This episode of Film Riot is brought to you by Domain.com
Today we dive into a pool of sound, not literally of course, although that would be a touch
of awesome.
Welcome to Film Riot, the show that takes the mystery out of the effects and techniques
that goes into some of your favorite Hollywood films.
I’m your host, Ryan Connolly.
Off the bat, I’m going to get sidetracked.
We just did a game on Film State that I thought was a lot of fun and I think you guys might
dig it too.
It’s the IMDB Movie Game, which you can play along with.
Tons of fun, so if you want to check it out, go here.
What’s this?
Love Losses, especially the sound.
Really hoping you do an episode on what went into creating the sound for Losses.
We have covered some Foley and whatnot in the past, but still I think a behind the scenes
look at the audio I did for Losses may be of help to some of you.
So, first thing I do when starting audio for a project is to sit down and watch it with
a pen and paper.
Of course what I’m watching is the final edit.
So I watch through the edit and I start to jot down all the sounds I need to create from
Foley and which ones I can get from a sound library.
I will watch the project four or five times in a row to make sure I don’t miss anything,
and I’m writing everything from footsteps to gunshots, even something as little as a
clothespin hitting the table.
Once I’ve done all of that, I start with the biggest sounds first.
Most of these I can get from a library or have already made myself, like the gunshots
which I used a combination of sounds I made myself and some I have from a sound effects
library.
Or the punch sounds, which was also a mixture of sounds I made myself and some from a library
Now everyone has there own method and I personally like to keep everything clean and separate
and then I bring it all together in the end.
So I render the video out from premier and then I bring it into Audition, use as my reference.
Next, I start laying in my library sounds and mixing them and adding EQ and reverb to
help them match their environment as much as possible.
After I finish that pass, I move on to Foley, which are sounds I will make from scratch,
using an assortment of things.
I actually did an episode on Foley in the past which you can find right here.
In that episode I give you a pretty good way to create your own punching sounds, so check
that out.
Now, I’ll just grab a stick and whack away.
For Losses, some of the more fun Foley sounds I made were the sounds of stabbing Bruno,
the sound of the pool stick breaking and where Josh stabs Nick with the pool stick.
Half the fun of Foley for me is finding the sound, going through different things, looking
for that perfect sound for what you are looking for.
And then that awesome ah ha moment once you hear that sound.
For the sound of Bruno getting stabbed, I tried a few different things, including stabbing
a few different types of fruit with a similar object to the paper clip.
What ended up doing the trick for me were two sounds.
One, the sound of me jerking a fork back and forth inside of a potato.
The second sound was me stabbing a spoon into a far of peanut butter.
Once I had them recorded, I picked a few I really liked and used them from the different
stabs.
I also had the peanut butter sound getting louder with each stab since I wanted it to
sound a bit more wet with each one, so it felt a bit more gory every time, like the
blood coming out on his neck.
Two of my favorite sounds to create where involving the pool stick, one where it breaks
and then the one where Josh stabs Nick.
For the break, I used a lot of different sounds, I think eight in total.
One of them was me snapping a stick, one crushing thin pieces of wood, a hanger whipping past
the mike, snapping a belt together, crumbling some wood chips on to another wooden top and
a few other things like it.
But, it still sounded a bit empty so I put away the obvious and started looking around
my house for sounds.
And funny enough the thing I found to finish off my sound was a bag of salad.
This added an extra crunch I needed, whipping the salad this way and that, still inside
the bad, which is a big reason I love Foley because you never know what it is that is
going to give you the sound that you need.
So, keep an open mind.
And just to push that thought a bit further.
For the sound of Nick getting stabbed in the back, I once again used my bag of salad, but
also added sounds from my own mouth.
I felt so ridiculous while doing and Josh and Stark were looking at me like I was crazy
but it worked perfectly.
So if you want to add Foley to your film, just keep an open and creative mind in the
process.
But now, a quick break and we’ll talk a bit about ADR and my recording set-up.
What are you fart baskets doing?
Trying to come up with a new ad for domain.com for Film Riot.
How long have you been in here?
Three days.
Serious.
Domain.com and Film Riot.
How hard can it possibly be?
Harder than you think, it has to be both comical and informative.
Make you giggle while pointing out how domain.com’s easy check out process makes it simple to
find domain names, and set up a website.
Plus, pointing out that domain transfers to domain.com are only $7.61 and if you use the
promo code FilmRiot, you get 15% off your domain purchase or transfer.
