubbed for Fraser to replace her heavy Scottish accent. In post the characters voice can be completely changed as David Prowse was replaced by James Earl Jones
There are many types of ADR including dubbing for animation and even for games. in a Japanese version of any game. The English take time and re dub everything so it can appeal to their country with translated text and dubbed dialogue, if necessary, in other languages Several Japanese games, such as Sonic the Hedgehogare released with both the original Japanese audio and the American English dub included.
One of the best ADR scenes i have ever seen personally was Forrest Gump: the JFK i need to pee scene.
In this scene forrest jump is meeting the present after a football game and the footage is actually real footage shot with present JFK in the room, They hired a impressionist to ADR JFX saying “how does it feel to be all american” they did this by lip syncing and syncing it perfectly to the footage by placing people in front of his month if he over stepped the line for cutting to another shot.
They did this to make it a lot easier for the audience. imagine if Darth Vader had a happy voice instead of a sinister gritty voice. it just wouldn’t work. Companies made ADR a very personal and a big part of a movie so they can get the perfect character even after filming is done.
1937
MPEG (The Society of Motion Picture Film Editors) was created in 1937 by Ben Lewis, Phillip Cahn and L. James Wilkinson when film editors earned under $100 per week. quiet recently they set up a ADR Workshop which will help students and people who works in film and sound to attend and learn.
1947 – Jimmy MacDonald
Jimmy MacDonald was a english voice actor and the original head of Disney sound effects department. He was also the voice of Mickey Mouse from 1957 to 1977, at the beginning he was a musician on the Dollar steam ship lines which led to a job at disney. He started to direct sound for many shorts and movies like Dumbo, Mickeys Trailer and The Rescuers. MacDonald also added voice effects in 1954 on 20,00 Leagues Under the Sea. in 1947 Walt Disney was too busy to be Mickey Mouse and was replaced by MacDonald himself
1957 – Jack Donovan Foley
Jack Donovan Foley was the creator of many sound effect techniques used in film. He is known as the God of foley as shown in a documented book which was released in 2009 named The Foley Grail: Development of Foley. Foley was part of a sound crew that developed Showboat and the Jazz singer along side George Robert Groves. Foley is the process of adding Sound effects such as foot steps and environmental sound to film to make them seem alot more realistic, Foley artists look to recreate the realistic ambient sounds that the film portrays and uses random props to try and find the sound they are looking for. Foley is used today which are added in post-production to enhance the quality of audio for films, television, video, video games and radio. Jack Foley created sounds for films until his death in 1967. His methods are still employed today.
We tried creating a Foley here.
Foley
Foley effects are sound effects added to the film during the films post production. On a set you cant record every sound the character makes because it would sound very unnaturalistic or maybe you wont want the character to do it on camera so sounds like, glass cracking, doors closing, foot steps are all done post.
1969 – Walter Scott Murch
Francis ford Coppola was the first person to call Murch a sound designer. this is how Murch started out but creating the sound design for Coppola’s film “The Rain People” after he worked on George lucas’s THX and American Graffiti. Then moved on too one of the biggest films in the world. The Godfather.
Atmosphere
The Atmosphere in films is basically the background noise that the character or scene is taking place in. i.e if your creating a city scene you will usually hear car noises or people talking or if your in a cave you will hear wind and maybe drips of water. this basically creates the realisation that your character is in this place.
For the Atmospheres we had a choice out of two scenes to recreate the sound on, the one we chose to do was called “The Mirror” a Tarkobsky film. we choose this one mainly because it seems very hard to determine the atmosphere for it as there is only two rooms with many things happening. We all watched the scene without sound at first as we were all made to make the sounds without knowing the sound of the film. as i was watching it me and craig made notes to see what would be happening in the film. after watching it over 7 times we kind of had a rough idea in our minds how we wanted it.
1975
Skywalker sound is the sound effects, sound design, adr, sound mixing, music recording and sound editing created by George Lucas and founded in 1975 now upholding over 150 employees. Back in 1975 George Lucas and Gary Kurtz hired Ben Burtt and made him Director of sound, someone who could imagine and implement a creative soundtrack and sound effects for the visual effects shown on screen for a film called StarWars.
