HOMEWORK: Principles Of Sound Design

[wheatgrinder]

In response to this thread:
http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=45351


Operating on the theory that "well begun is well finished"
Help me get this opening scene of my short "The Hot Rod" as well designed as I can!

The feel is comical, I have prerecorded music track that the band "in the bar" should be playing, I want the music to be heard through out the sequence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ebn8Jra7fg&

Where do we start?


For those of you looking for a scene to practice sound design on, you can download this same footage from vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/57632322
Password: it-rt440

Id rather you didn't publicly pass this around too liberally, but feel free to post your results back here.

FYI: Production sound only: Recorded by IT member 2001Productions with a Marantz pdm660 (the old 16 bit one) Oade brothers moded ... bomming an AT835b mic, it sounded pretty dang good but still a bit hissy. Plus there was a light rain that you could hear as added hiss..

I used adobe audition CS5.5 patterned based noise reduction to clean it up, worked pretty good. There is a bit of "flanging" on one shot , I need to redo the NR on that one..

 

[icba pictures]

I've known a few low budget Fix & Mix guys in the past but never one as knowledgeable, well informed and enthusiastic as you. I hope you're appreciated round here, there aren't many like you about!

G

You're both very appreciated in here, shedding for us light on an otherwise very obscure topic (pun intended).

Yes, VERY appreciated! Both of you. Many thanks. Sound design is by far the most challenging for me, the layers and depth involved are time consuming. The quantity of sound files needed alone is daunting. Please continue to be patient with us newbies... please.

 

[AudioPostExpert]

Thanks. As I said in the other thread, keep trying. It does take years to get really good at sound design but just trying, even if it isn't very good to start with, will teach you loads and make your films better!

From my point of view (knowing full well that you are both entirely correct in your approaches), I try to come at every story element of every stage and element of production from the middle out. What I mean is that in every shot/scene/sequence/story, I try to find that pivotal moment and decide what comes before and after and what that says about the story.

Even when we're talking about films with a budget of a few million $, most filmmakers seem to think of film as no more than a visual method of presenting a screenplay. That was true in the 1920s and early 1930s but film and audience's expectation of film has greatly evolved since then. A script or screenplay is not a film, it is only the starting point for a film! A film has to go so much further than the script but low budget films rarely do and that is why the paying public find the vast majority of indie films boring. We go from one dialogue driven, single paced scene, to the next single paced scene and no matter how good the script or the story behind the script, everyone finds it boring with the exception of the odd other indie filmmaker who maybe appreciates the image quality. It's boring because there is another whole layer to filmmaking which is missing and while the audience may not be consciously aware of this layer, they are more than aware that something IS missing and more than aware that they're bored! This is why is started the Principles of Sound Design thread in the first place.

Knightly, finding a pivotal point in a scene is a great start, it means you're thinking about shape; how we get to that pivotal point, what we do when we get there and what we do afterwards. Commonly there may not be a single pivotal point in a scene, there maybe several smaller ones instead and even if there is a single pivotal point, we try to create several additional more minor peaks and troughs to maintain the pace. The shape of a scene and the shape of how the scenes fit together to make the entire film needs to be in a state of almost constantly change. It's the same basic rule with music composition, either you're going somewhere or you're going nowhere! To achieve this in film you need to use sound design as at least one of your filmmaking tools and frequently, particularly in lo budget film where there may not be the budget for loads of visual action scenes, as one of the most important filmmaking tools. As a Director you need to be constantly thinking about what's beyond the words in the script. I cannot emphasise this point enough! It's what separates the very good and the great filmmakers from the countless masses.

I know with you I'm preaching to the converted but this is for the benefit of others reading this thread and because I felt like a bit of a rant anyway!

I had a lot of fun a few months back basically sound designing (as well as recording) for an "audio only project"..no picture......but it gave me the chance to do soundscapes behind story-telling, for creating 'atmosphere,' to give people a "mind's-eye" for them to visualize the story for themselves... No film involved......but gee it was fun because it was all "sound".

I've done this sort of project myself in the past but to be honest I find it too restricting. When there's no picture, the audience concentrates purely on the sound and I find that a lot of the sound design tricks I'm used to employing sound too obvious, beyond believable and just don't work.

G

 

[rocksure]

I've done this sort of project myself in the past but to be honest I find it too restricting. When there's no picture, the audience concentrates purely on the sound and I find that a lot of the sound design tricks I'm used to employing sound too obvious, beyond believable and just don't work.