That’s only $6.47 for a domain transfer, no…
I know math.
Wait, I’ve got an idea.
Josh and Stark can be standing outside and I will come on and like “Stark, you should
use domain.com”, and he’ll be all like “nah”.
I pull out my Samaria sword and start hacking him to bits while Josh is all like “sweet
God, open your light of mercy and stop this.”
That’s morbid and it has nothing to do with domain.com.
Did you miss the exposition when I told him to use domain.com?
That’s not exposition, and it’s morbid.
You just say things that I say, I say things that are good, and you say dumb things, two
times, you hurt my feelings.
I got another idea.
Don’t want it.
I’m curious.
Josh is on the computer, getting a domain from domain.com and all of the sudden a little
Ninja comes up and starts hacking him to pieces with a Samaria sword.
Don’t piss off little Ninjas, that’s worse than the last idea, you killed me even though
I told you I was already using domain.com.
Yes, but you didn’t use the promo code FilmRiot.
Bam.
Marketing.
Nice.
Not nice.
You’re impossible to please.
No, I just want a good idea.
Then just do one ad about trying to come up with an ad.
We did that already.
Not with me.
True, it’s genius.
It could go viral.
No, it will go viral.
I’m confused, did we already shoot it?
Welcome back, now on to recording and my set up for recording was super simple.
I didn’t use pro tools since I wanted to give Audition a try.
For the mike, I just used the same shotgun we always use for production sound.
And I ran the shotgun mike through my H4 and zoom which I use as an interface for Audition.
That’s it.
Then I recorded straight into Audition and I was very impressed with it.
I loved how it is set up to mix and work with effects so much more than sound tracks.
For quick turn around work, I think it’s a great alternative to Pro Tools.
One of the things that impressed me most was noise reduction.
For the final scene in Losses, there was an intense hiss in the audio from the room I
was shooting in and it ended up being pretty distracting.
So I brought that audio into Audition and used their noise reduction process by applying
it and then selecting a section of just noise, setting the noise print and this tell audition
what frequency the noise actually is so it can single it out.
So now I can select a whole track and tweak the parameters until I have what I want.
To show you the difference, here is a before and after.
Of course you have to be careful how far you push this or you will start getting this obvious
digital sound, but even with all the post work you can do in audio, there are still
some things you can’t salvage and for that we have ADR, which again we got into deeper
in older episodes so check that out here and again, this was a super simple setup.
All I did was have Todd go under a blanket so we could cancel out as much room noise
as possible, which was helpful and amusing.
Now for Losses, I originally intended to do a lot more ADR than I actually did since there
were a few times when the production sound would actually peek.
But once I started doing my ADR, I realized in one or two particular moments we were losing
the intensity of the performance with the ADR so I decided to let it go for the sake
of performance in those two sections.
This is something you will have to decide on your own, which is more important to you.
But for me, the emotion was a lot more important here than the technical.
But there you go a behind the scenes look at the sounds of Losses.
Now, Losses was a quickie shoot, done for a little amount of money and in a little amount
of time.
Some stuff did suffer for this, like the final mix of the audio for the film, since I had
to record all the Foley grunt passes and so on and do my final mix all in the same day,
in all honesty I think the audio in Losses came out just passable, I would love to have
a few more days to work on the sound, but that is how things are in this industry.
You have a deadline and you do what you can up until that moment.
One of my favorite sayings is: a movie isn’t finished, it escapes.
And it is so true.
Why am I telling you this?
I think there are a lot of scenes and moments in Losses that are not as good as they could
have been and it is due to the sound not being 100% so make sure you spend the proper time
on your audio when you work on your film in post.
The great thing for most of you, you don’t have a deadline, your project is done when
you want it to be so be sure to give your sound the TLC it deserves.
That’s it my friends.
As always you can follow me on Twitter, at twitter.com/ryan_connolly if you do so choose,
or our Facebook page for some delightful delights and if you are interested, check out my triunefilms
Facebook page, we just put up a bunch of new film maker TV designs and just like last time,
we want you to help us decide which ones we are going to make.
So jump over there and vote for the two you like most by liking the pictures of those
shirts.
The two that get the most ‘likes’, will be the ones we put into production right away
so go there, check it and let us know what you think.
I’ll see you guys next time when some friends and I make a space ship that looks like an
old shack and then we fly it into space, just to find some aliens who are teenagers too.
Look at that.