Post production work on Cognition began on 6th December. We had received an AAF from the Tom, the films editor, on Monday, and had already spent some time going through the film with him to see if he had any thoughts. We watched the film through, each making notes on possible audio to put in, and what sort of tone we wanted the film to have overall. We had already discussed who would tackle the various sections of the film: Sam would edit and mix the dialogue, Rob would record, edit and mix the foley, and I would assist in recording foley and edit and mix the SFX and Ambience. Barney Oram was composing the music, so we were confident that little would need to be done on that side of things.

The first few days were a bit of a write-off, as we had major issues with the session when we came to record foley. To make the best of a bad situation, we sourced some library sounds that we thought would be useful, and cued the majority of the foley so we were ready to record. Unfortunately it turned out that something must have glitched out or bugged in our session, and so we lost a lot of this cued foley. I had to re-do this, but I did it a different way that should hopefully be transferable as an OMF or AAF. This link shows how I cued the foley, and also shows the naming scheme we used for our clip as well. Basically you consolidate a huge blank audio file, and then copy chunks of it. You can name these chunks, and when selected, you can record at exactly the right spot, making recording sessions a lot faster and more efficient. Rob and I recorded a lot of the footsteps, and Sam helped out recording on Sunday when I was working. They got a lot of the prop foley done. We began work on the SFX and Ambience session after I finished work, selecting some rain, thunder and wind effects that we liked the sound of.

Recorded some more foley on Monday, focusing on the attack scenes, so using fruit and vegetables. Rob will mix these together with the library SFX in my session to create a more unpleasant impact sound. We borrowed a lab coat from the Sciences building to foley Susan’s movements, and felt that getting an actual lab coat would be worthwhile, as the fabric has quite a unique sound to it, which translated well when recording to a mic.

At this point dialogue was mostly complete, and there were only a few sections of foley that needed recording. We completed these, and I managed to get a little creative in the foley room, using a fork and the underside of a plate for the specimen slide, and trialling several different switches before settling on one from a voiceover mic.

When the time came to edit and mix the SFX and Ambiences the main task was the ambience. Most of the sound effects in the film were actually foley’d, and Rob and I spent some time discussing who should do what. In the end he mixed the foley and I mixed ambiences, and I don’t think much would have changed either way. The first thing I did was work on the ident at the very start of the film. Lauren, the Director, had asked us to come up with something if we had time, and had said to try and make it industrial. I found some library sounds and had a particularly interesting hangar door slam. I really like this effect, as it has a wonderful travel noise which couples nicely with the hands moving inwards, then a wonderful reverberant clang, followed finally by a really nice natural reverb. The natural reverb was especially interesting, and I wanted the whole ident to sort of fade back into silence, much like the image fades into black, so I created some reverb for the other two effects that made up the ident; a servo motor and a Jacob’s Ladder electrical arc. The arc effect was really aggressive, so I shortened it right down and, using AudioSuite (I saved copies of the original files in muted tracks underneath), created a reverb with a really nice long decay that perfectly melts into the blackness left behind by the ident. Rob, Sam and Lauren all really liked this, and I very much enjoyed the experience too.

I then arranged the SFX and Ambience into separate tracks, and due to the amount of rain clips that I was using I separated ambiences into Wind, Rain and Thunder tracks respectively. My main aim when editing and mixing the ambiences was to try and inject the various spaces of the film with realism, and because all of the ambience was exterior weather noise this meant equalisation, and a lot of it. Most of my EQ took the form of low-pass filters, which act as aural walls, blocking high frequencies and allowing lower ones to penetrate further. At first I used a very raw, simple low-pass filter which I stuck on every rain track in order to gauge approximate levels, since a harsh low-pass filter quietens the clips heavily. I later went back through and created individual EQs for the various tracks, taking into account the space the camera (and therefore the audience) was in, as well as the acoustic properties of the various rain effects. I spent a lot of time tweaking and re-tweaking the levels of the rain, and it got a little ridiculous. The final mix is something I’m very happy with though, as it sits nicely in with everything else, doesn’t cut across other elements of the mix, and really nicely adds to the tone of the film. The idea behind adding rain, wind and thunder, apart from fleshing out the aural background of the piece (which was something we were struggling to do; an attic in the 1970’s lit by candlelight does not have much going on sonically), was to add in elements that could build tension. Assisted in this by an excellent musical score composed by Barney Oram, a recent Audio Production graduate, the rain is used to suggest Susan’s chaotic mental state, and the increasingly rapid rumbles of thunder show that a storm is brewing, or about to break. Wind goes hand in hand with storms, and adds to the notion of stormy weather. I did have to automate sections of particularly howling wind, as it cut into the dialogue a little, and didn’t sound like exterior sound.