G

That's why things can work out for different people doing different things. You don't like doing that sort of work and find it restricting, and that's cool......me on the other hand, I do enjoy it because I get to do sound design, and create soundscapes from scratch...which can mean I get to be a composer, audio engineer, sound designer, musician all in one project. That's the kind of project I enjoy the most actually.

 

[AudioPostExpert]

That was fun. I was visualizing and audializing (what is the audio equivalent to visualization called anyway?)

AFAIK, there isn't a specific term, visualizing is the term we use. In a sense, this "visualisation" of the audio goes to the heart of film making. Add this audio visualisation to the actual visual images and the impact of the combination of the two is immeasurably more dramatic and involving than either could achieve on it's own. This combination IS film, without this combination you are making a visual montage or a radio play, not film!

Sound design is by far the most challenging for me, the layers and depth involved are time consuming. The quantity of sound files needed alone is daunting.

Agreed. Figuring out how you want to tell the story, where you want the audience to be focusing their attention, what you want them to be feeling and then how you are going to achieve that is time consuming. Then of course you've actually got to source sound FX or perform and record many of them because subtle differences in sonic quality will take the audiences in different directions. For example, the different sonic characteristics of the slaps during the fight (point 1 in post #10). You're not easily going to find slaps from a sound FX library with the exact flavour (sonic characteristics) required and it's usually far quicker to get what you want/need by simply recording them yourself but this is still time consuming. That's why on the big features you might have an audio post team of 50+ specialists working for 4 months or more on the audio post. I know this all sounds very daunting, it's sometimes pretty daunting for me as an actual sound designer! Don't let any of this put you off though!!! The act of trying will give you invaluable knowledge when you are eventually in a position to have your own audio post team and in the meantime you are giving yourself the chance of elevating your films well above the masses of no budget filmmakers fixated on the visual images and not even considering sound as a story telling tool!

G

 

[wheatgrinder]

Thanks all for you inspirational comments. Its not great art, but its interesting...

Focusing on story in this, and not so much "accuracy" trying to accent the humor and slap stick nature of this scene ... also includes the opening (I didn't have an establishing shot, so I used this map thing modified from another another project) Overall Volume level is low... dialog is a bit low in the mix at start..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEuRJcr3rHM

Music is the "Lonesome Billies" with permission..

 

[AudioPostExpert]

Focusing on story in this, and not so much "accuracy" ....

This is where sound design gets really interesting! You need to have a bit of both, you need to carefully tread the line between "accuracy" or realism and believability. I've only got a few minutes, so I'll just deal with the music as an example.

A large part of sound design is psychoacoustics, knowing how the human brain perceives sound and using that as a tool. As with most of psychoacoustics, the way the brain perceives information about the sound it is hearing is dependent on several simultaneous factors. For example, high frequencies (HF) are absorbed by almost everything, even air if there's enough of it. Therefore distance is perceived as a combination of loss of overall volume as well as an additional loss of HF content. When the scene cuts from the titles to the action, apply a quite severe low pass filter (LPF) to both the music and the crowd sounds, probably somewhere around 1.5kHz and possibly add a little bit of echo. This will emulate the frequency absorption of the high frequencies by the bar's walls and surfaces and help create the illusion we, the audience, are hearing the music from outside the bar. This will change the music from being incidental, to being part of the scene and help to tell the story. When the bar door closes filter out even more of the HF, set your LPF somewhere around 900Hz - 1kHz. This will have the added bonus of creating a nice big hole in the frequency content of your mix so that the dialogue and Foley will cut through easily.

G

 

[wheatgrinder]

I'm grinning from ear to ear! Thanks for that specific advice..

 

[wheatgrinder]

wow, what an amazing difference! I started with your exact settings, worked, but sounded a bit TOO far away so I just shifted the roll off just a bit higher. Now all the little treats in the background are coming through, dialog sounds better etc.. I cant wait to post the fixup.

 

[wheatgrinder]

For convience here are the three versions:

Original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ebn8Jra7fg

First attempt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEuRJcr3rHM

Second attempt, with some additional tweaks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64J1xZWqSc

 

[TheArtist]

Okay, I think I'm gonna need to save this topic somewhere on my computer before APE realizes he could make money out of such practical advices..

