For this project Sam Jenkins, Rob Wynne and myself were contracted by Viewfinder Productions, a group of talented third year Media Production students, to record and deliver Location Sound during the shooting of the film, and also to complete the Post-Production Audio process in its entirety. We actually began speaking to the Media Production group late on in Year 2, around June time, and the project they pitched sounded really interesting, so we all agreed to work with them when Year 3 began.
Overall, I’m happy with what we have produced for Viewfinder Productions, and I believe I’ve successfully met the individual learning outcomes we set for ourselves near the beginning of the semester.
- Improve my post-production tracking, mixing and recording abilities, specifically in regards to sound effects, foley and background ambiences.
- Develop greater knowledge of location sound recording techniques, especially those involving plant (radio) and boundary mic techniques.
- Work to become more professional in all aspects of audio production throughout this project, streamlining my workflow in order to gain efficiency and save time.
I’ll speak about these outcomes individually, starting with arguably the most important one; improving my post-production skills.
Our roles when on location were more dynamic than when we began post-production. In the previous semester I worked primarily on dialogue editing and mixing, so this semester I wanted to record more foley and edit something other than dialogue. Rob, Sam and I then decided who would tackle each part of the soundtrack: Sam would edit and mix Dialogue, Rob would record foley, and then mix and edit the final foley session, and I would record foley with Rob and edit and mix the SFX and Ambience tracks, essentially any effects that weren’t foley’d. Music was being composed by Barney Oram, and I dealt with editing and mixing it, though this was not a large job. This decision worked well, although I feel like I should have done more research prior to the start of the post-production process. We were very busy with Creative Enterprises in the weeks leading up to picture lock, but I should have made more time to acquaint myself with this section of the process. Most of the work I did on the soundtrack was based on my past experiences with Post-Production, as well as feedback from Sam, Rob and Lauren, the director of Cognition. I did use excerpts from The Foley Grail (Theme Ament, 2014) and The Sound Effects Bible (Viers, 2008), which I’ve talked about in a previous blog post. I do feel like working on Callback, a short film the three of us sourced ambiences and effects, and recorded foley for, helped me greatly when approaching the post-production of Cognition, as the work was very similar. The main difference was that we only needed to roughly mix the elements of Callback. I spent a lot of time tweaking the levels of Cognition though, and I think that this shows in the final product.
The second outcome regarding location recording techniques, is one I believe I have also met. I described the steps we went through to set up plant mics in the third day of the Cognition shoot in the blog post I wrote about the three shooting days, and from all the shots in which we set up plant mics, we received usable audio that was included in the film, either as dialogue or a sound effect. Because it was all recorded on location, we didn’t have to spend as much time processing it to fit convincingly into the world. The section that springs most clearly to mind involved shots of Susan ascending the stairs. The shots that Jamie wanted to capture wouldn’t allow a boom anywhere near, and we were unsure if we’d be able to recreate a convincing footstep sound effect to accompany her movement up the stairs. The two radio mics and the boundary mic we rigged up recorded really nice, clean footsteps, and also captured the striking match, which sounded far better than library match effects I found to insert into the soundtrack. There were some issues with the location shoot, but I’ll talk about them in a moment.
My final outcome about improving my professionalism when speaking and working with clients is something I think has been well met. In order to document this, we asked some of the crew from Viewfinder Productions to fill in a feedback form, which I’ll attach below. Both the Producer, Hannah Darby, and the Director, Lauren Taverner, have filled in a form, and I hope to update this in a day or two with other crew member’s forms. I’ve uploaded copies of the forms for you to read through if you wish, but to summarise:
Lauren – “Dan was very good at communicating, he was friendly, open-minded and confident… he was always problem solving rather than complaining… He was very professional, causing no drama of agro on set which meant that we could get on with filming without any unnecessary disruptions… He was very professional during pre and post production… Dan’s technical skills proved to be very good as he was very quick to solve issue on set and during post production… Dan was a pleasure to work with throughout.”
