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?”
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.
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:
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.
After the dialogue edit I organized a draft screening with the film group. This had many advantages, it meant I could hear the project in another set of speakers and get personal feedback from the director and group. After screening the film, the group were impressed with what I did in a short space of time. There were a few things that were mentioned including levels of Foley, and sound design for the phone call. However I had told them prior to the meeting that this was a very rough draft and far from finished.
After this we recorded some ADR for the bingo scene in the film. The editor (Jordan) volunteered to be the voice. Because I didn’t have access to any of the university facilities as they were fully booked I set up a ‘make shift’ portable studio. This involved using the ‘Zoom H4’ as an audio interface that worked through Pro Tools. I used a cheap Dynamic vocal microphone as this would reproduce a similar sound to what an actual bingo caller would use. Once this was recorded, I processed it straight away to see if the director was happy with the sound of it. I added artificial reverb, panned it a bit to the left and boosted some of the low-mid frequencies to give it a more boomy room sound effect. This worked really well and the group seemed very impressed with the speed and quality of the result.
This post will look into the research and process of dialogue editing for ‘All Ribbons End’. This was the first stage for audio post production on this particular film. This process not only ‘cleaned up’ the location audio and made it audible clear and better quality; it meant by the end of this process it would then determine on how much of everything else I would need to do. It would determine any Foley I needed to do, atmospheres I have to create, and any ADR that was needed. However ADR was not possible due to time restrictions and actors availability therefore I had to make sure that the dialogue was as best as it could be.
For my research on dialogue editing I used a book by John Purcell: Dialogue editing for motion pictures-A guide to the invisible art.
This was a very useful text, as it explained the role, how to get started, how to fix certain problems etc. I also used this text in the first semester. It proves to be a good book for problem solving issues with dialogue editing and is clear, easy and very useful guide.
“A dialogue editor is responsible for every sound that was recorded during the shot. She takes the more or less finished film from the picture editor, makes sense of the edited sounds, organizes them, finds out what works and what doesn’t. The dialogue editor wades through the outages to find better articulations quieter passages, sexier breaths, and less vulgar lip smacks…Dialogue editors work to remove the filming from the film. Dolly squeaks, camera noise, crew rustling, and light buzzes must go; otherwise, the magic of the movies is comprised.” (Purcell, 2007, 1)
So, just what is the dialogue editor’s part in this process:
To organize and manage the material.
To smooth the transitions between shots so conversations appear to be happening in the same place at the same time
To fix articulation problems, overlaps and language issues.
To address unwanted, unseemly actor noises.
To pay attention to changes and adds that will enhance the story or motivate characters’ actions.
To remove unwanted external noises
To replace sections of dialogue corrupt by distortion, wind, clothing rustle, boom handling and the like.
To determine what can be saved through the editing
Before i started this process i wanted to make sure I was prepared. Therefore read some of the chapters in Purcell’s book and used them as a reference when having any issues with the dialogue editing. The chapters that were particularly useful included:
Getting started on dialogue editing
This chapter was extremely useful in outline the necessary preparation before going ahead and diving into the dialogue editing. It suggests the best ways in which to set up, syncing an OMF file, using a template session etc. For this process I used my own template that I created previously. In the previous project I created a Pro Tools Session Template with reference to the Template given to us by Grant Bridgman in a previous lecture. However after assessing some of the issues with the template I used, I amended it further. Below are the two old templates in question. The left is the Grant Bridgman one and the right is my old template. My new template took my old template and modified features that made it more similar to Grants one. The first thing I did was add working tracks and Junk tracks. This meant I could work and edit on select bits of audio. once it has been edited I placed it in the dialogue tracks. therefore I knew it was complete and I wouldn’t try and edit and or delete things that didn’t need to be. the Junk were used instead of deleting files. This proved useful as sometimes I wanted to access clips that I previously deleted. This was much easier to access through the junk tracks than having to reimport an OMF session.