 

[AudioPostExpert]

wow, what an amazing difference! I started with your exact settings, worked, but sounded a bit TOO far away so I just shifted the roll off just a bit higher. Now all the little treats in the background are coming through, dialog sounds better etc.. I cant wait to post the fixup.

Glad that info helped. You can never give precise settings for EQ as it depends on the source material, so the settings I gave were just ball park.

I would also consider on the cut automating the panning so the music is in mono. The sound source is essentially from one place, the door of the bar, so it will sound more convincing being in mono from that point onwards. If you want to be clever, you can slowly pan the music more to the right speaker throughout the scene as the action shifts more to the left of the door. I'd also add a little stereo echo to the music as if we were hearing it from the street, with reflections off the buildings. A little frequency roll-off at the bottom end would help too, try about 80Hz and adjust to taste. As we don't see the door to the bar close, bring the door closing sound up in volume to make it more obvious and then the second HF removal will sound more convincing.

Having so much HF removed sounds a bit unnatural, so bring in a little ambience, effectively some deserted street "room tone". Again, if you want to be clever, you can make the Foley sound a little more distant at about 00:01:20:00 when you cut to a more distant POV. Use the same trick as with the music, some HF removal plus a little echo, not as much as with the music though and leave the music as is and maybe raise the volume of the ambience a tiny bit.

BTW, the music jumps up in volume at about 00:01:05:00, which I presume is a mistake or at least it sounds like it. Also, maybe the mouth wiping squelch it a bit too prominent.

Hope this helps.

Okay, I think I'm gonna need to save this topic somewhere on my computer before APE realizes he could make money out of such practical advices..

This is just basic, simple starter audio post advice, so I don't mind giving it away. There are of course some tricks I'll keep up my sleeve but most of them are only really useful when you've got a high quality mixing environment so you can get the balance exactly right and of course it gets even more interesting/complex when you start working in 5.1!

G

 

[TheArtist]

By the way, is there a free online sound library you would recommend ?

 

[wheatgrinder]

most of the sounds I used so far are from either the free adobe sound library or freesound.org

 

[Alcove Audio]

By the way, is there a free online sound library you would recommend ?

FreeSound.org has a huge library of sounds, ranging from complete garbage to very nice; you need to spend a lot of time weeding through it all. It's a Creative Commons license, so you will have to credit the creator(s) of the sound(s). There have been some mega-budget films (such as "Children of Men") that have properly credited sound clips from FreeSound.

SweetSoundEffects.com has some decent stuff; I think it's another Creative Commons site (although run by one guy) so you may have to attribute.

Many sites where you purchase sounds have a small section of free sounds; their usage licenses vary, and you usually have to register with them to obtain the sounds, so you'll get lots of marketing emails.

Just Google "Free Sound Effects" and download everything that you can. Yup, you can spend weeks doing this and you will come up with many redundancies, and the quality is usually mediocre to poor. But you never know when that trashy sound effect is just the right thing.

For a lot of stuff it's not possible to DIY (weapons, for example), but if you have a mic and recorder spend some time out in the field capturing vehicles, ambiences and whatever other interesting sounds you can find. Go to the residences of family and friends and record doors, windows, etc. If you get out for a couple of hours every week you will be amazed at how fast your library will grow.

 

[TheArtist]

Thanks Alcove. I will check those sites.

I have another question !

What's the standard workflow for sound design ? Is it something done at the very end of the post-production, after VFX (maybe before grading) ? I'm so messy when I work on stuff, I finally got the Premier/After-Effects workflow down and was wondering what's the best way to work with sound. i'm thinking Audition to stay in the family but what's the usual way of doing this ?

Get the edited picture, get the raw dialog and start building ?

 

[Alcove Audio]

The biggest issue with low/no/mini/micro budget projects is, as always, funds. A fractionally smaller issue is inexperience, especially when it comes to audio. A very huge problem is completely inadequate records keeping, by which I mean EDLs, sound reports and the like.

So whether doing it by yourself or when retaining someone like me who specializes in l/n/m/m budget projects the idea is to avoid problems that need more money, more experience, or waste time.

So yes, do the audio post last. This is not how it is done at the budgeted level where there is usually a very rough basic first cut within a couple of weeks (or less) after shooting wraps. This is what the audio post team works with. Yes, there will be many, many changes, but the budget has accounted for that.

