This shot is pretty simple, pretty quick, and yet there were 25 different sounds added
on top of the dialogue to get this final result.
So let’s go through that process of using sound effects and foley to build a rich soundscape.
I like to start by trying to make things sound realistic.
We can record every single footstep, carefully replicating the surface that they were walking
on. When someone drops a metal gun on the ground,
we need a metallic scraping sound. These days I force myself to go out and record the sound
effects before looking online for pre-recorded sound effects.
Because that way I can try different materials, and perform it with a lot more precision than
just finding something online and saying, "yeah that’s good enough".
Doing this can take up as much time as you give it, so I can totally see why bigger productions
employ someone just to work on the sound. But of course, we don’t necessarily have
to re-record every sound from the shoot. For this shot, we had enough time on set to
record the running, which I then was able to combine with the lavalier sound of heavy
breathing. Getting those sounds on the day did save me
a bunch of time in post, but I should mention that most of the time we really can’t spend
our precious time on set recording a bunch of sounds effects that we could quite easily
just recreate later.
Now looking at our entire project, we can do our typical EQ and compression for the
dialogue, which is a separate topic for another video, but a simple way to make things more
realistic is to have consistent ambience throughout the scene.
For example in this sequence we’ve got a pause in the dialogue, which gives us a silent
gap that sounds very unnatural. "I’m gonna kill ya like you killed my brother."
"Try it mate, try it" So, we grab our 60 seconds of ambient recording,
or room tone that we captured on set, and use it to fill in any silences.
Here’s the result, which makes everything more seamless.
So once we’ve cut out all of the unwanted sounds, and replaced them ambience, and we’ve
dropped in all of our recorded sound effects, we should have a pretty strong foundation,
and this brings us into our next stage.
We started with realism, but we don’t have to be limited by that, we can still be artistic.
So we listen to the whole mix, and think of the moments that could be bigger, or moments
that could benefit from extra sounds. It could mean recording chopping wood in the distance
to put some weight behind a gunshot sound, and then finding a recording of thunder to
use afterwards, as if the shot is echoing around the neighbourhood.
We have creative license to use anything that could contribute to the tone of the scene,
like a dog barking, or music playing from someone’s phone.
We might decide that we need more intensity, like this in this shot, now here’s the sound
that we recorded on set, so it's 100% realistic.
and then we drop in a bunch of the scraping footstep sounds that we recorded...
next, the clothes shuffling around for each kick, along with the kick sounds from a range of
different impact recordings...
It's quite a big difference from what actually happened on set, but that’s it's what the
scene called for.
And so after spending plenty of time recording and layering all of our sounds, we can enter
the final stage of post production sound. Mixing all of the elements together, making
it balanced. Now like all aspects of filmmaking, there
are no rules about how loud your sounds effects should be, or how quiet your music should
be. But here are a couple of common problems that
people tend to run into. Number 1: Is there any point where the audio
meters go into the red, above 0dB. If that happens, we need to reduce the volume, or
use more compression. Number 2: Are there any sounds that jump out
at you, that are distractingly loud? I had to reduce the volume on the sound of
these coins because they weren’t important to the story, and were just distracting from the
dialogue, which was more important in this scene.
Now, there's plenty of other stuff like panning, EQ and reverb, but we’ll look at those another
time, because for me, 90% of the work is recording the sounds, and layering them together - everything
beyond that is kind of just tweaking. Now the last thing to do is to make the overall
levels consistent, so you can watch the entire film without adjusting the volume on your
speakers, before then testing it on a few different devices with different speakers
to make sure it sounds okay everywhere.
Now all this might sound like a lot of work, but for me, it’s honestly one of my favourite
parts of the entire filmmaking process.
Because it’s one of the rare things you can spend a few hours on, and instantly see
a decent improvement, pretty much every time. If it goes well, the audience won’t even
notice the sound, but we get to have the kind of amazing experience of hearing the before
and afters, and seeing just how much of a difference it makes.
My name’s Simon Cade, this has been DSLRguide, and I’ll see you next week.