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1980
The Sound Design Commission is a organisation which promotes theatrical techniques in the US back in 1980 they used to be called Lighting and Sound Design Commission and USITT, the two groups met and worked together for many years. the Sound design members outnumbered the Lighting development. the first Sound design commissioner was Charlie Richmond.
1995
MP3 is a very powerful compression, it strips out alot of the song which our ears cannot hear this reduces the file size further, the result is that the MP3 files are around 11 times smaller than uncompressed music tracks.
1996
Skywalker Ranch is a 4000 acre working ranch that houses the headquarters for Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound
Present
A Sound editor is a professional and creative editing response for combining and editing sound sound in film and music, they master and mix sound for television program, motion picture, music and video games. Sound editors main job is to focus their main efforts to make the film alot more real and to make the audience feel like it is really happening i.e a film will usual be given to the editors with almost no sound and its the sound editors job to create sound for the piece this includes, ADR, Foley, Environmental and sound effects. Many creative Sound editors will go out into the world and record their own sound with their own sound equipment to get the perfect tone for the film they are working on. one of the most famous sounds is the Wilhelm Scream recorded by Ben Burtt which has been repeated in over 100+ films most famous in Starwars and Indiana Jones.
Below is an interesting documentary on how some sounds were created in the popular film series The Lord Of The Rings. Workers in sound have the real chance to have a huge impact in film the films sound design is usually one of the biggest process in any film other than the actual filming itself.
Benjamin “Ben” Burtt, Jr. (born July 12, 1948) is an American sound designer, film editor, director, screenwriter, and voice actor. He has worked as sound designer on various films including: the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series and WALL-E. He is famous for creating many of the iconic sound effects heard in Star Wars, including the the lightsaber hum. (inwhich we will focus on) He says in in this video that he created this sound by accident by dropping a sound recorder near a Television set.
In conclusion SoundDesign, ADR and sound effects are sounds that do not normally occur in nature, impossible to record in nature or just want to add something to a character weather thats completely removing or enhancing voices or changing a language completely. Some sounds are used to suggest futuristic technology in a science fiction film, are used in a musical fashion to create an emotional mood or just to cadd something to a scene.
As aspected there are variety of sounds in each media around the world but what i want to know is the differences between platforms ranging from films, animation and games.. to make it alot different i was to watch/play two different Games/Films and see the difference in sound i.e a Drama to a Action or a First Person Shooter to a strategy.
Sound design is at least as important as filming in a film, one of the most important areas in animation and the most important areas in computer games other than the gameplay itself obviously. Sound design can determine how successful a project can be if not make it better than they ever imagined. Sound is usually the longest process when creating a project other than filming, rendering and correction. Sound can change everything about a project it can make the audience feel an emotion and even change the tone of a project.
The films, animations and games I have chosen to analyse sound in are Last of us, Call of Duty, Inception, Disney’s Dinosaur, Wall-E and Reign over me. For the last of us i am going to analyse the Hotel basement scene as it is one of the most tense scenes i have ever played. As the character walks through the shadowy water we hear zombies around the hotel. The character Joel experienses being lost in a basement of an abandoned hotel which makes the audience feel for the character more as we are lost with him in this creepy abandoned hotel. Sound plays a huge part in this area of the game as throughout there is no score only creepy noises, screeches of metal, trickling of water and groans of zombies. For the Call of duty game “Ghosts” i will analysing the first/second level. This level our character we are playing will be in a space station. here i will analyse the sounds within the space suit. i will be talking about the movement and bullets muffling throughout the level. In the film Inception i will analysing one of the most tense scenes of the film where all the characters are dying and the score i sober powering all the moments. i want to do this scene because the score gives us a different outlook to what it could of been. the Inception theme is harsh drums that give off a emotional tone in which gives us an emotional though to the scene. i also wanted to do this scene because in a few scenes they are living in a apocalyptic universe and it will be interesting to see the worlds get less and less chaotic. In Reign over me i want to analyse the sound for the “Telling the Parents scene” because its a very simple scene that gives off a lot of emotion with no sound. only voices and a score. The scene is about the character Charlie Fineman and is about to tell his dead wives parents that they need to stop talking about the death of his ex wife as its killing him. Its one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve seen and would like to analyse it to see why he only used voices, music and a elevator beep. Disneys dinosaur In this scene of Dinosaur D.B. Sweeney;s Character Aladar is leading the heard back to the Great Falls and is heavily driven by dramatic heroic music and you can hear all the footsteps of the dinosaurs until the music fades out and a Roar is heard. Wall-E is one of the most famous animations in the world for sound design i will be analysing the sound design for the first scene in the film.