The dialog editing team digs into the production sound - ALL of it, every belch, fart, laugh and flubbed line. They work on putting together the "perfect" dialog performance(s).

The ADR team is busy recording the lead and supporting actors. They usually handle the "loop group" as well. These are the folks who provide small crowd sounds (a café or cocktail party, for example) and supply details to larger crowd sound effects (the extra who heckles a player in a sports film, for example), one-off dialog ("Yes, sir!"), etc., etc., etc.

The Foley team does the Foley work. The sound effects team does the sound effects work, usually broken down by units - vehicles, weapons, environment (ambient backgrounds), etc.

All of this is overseen by the supervising sound editor, who may or may not be the sound designer.

As all of this is occurring the film is, of course, being re-edited and re-edited again. Scenes are modified, added, deleted and rearranged. An EDL must be generated for each occurrence. And, of course, all of the audio files must be conformed to each new edit.

Down here in the weeds at the l/n/m/m budget level, dealing with inexperienced editors and directors, I prefer the final locked edit. I charge, well, a very large hourly rate for conforming to re-edits. Why? I never get an EDL, which makes the process an intense PITA.

I always do the dialog first. It tells me a lot about the film. I get to know the characters, which is important with putting together my Foley cue sheet and I also as I put together the sound effects cue sheet. It lets me know how much noise reduction I need to do, and if I can bury some bad production sound under ambient backgrounds. I usually do the Foley next; I do each character through the film, rather than doing the Foley scene by scene. This is followed by the sound effects; hey, I save the really fun stuff for last. I then drop in the score and the music. And, finally, comes this mix.

 

[TheArtist]

Thanks Alcove, very informative. Looking forward to put this to good use on my next project.

I met someone who will be shooting his very first short soon . He has no experience and the short will be sent ou as a part of an application to film school.

I asked him a few things about how he's gonna handleit and when I asked about sound, he told me he was planning to plug the Rode VM into the DSLR ans that's it. I talked him out of it very easily and he asked me to help out on the project.

One thing though... can you still do good Sound Editing and Mixing if the actors speak a language you don't understand ?

 

[Alcove Audio]

One thing though... can you still do good Sound Editing and Mixing if the actors speak a language you don't understand ?

You can still do a good job editing without understanding the language, mostly clean-up, trimming out the stuff between lines of dialog and the like. The only thing you cannot do is edit the dialog for emotional content - which is the most important aspect of dialog editing.

I'm working on the dialog edit right now, and that is actually the biggest challenge, editing to improve the emotional content. It's incredibly subtle, sometimes choosing between almost identical lines of dialog where just one syllable is just slightly more emphasized. I agonized for quite a while last night between four different versions of a very quiet "damn!"

 

[TheArtist]

I still don't know much about dialog post-production so I will keep it basic, just going for the clean and proper feel. I have never messed with EQ and other sound tweaking before and have no idea of the whens, hows and whys.

I can easily picture you tortured about a choice in the edit room. Hope you made the right choice.

 

[Alcove Audio]

I can easily picture you tortured about a choice in the edit room. Hope you made the right choice.

I believe that I did, but the final decision is always up to the director and/or producer. I've sat through some amazing arguments between the other creative collaborators. One of the big problems is that so many indie types spend months editing and are "married" to what was there originally; they just can't seem to get around substitutions.

I recently sat through one of those after doing the dialog edit on a gun battle/fight scene. The producer agreed with most of my choices, and his suggested changes definitely had solid merit, and I had no complaints about his choices. The director didn't want any changes, which included several nearly identical alt takes that were chosen to replace lav rubs, mic bumps and the like.

Here's an example: I had only three very similar "Ooofs" to choose from for one cue - one with a lav rub, one way off mic and one close miced; I chose the close miced version as it did what I want theatrically and emotionally. The director was used to the original with the lav rub.

BTW, this is why the original pieces of dialog are in their original position on an inactive track for easy retrieval, so I can slug them back in if needed.

To be fair, there are some who come in to hear the dialog edit and go "Holy shit! You can do that?" The problem then is they want to micromanage the entire dialog edit; sighhhhhhhhhhhh.

One of the problems I run into frequently when newb clients hear the dialog edit by itself is that a large percentage just cannot "visualize" (audio-ize?) what everything will sound like when the rest of the audio elements - Foley, sound effects, score/music, etc. - are added later.