Now the actual editing
This chapter gives an outline of the dialogue editing process. It talks about checking boarding the audio files on tracks, organizing scenes into shots, splitting by sound edits, not picture edits. Finding room tone, making edits etc.
Here is an example of my dialogue edit early on in the process.
Damage repair
This Chapter was especially useful as reference tool for when i needed to overcome an issue with the edit. It starts by talking about the common issues that dialogue editors have and how to repair the issues. It talks about using room tone, and how to use it to repair audio in regards to sounds being there that shouldn’t, and finding literate takes. In which i did for a few occasions where the dialogue was bad quality in the original recording. Finding other takes was really easy as one of the charters were never in shot. Therefore the voice coming from the phone call could be fixed easier than the actor on screen.
IZotope’s RX plugin was very useful during this whole process. This is a very powerful tool that did many things that helped improve the quality of audio during the dialogue editing process. The videos below really helped me in understanding how to use this software and how powerful it can be.
This video gave me an amazing incite to RX. Before I accessed this video I was simply playing around with the tools (not really knowing what I was doing. I also never touched the spectrograph editor. I was quite intimated by how complicated it looked. I basically guessed how it worked and didn’t know how to get a result out of it. However this video simplified it a lot, and it was amazing how easy it was to use. the caption for the video was: “Learn how to deal with gaps and dropouts, wind noise processing techniques, tips for visual editing in the Spectrogram, help with removing unwanted sounds, and a deep dive into the De-noise, EQ, and Ambience Match tools.” this is exactly what I learnt from it, and it considerably helped aid the quality of the final audio I delivered to the client.
As well as this Video, I used used izotope’s ‘RX cook book’. This is a free access site that lets you look for a specific problem and the solution to the problem, as well as tutorials on how to use the software.
The main tools I used was the ambience match, Dialogue noise reduction and the ‘connect’ feature that allows you to edit the spectrograph outside of Pro Tools.
One of the issues I had with the last project is that i couldn’t find enough ‘silence’ to fill certain gaps. This very effected the overall quality of the audio. The ambience match tools was an amazing feature i used very frequently in this project. Any time where I needed ‘silence’ I didn’t need to go through lots of takes to find a similar ambient sound. It also meant the audio could be a lot more consistent, and I could record bits of Foley that wouldn’t sound out of place.
Another issue I had in the last project was background noise. The Dialogue DE-noise was a very easy to use and power tool that helped get rid of the background noise. This was quite essential in a film that has big gaps of silence in. The background noise can be very distracting for the listener. After experimenting however, I found that if this tool is overused, it can degrade the quality of the audio. When the noise is reduced too much it sounds a bit like a ‘phasey gate’ and is very distracting. There was a few occasions were I had un-do the processing as it sounded worse than before it went through the de-noiser.
The main RX module with the spectrograph was an amazing feature when it came to wanting to pick a part certain parts of the audio. You can turn down certain frequencies as well as ‘rub out’ other specific frequencies. this function was most useful when trying to get rid out certain sounds such as knocks, boom bumps, clicks etc.
I had already been given a ‘picture locked’ version of the film. However was told that this was going to be re-edited due to suggestions from the film group’s tutor. Luckily due to other work commitments I hadn’t made a start on this film yet. Therefore I organized another meeting with the director and editor. This was only a brief meeting that involved getting a copy of the actual ‘picture locked’ film and asking the director for any sound requirements.
The main focus was on the phone call. The director talked about wanting the phone dialogue to be obvious and clear to the audience that the phone call is taking place, even on the silent parts. He wanted sounds to be included such as phone crackles, doors being shut, background chatter, all coming from the ‘phone call’ perspective. These sounds could also be used to fill some of the gaps in the silence to show the audience that the character is still on the phone.
I knew from working with the director on a previous project, that his ‘vision of the sound’ is limited until he hears a draft and then picks out certain parts of the edit that he likes or doesn’t. Therefore I re organized another meeting for a few days later to show the group a quick draft, as well as record a voice over/ADR for an off screen character.