Films:
Inception
The start of this film opens up with very emotional music which then focuses towards tense and loud synths. just by the start you can tell the film will be very focused on its “Inception Soundtrack” and The brass impact with reverb and drums, in 4 different velocities. The intro is a wave sound with laughing children all very distorted with added echo and the emotional soundtrack. the wave overpower the sound of the children as its like we are hearing it from Cobbs ears this slowly fades when he becomes more stable. the sound of the guard must of been ADR’d mainly because of the atmosphere of the beach.
The scene i am analysing is the scene where Cilliam Murphys Character Robert Fischer goes in to talk to his father and get information. To add drama and emotion they have no music playing where a the following sequence had heavy sound effects and the dramatic inception tune. Here all we hear is the sound effects of the sound surrounding him, the doors and the breathing of Fischers Character, suddenly as the Dad looks at Fischer there is a slight tune in the background, we can only hear the voices of the characters. This is because of the saying “More is Less” once the father character says something which will change the course of his story the music becomes more tense and fast paste.
In this scene there are 4 sequences, the Snow, The Apartment, The Elevator and the Car, With the Snow we see the main building exploding, we only hear the explosion in this sequence because its not our main focus. throughout all these scenes we have the main theme playing, this adds more tension to the scene than sound design could ever do, with the Apartment we seen all the buildings collapsing and flying off around them, but we only hear wind, but this brings up and amazing opportunity as the main focus is the destruction of all character and not everything around them, The Elevator had nothing but the inception theme and the Car had the sound effect of the car crashing in the water and waves coming in the car and suddenly the music stopping and fading out. The sound of the waves give off sharp thud sound as the wave impact hitting and it seems to take over the other sounds and ends the sequence. the wave sound effect impact is probably the most important sound and this is why the effect does take preference in the mix over the things happening around. and the score slowly fading out. This gives the audience a stepping stone of emotion to go by with all the heavy music and all of the characters dying one by one it makes the audience think if they will all actually get out alive with all these things happening simultaneously. One thing that also got me was the angles of the main protagonists eyes. every stop they close or are about to close and her eyes appear in the next shot. The final shot the music stops and fades out when her eyes are open and we get a quick synth which makes the audience realise that they are all okay and got out the situation they are in. This makes me as a viewer feel relieved as they music was so tense are they’re were explosions everywhere which usually a harsh sound like a building falling or a huge deathly explosion will mean that the characters are in trouble but the music and sound smooth your brain and leave you hanging on a little string of hope.
Reign Over me
The scene i am analysing is the scene where Adam Sandlers Character Charlie Fineman talks to the mother and father of his dead wife for the first time ever. i wanted to do this scene because i think emotion is the hardest thing to pull off in a film and Inception and Reign over Me do it perfectly but in totally different ways. Here you can tell all the audio work is done on set with a few exceptions of the elevator beeps. you can tell its all done on set mainly because its not a high end hollywood film with a high production value plus i doubt they needed to adr or add any sound effects to the scene. They are in a massive building where you would hear sound from people, workers, the building itself, the elevators behind them but they chose not to ad them in because they want you to focus on nothing but the scene itself. Sandlers character walks off a few times but his audio stays the same throughout so im guessing they want all the audio focused on him mainly because its his big moment in the film. 1 Thing that is overpowering is the music, it sets the tone of the environment and story. the piano out lifts the characters and makes it seem like a horrifying story to tell as the music gets louder so does his character. At the end of the scene the audience will feel emotionally scarred as the tension runs deep as soon as the character walks off the first sound of the outside world beyond these characters is heard and it is a elevator beep i feel that this sound distinctive as he is finally getting in his “elevator” and “Getting off this floor”.
Games:
Word Deffinations:
Connote: (of a word) imply or suggest (an idea or feeling) in addition to the literal or primary meaning.
Denote: be a sign of; indicate.