The final scene is the most SFX driven sequence in the film, and I spent a lot time trying to bring the film to a suitable end. After receiving the last section of the music from Barney, I placed it into the session and immediately wanted to incorporate complementary elements into the soundtrack. I had already found a nice, satisfyingly vintage-sounding camera flash, that I edited into the quick cuts between Susan and her research. This had a nice impact to it, and worked really nicely as a sort of bass hit. One slightly criticism of the music was that it tailed off slightly too abruptly, so I wanted to add some effects that would bulk the climax up slightly, and leave the audience hanging with a silent final shot. I intended on using a library door slam when the music ended to finish with a long, reverberant, bass hit, but it didn’t sound quite right, so I instead reversed the effect and used it to ramp up with the music, which would leave both the penultimate and ultimate shots of the film silent. I also time stretched it a little as it grew in intensity slightly quicker than I wanted. Finally I added a high-pitched whine, often used in cinema to communicate deliriousness or disturbed senses, and thought this fitted well because of the nature of Susan’s work, cutting out chunks of brain from kidnapped men and experimenting on them. I feel it also creates a divide between the audience on the on-screen character of Susan, and mixes in nicely with the non-diegetic nature of the final SFX sequence. After showing this sequence to Rob, Sam and Lauren, they suggested extending the whine out further, which I agreed with. I also moved the middle section of the music to right slightly in the session, as we all felt it began slightly earlier, and ended a little early. Barney was busy with other things so couldn’t re-do the piece, so he gave me permission to play around the position of the music. I finally decided to end the music right as Jack is forcibly fet the pills, so there is a short moment of quiet between this scene and the choking scene. Barney has sinced watched the movie and very much liked it, so hopefully he is happy with what I’ve done!

The last few steps were essentially all fine-tuning. I cleaned up the ident I previously mentioned at this point, created individual low-pass filters for Ambience tracks, and then using AudioSuite, added Reverb to the SFX clips to give them a better sense of place in the film. Sam and I also made the decision to add some weather effects over the credits, as the silence felt a little empty. This also gives the audience the sense that they are still aurally in the room with Susan, and suggests that her work is still taking place. I made a final level check, automated sections of the final SFX sequence down slightly, and also made some adjustments Lauren wanted, before bounced down my mix.

Our final mix was a little quiet, so we experimented with the Maxim plugin, adding it to the Master Fader of the Master Mix session, but it introduced some speaker crackle and we thought it reduced the quality of the film overall, so we took it off and settled for a film that was slightly quieter than it should be, using R128 Broadcast Standards. These state that “R 128 recommends to normalize audio at -23 LUFS ±0.5 LU” (EBU), while our Integrated reading from iZotope Insight, an R128 meter available on the Sound Theatre Macs, showed that our film had an average LUFS of around -30. This is something we’ll be sure to keep in mind the next time we work on post-production sound. We had issues with audio de-syncing at this point, and had to bounce down another version of the film that rectified some, but not all of the de-syncing. In the end though, I’m very happy with the final product.

Rob doing some fruit and vegetable Foley recording during post-production. This was one of the final full recording sessions, as later ones were mainly to record extra or missed effects. Normally we removed the mic from the Windjammer, in order to better capture sounds, but we left it on as we were worried about potential spatter from handling the fruit.

References:

(EBU) Loudness (PLOUD): Helps Members to understand loudness metering and levelling. [online] Available from: https://tech.ebu.ch/loudness [Accessed 16 December 2016].