For this particular project I conducted the Foley before the sound design. This was because parts of the Foley were going to be manipulated in the sound design process. This process took a whole day. I was very limited to the times I could do this as the university facilities because they were fully booked. Therefore I was limited to that one day to complete the Foley for the whole film.  I don’t think this effected the result too much as it was quite a short film, however did prevent me from making any changes to the Foley afterwards. During this process I edited the Foley as I went along. This prevented the situation of needing to re-record bits of Foley later on as I have already edited it and determined if it needed re-recording. There wasn’t a lot of Foley needed as the movement in the film was limited. The main bit of Foley recorded was clothing noises that represented movement in the scene. This helped the scenes come to life and made it seem more ‘real’. I felt that the original sounds from the kitchen scene (where the actor puts the cake in the oven) could have been improved a lot. Therefore I re-record the entire scene including the oven door opening, cake sliding in the oven, door closing, clothing noises etc.

The first thing I did regard sound design, was find a voice for the phone operator. Originally the director want this to be a human voice that was ADR’ed. I thought it was a good idea for an artificial voice to be used. This made the prison operator voice sound much more professional and makes the audio feel it’s more genuine. I did a bit of research around the best voice generator to use. I tested the most recognizable one first, ‘google translate’. But that like many sounded too robotic. I kept searching and found ispeech:

http://www.ispeech.org/text.to.speech?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ispeech.org%2Ftext.to.speech%3Fvoice%3Dukenglishfemale%26action%3Dconvert%26speed%3D0%26text%3D%2520This%2520is%2520a%2520collect%2520call%2520from%2520an%2520inmate%2520at%2520Her%2520Majestys%2520prison%2520Wallington.%2520Please%2520Press%2520five%2520to%2520accept%2520

This was the exact voice I had in my head. It didn’t sound too human and didn’t sound too robotic. It sounded exactly like a phone operator.

The main part of sound design was making the sound effect of the phone. I created a bus track that would be connected to all sounds that need to sound like they are coming from a phone. I used an EQ plugin to remove the low and high frequencies, as well as boost the mid frequencies. I also used a brick wall compressor and a smidge of distortion. This gives the impression that their voice is coming from the phone. I then used a room tone atmosphere, increased the volume and run that through the same EQ plugin. Other things added included vinyl crackles, door slams etc. found in a sound FX library to give the audience more of an impression that the sound is coming from a prison. I then run all of this through several plugins, EQ, reverb and distortion that made the sound more convincing.