The Last of Us
For the last of us i am going to analyse the Hotel basement scene as it is one of the most tense scenes i have ever played. As the character walks through the shadowy water we hear zombies around the hotel. The character Joel experienses being lost in a basement of an abandoned hotel which makes the audience feel for the character more as we are lost with him in this creepy abandoned hotel. Sound plays a huge part in this area of the game as throughout there is no score only creepy noises, screeches of metal, trickling of water and groans of zombies.
Link to Last of Us: Analysis
Something i forgot to add was how they achieved it technically now the sound design teach could of actually went to an abandoned room in a big building and actually made something fall over to see what kind of echo it would bring into the environment it would dog been the most perfect way to analyse something like that for a game like this. Also watching horror films set in cathedrals or abandoned buildings would of helped. I also believe for the foot steps they would of stepped in a bath tub full of water with thickening gel that would make the water a lot harder to walk in and then make the sound for joel stepping through the water.
Call of Duty: Black Ops
For the Call of duty game “Ghosts” i will analysing the first/second level. This level our character we are playing will be in a space station. here i will analyse the sounds within the space suit. i will be talking about the movement and bullets muffling throughout the level.
This is nothing like the last of us but its a nice take on a first person shooter as you can literally see everything from a persons point of view. there protagonist is in space so we hear muffled from the space atmosphere and bullets crossing the path of the character. these have all been edited from a low base change and a low EQ. The voices have a high EQ which made them sound like their on a radio. Everything you hear is muffled even the explosions. This i thought was a nice touch and gives me a sense of being in the suit as a player.
Animation:
Disney Dinosaur
In this scene of Dinosaur D.B. Sweeney;s Character Aladar is leading the heard back to the Great Falls and is heavily driven by dramatic heroic music and you can hear all the footsteps of the dinosaurs until the music fades out and a Roar is heard. Sound Designer Christopher Boyes (Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings, King Kong (2005),Iron Man (2000) and Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-7)always knows dinosaurs. He knows how they live, how they work, how they walk, how they look without skin, how they bellow in fear or anger or joy. He knows everything to a carnivores ripping up its newly found dead prey to a herbivore gently chewing on a leaf. The Carnotaurus was made from a baby elephant snout and a dog barking mixed together and Alidars noises came from a donkeys yodel with the pitch turned way down, and another dinosaur from the scene is made from a whale blowhole and a fire hydrant. This combined with all the other sounds act as one big herd and with the sound effects of the heavy foot prints as i can only imagine them using great force on gravel to make that nose make this scene so beautiful. Bringing Dinosaur to life required 3.2 million processing hours and the filmos total elements occupied 45 terabytes of disc space (45 million megabytes) stored on 70,000 CD-Roms. The studio’s render farm consisted of 250 dedicated computer processors and another 300 desktop processors at the workstations. On average, 30,000 processing hours per week were devoted to rendering and compositing the film. Here we can hear the whole movies Sound Design without Music and Talking its all sound design. For a audience the scene where the dinosaurs are walking makes us feel hope and triumph but as soon as we hear the carnivores rawr our hope drops and we start to feel fear for the characters.
Wall-E
The scene i am analysing is the first scene from Wall-E, the first minute and a half is various shots of New earth or a post-apocalyptic Earth with the post-war vocals of “Hello Dolly.” It connects the post-apocalypse to the aesthetics of the 50s (“Hello Dolly” is actually from the 60s, but still), the period both of the birth of consumer society and of nuclear paranoia, an image reinforced by the subsequent 50s stylings of the Buy ‘n’ Large outlets we see a bit later. I’m intrigued as to why this is the style we still reach to, 60 or so years later, when we want to represent the end of the world. The fact that this song gradually fades out into a distant echo makes it even more memorable, much more so than if it had reached its natural conclusion or ended abruptly. I feel like it helps signifies humankind (and most o life’s) gradual departure (or extinction) from Earth, and evokes a melancholic atmosphere to this sad scene of our planet. once the camera goes through the atmosphere we start hearing natural sound i.e wind and sound effects when going past satalights or buildings. Once the song has faded out all we hear is complete silence which shown no habitat or human life until we see Wall-e which is combined with many robotic noises, With a interview with Ben Burtt the Sound Designer for Wall-e he said that eh could of hired actors and made them make weird robot noises with their voice and edit them in post but Disney said that they wanted him to create something that sounded like he is speaking out of the functions of the machinery inside Wall-e Itself but he found it very challenging that you need to understand what is going on in wall-es head and that he also needs to have a depth of character he also said this about R2-D2. He then shares with us that he is the voice of Wall-E, once Wall-E piles up the rubbish but was i think done in a sound design lab and alot of trash and glass in a bag recorded in sync we then see a little cricket which makes very high pitch sound effects and his little steps he takes which sounds like someone tapping a keyboard.
