Week 4: Sound editing for a documentary: Chapter 4 - July 28th to August 8th - Part 1

After my meeting with Dean today I feel somewhat humbled. I had worked really hard on Chapter 3 and had tried my best to articulate every action I could. I did this as the pacing for Chapter 3 was so much slower than chapter 1 and 2, . As such I tried to prop up the visionwith audio as much as possible. In doing so I went too far into micro details and felt like I lost the pulse on the original recipe of additive FX for JFK as discussed with Dean.

With all the extra detail I added the whole thing started to feel more modern than it should and it also felt slightly out of step with chapter 1 and 2. Dean said not to worry too much as it is easy to loose perspective sometimes and he also noted that picture editor's style had also changed dramatically.
 
This particular situation really reminded me of when I started to play drums in bands and started to overplay everything when I realised I was could do so. With my boosted confidence I had now done the same thing with sound design, which was quite humbling as in some ways I thought I had done a better job than ch 1 and 2. However like my music playing, I was actually happy that Dean wanted things simpler as that is what my instincts desired me to do, I just got slightly carried away with defining details.  

Dean also pointed out some other technical issues such as not bouncing down clips too short, and sometimes importing clips into Stereo instead of Mono. He also pointed out that I layered too many clips that were sounding too much the same. Preferring the need for economy over indulgence, as with a small team more clips simply creates more work and more mixing for Dean.

As such moving into the final week of Additive sound and the final chapter, I endeavoured to create the most streamline, authentic and economical audio that I could.

The start of this week was hampered by internet problems and a power outage that put me back a day. I managed to get some work done, but essentially my schedule got somewhat sidelined by a day which was somewhat annoying, but totally out of my control.

Chapter 4  Work Examples

​1. This is a little montage I made consisting of cars, the dicta belt recording and crowd murmurs. I was quite happy with how cleanly it turned out, and how I only managed to use single audio clips per event.

Chapter 3 and 4 had multiple shots of Warren Dullis in board rooms with sitting men. Not much action to articulate so I mostly used murmurs, room tones and the camera click to create a sense of movement.

This an action sequence with music and SFX, I was quite happy with how my sound fitted in with the music. Finding the jumping jack sound was quite a challenge but it was quite satisfying when I finally got it parried up with the vision.