Once I had finished the foley and sound design i wanted to make sure the director was happy with everything before I level everything properly. Therefore I sent a copy of the audio to the film group. The director responded:

“heya mate

just watched it

jesus you did all that quick

Proper happy with it

its just a few minor points and thats it really

-the painting foley and newspaper sounds are too loud. bit overpowering.

-clothing ruffle throughout needs to be little quieter.

-when he puts the cake in all those sounds need to be little quieter.

-the ‘how many weeks are we talking’ sounds like its sped up for some reason. is there another take or can it be slowed to sound more natural?

-During the phone call, it sounds like theres a ruffle of clothing where there should be a breathing sound? (6:52)

-on the outside bit with the wind turbine thing, the wind and outside noises are a little overpowering.

oh and theres something strange with the breaths when he cries at the end.

it might be easier to explain this bit to you in person or on the phone?”

This is regarding this version: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxQ5TCl6APcRbU4zNGlmNE5HMDA

The majority of the issues were down to not mixing yet, therefore sorted everything else out, such as the breaths, the odd rustles of clothing’s and the line of dialogue (by using another take), before balancing everything out.

To monitor the levels I used the PAZ analyser. This plugin not only moments audio levels, but frequency and phase as well. I firstly began going through each track sections and levelling them up. E.g. made sure all the dialogue was level, then , made sure everything was level compared with the dialogue. Once I done this I used a reference film to see how the levels compared. The reference was a phone call scene from ‘Orange is the new black’

When running this reference film through PAZ analyser dialogue seemed to come through at around -20 and peaked around -12. Background sounds inside the prison were around -33, however outside the prison was around -39. Therefore i levelled the dialogue aiming for the same kind of levels.

I then organised a meeting in one of the only time slots that was available for the sound theatre/mini sound theatre available, with the editor and director. Here we went through the film scene by scene, making slight changes. These changes were tiny bits of foley, fades of music, and changing the bingo caller ADR by using different takes.Some parts of the film appeared to be out of sync, however a lot of that was down to the latency go the screen in the mini sound theatre. Once the director was happy with it I bounced the file into three different exports. This included music only, without music and one with everything. After these were bounced I transferred it to the editor.

Around an hour later the editor said that one of the scenes were slightly out of sync. Because of the screen in the mini sound theatre it was difficult to correct. Therefore I transferred it onto my laptop and ‘re-synced’ the scene through pro tools 11.