Hannah – “Dan was comfortable to come forward and ask for more time on set should they need it… He is open to suggestion and happy to suggest suggestions where he feels it is due… they [the sound team] were focused on making sure that atmosphere was spread across the whole team… Dan diligently adhered to every single one of the rules, including but not limited to, punctuality, attitude and language… Dan was very professional throughout the whole process… The quality of the sound overall is astounding. Having worked on multiple student projects before, this is definitely the best sounding one I have ever participated in.”
The main issues we had over the project were: a late change of location, which happened three days before shooting; a host of issues with Sound Theatre A/Pro Tools (we still aren’t sure where the problem originated from) that set our foley recording efforts back two days; and a late problem with the audio of the film becoming de-synchronised after our initial final bounce. The change in location was a decision Mikey Murray made, and while I believe the location we changed to was far better than Hannah’s bedroom, the late decision forced Lauren and Jamie to scrap the vast majority of their work constructing a shot list. This had a knock-on effect for us, as many times we had to ask what the next shot would be, and then decide how to capture audio from there. We were given shot lists, but new shots would often be added, and others removed, so at times we struggled to keep track of all that was happening. I believe Jamie had to work on instinct as well at some points during shooting. If we had been given a concrete shot list, and ideally a storyboard of what shots would look like, it would have meant we were much more prepared, and could have saved a lot of time; time which could have been used rigging up plant and boundary mics. As it was, we were often rushing to get shots filmed, and we spent valuable time trying to find out what the next shot would be, if it would require sound, and if so, which mics we should use, and where they should go.
The second issue was one that set our post-production back several days. Fortunately, Sam was able to continue editing and mixing the dialogue, so it only affected Rob and I. We had cued up the vast majority of the foley, in order to make the recording process more efficient, and were just about the begin recording on Wednesday 7th Dec (we received picture lock on Monday 5th Dec evening), but when we tried to record, the video would play a single frame and then freeze. Nothing else would stop, and we could record into Pro Tools fine, but we couldn’t sync our actions to the picture because it would almost always freeze. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t. We asked Craig Bratley for assistance, and he suggested a few ways to find out what could be the problem. We tried different videos in the session, restarted all devices responsible for video and audio in the Sound Theatre, until we eventually reasoned that the session was perhaps just irreparably bugged, and that it would just be better to export what we could as an AAF into a new Pro Tools session. This worked, but I lost almost all of the cueing I had spent Tuesday doing, so I re-did that, using a different technique that should be included in an AAF/OMF export, and we tracked the foley without any major issues (aside from I/O settings often getting changed) after that. The only other main issue that requires mentioning is the audio de-sync we experienced after bouncing down what we thought was the finished film on Thursday 15th Dec, at around half ten at night. We all went home, and Lauren uploaded the bounced .mov onto YouTube. When I came to watch it however, the audio was noticeably out of sync with the picture when viewed on both my phone and my Playstation 4, and watching the raw file on the PS4 produced similar results. The weird thing was that Sam and Rob weren’t experiencing the same amount of de-sync when viewing the film on their Macbook Pros. The following day we came in and, after adding a few final tweaks, re-bounced the file in Sound Theatre A as opposed to B, and handed that version in. We still noticed a few elements of the movie were out of sync with the rest; the dialogue most notably, but we simply didn’t know how to fix the problem, and the deadline was looming. Personally I believe it is an issue that happens when a session that is started in either Sound Theatre A or B is bounced down in the other Sound Theatre (we started our master mix session in A and bounced it down in B), as this is not the first time this has happened. Sam had a dialogue de-sync issue when working on a documentary about the Kinema in the Woods, and I had a lot of trouble editing dialogue for Perils of Patricide last year, and I think it was because I swapped back and forth between Sound Theatres.
I understand that this evaluative report is far too long, so my conclusion will be brief. In conclusion, I’m very glad I was able to work on this project, and I’m proud of the final product. If I were to do this project again, I’d be sure to research Location Sound and Post-Production Techniques in greater detail. I would also keep more up to date with my blog, as I neglected to post over several weeks, which I then had to catch up with close to the project’s deadline. I’m particularly proud of the final section of Cognition, that, coupled with the excellent musical score, relies heavily on sound design work that I did. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with Sam and Rob as always, and am looking forward to next semester’s project.