Week 4: Sound editing for a documentary: Chapter 4 - July 28th to August 1st - Part 2

My meeting with Dean in the second half of this week was short and sweet. Due to my 'lost' day I was totally under the pump, swamped in and in a slight panic to finish the project on time. Dean needed the audio by August the 1st (Saturday night) at the latest. As he would then have to spend his weekend mixing it and automating all the EQ for the music and dialogue. He would then have to bundle it all up and send it on a hard drive to L.A. As the plan was to have another sound guy mixing it for him with the producer. The audio would then be sent  back to him and he would talk with the producer and sound mix distantly to go over any issues that may come up. Dean would then do the final mix and send it all back to the producer again.

Dean said too do the best job that I could and if I ran out of time to leave the markers in and just to leave him notes of what additional sounds who would need to add.

I managed to get the work to Dean on Saturday night, after rewatching it a few times I realised I would just need to hand it in as I was getting way to close to the work and overly fussy. I removed all the markers as Dean instructed and only left the ones with the sounds that I hadn't added. Which were mostly interview audio for archival footage that I could not track down. I also spent a great amount of time going over my work and making sure that all the files were the correct lengths and file formats.

I sent Dean and email with a detailed description of what I had done, which he thanked me for, as it enabled him to know what work he needed to do before opening the session.

Chapter 4 Work Examples

For chapter 4 I requested some sounds from Dean's collection as I had trouble finding appropriate recordings. More specifically I requested hospital sounds, New Orleans street sounds, and media pack sounds. I asked for this suite of sounds as chapter 4 was littered with scenes requiring such audio. I worked from Dean's philopshy of using restriction as a cretaive device. As such I used the same sounds in multiple scenes, the challenge been to then remix and edit it to suit the vision and space. Mostly using reverb and eq. Below is scene of Oswald in New Orleans, notice the visual editor has cut the cars on the cut. This is done to give the image a sense of visual and auditory movement.

Here is another example of a car montage with the music isolated. With all the additive FX I used EQ and pitch shift sounds to match the fundamental note of the music. I largely did this via feel. As opposed to previous chapters I also experimented a lot more with longer crossfades across scenes.

Below is one of my favourite scenes. Largely due to the autonomy of sound I used. I managed to use RX 7 in the way Dean showed me, to create false ambiences sampling previously used sounds. Thus evidence in the sounds of the troops storming the beach. To articulate a bigger sounding bomb I also layered a 2nd layer with ducked all the frequencies other than a boosted 40hz to create a greater bass presence.