Over the past 9 weeks, I have learnt plenty. By being placed in a new uncomfortable environment, tasked with challenges I have never faced before such as audiovisual analysis or dialogue editing. I have been able to research and study completely new production, recording and mixing techniques, with one of the first being field recording. Something that I have used on not just my London artefact, but on my final project as well by using the H5 kit to record audio clips in high detail to then implement into the short film I chose.
In this final class before we submit our work, our lecturer Diego gave us valuable feedback to incorporate into our work. It is crucial to get feedback from a fresh set of ears (especially from someone who does sound design for a living) as when you are working on a project like this, your ears can become disillusioned to the mistakes or creative choices you have made. Since Diego has worked in the field for many years, he was able to tell me exactly where i went “wrong” and explain how I could fix it as well as provide me with additional ideas for what I could potentially add to improve my project overall.
For example in the astronaut clip artefact, It was pointed out to me that as the astronaut is moving through the ship, the sound of the sliding door closing behind him does not get any quieter as he moves further away To fix this I added automation to lower the volume in time with the movement of the astronaut away from the door, as well as add some reverb and pre-delay (as per DIego’s suggestion) to exemplify the dynamic soundscape of the spaceship interior and push the audio to the ‘back’ of the mix.
For the second of the two ADR clips, Diego was able to show me how to effectively use the fabfilter plugin to EQ match the main villain’s voice lines. Before he showed me this I was struggling to match the tone, leading me to use more of the boom mic dialogue. The audio from this however, provided a much less realistic and believable tone for the villain character (too much room noise and not enough bass). By using fab filter and sticking to the characters mic over the boom I was able to bring back the more intense vocal sound for the character while providing a contrast clean anough to not notice any drastic changes in the tone of the vocal delivery.
I was also able to receive feedback from my peers in class, who recommended I used additional equalisation on the forest footsteps artefact to cut out the high end in one of the footstep samples to make it sound more relevant to the material the character is walking on. This is another detail that went completely unnoticed by me until it was pointed out to me.
Throughout these past weeks, writing and researching these blog posts has made me a lot more confident in myself and my ability to create, mix and produce within the realm of post-production and sound design, you can see this evidenced in my work, utilising a number of new skills on my project such as field recording and sound processing. Over the weeks of class I have been able to improve on my skills, creating a more and more polished final project as I progressed through this terms classes.