In this Sound design assignment i need to build 4 test pieces that focus on particular areas of sound design:
A.D.R – What is ADR?
ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement but also known as Dubbing) Is a form of sound recording that is to ensure the best quality of sound for your film. Once recorded they drop the sound file onto the editing software and placed accurately to the characters mouth movements. In big budget films the ADR editor and Dialogue Editor are usually two different people, but in low budget its usually one. ADR/Dialogue Editors may be freelance, or they may be employed by an Audio Post Production House. The ADR is usually done in a sound booth to get the perfect crystal clear audio after the filming is done.
adr project Fail:
I Dont want to talk about the ADR Project too much as it failed quiet rapidly but i toke this as a learning experience. For the ADR we wanted to create our own video as we set up and made a script of a cop getting some bad news for a friend on a phone. Once we went upstairs to edit the project the files were all corrupt and lost. We cleared away the Set and made room for the audio equipment but obviously wasn’t of use anymore. so we said we would scrap this project and do some ADR for a Noir film Brooksby made a few years ago
Set Photos of the day:
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SFX – What are SFX?
Sound effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds that are contents of many TV shows, Video Games, music, animation and so on and so fourth. the Sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or create point without the use of dialogue or music. This process is applied to a recording without necessarily referring to the actual sound itself, i watched a documentary recently about the sound design of Lord of the Ring: The Two towers and to create a Dragon noise they used a Donkey howl and to create shredded paper sounds as grass. In TV and Film the sound design is treated as a separate form of production.
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Foley – What is Foley?
Foley effects are sound effects added to the film during the films post production. On a set you cant record every sound the character makes because it would sound very unnaturalistic or maybe you wont want the character to do it on camera so sounds like, glass cracking, doors closing, foot steps are all done post.
We watched a anime piece where a car pulls up in snow and a big battle commences, today we worked on the guy walking over to the door and getting watched by a robot, we spent a few hours talking and learning about sound, and the different microphones used to record the sound and how to do everything in post production including recording and editing the sound it self. After learning a few tricks we all went out and tried to find objects that we think would sound like that certain object on the film itself. My job was to take Pete and find some concrete, we spent around 5 minutes looking intil we found a slab which we used to do the walking on. Craig found some steel toe boots and used them on the slab, we also used a shower certain to make it sound like snow.
After we used many other things including a stereo system, a old 1980s phone, a dial for the robot mechanics, Wind sound effects and Richards voice over for the scanner we had about 14 seconds worth done. We all kept in mind how challenging this will be for us and e will have to work hard and fast for it to meet the deadline but it was an over all fun day.
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Atmospheres – What is the Atmosphere?
The Atmosphere in films is basically the background noise that the character or scene is taking place in. i.e if your creating a city scene you will usually hear car noises or people talking or if your in a cave you will hear wind and maybe drips of water. this basically creates the realisation that your character is in this place.
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For the Atmospheres we had a choice out of two scenes to recreate the sound on, the one we chose to do was called “The Mirror” a Tarkobsky film. we choose this one mainly because it seems very hard to determine the atmosphere for it as there is only two rooms with many things happening. We all watched the scene without sound at first as we were all made to make the sounds without knowing the sound of the film. as i was watching it me and craig made notes to see what would be happening in the film. after watching it over 7 times we kind of had a rough idea in our minds how we wanted it.
For all the sounds we used a website called http://www.freesound.org/ Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds. We spent a few hours trying to find perfect sounds for our film, they raging from kettle noises to waterfalls, one sound i was very proud of using was a underwater sound where everything you heard was mumbled. to create the sound of the building collapsing we used a actual building falling, pirate ship sails and waves from the ocean.
Joey Lever 