Final Project
My final project was based on the Assassins Creed "Mirage" trailer (provided by Ubisoft). It began with just a video, no audio, and 2 months to complete it.
Project Designed and Mixed in 5.1, Online format is Stereo
The Process
Spotting
All good work starts in pre-production. Going through frame by frame, I made spotting sheets for ADR, Foley, and Sound Design, giving me a detailed list of all the sounds I would need. In total, it added up to over 500.
Spotting session here, each clip is a different sound or sound group. Some are not visible
Foley
All of the footsteps, touches, character interaction, and minutia. One of my favorite steps in the process is getting to record Foley. I'd spent the past 6 months working on getting perfect recordings and eventually landed on a Sennheiser 8060 into a Sound Devices 722 as the preamp. This gave me transparent and clean recordings that sound amazing.
Working on the alley chase was the most interesting, in the span of 10 seconds there are 7 different surfaces for footsteps, several soldiers running, a chase through a tunnel, into a huge cart crash in the middle of a market.
A clip from the Video overtop the mix session with Dry Printed down Foley
Sound Design
Tape stops, explosions, and eagles. Starting to build out the sonic identity and create the world for this piece. This was the most time-consuming aspect, but one of the most important.
The most challenging scene was the explosion in the back alley. Creating something that is both loud and identifiable was very difficult. The explosion is huge, with a fireball woofing past the main character, and all the items on the table being thrown into the air. It required a few Doppler-ed explosions going from the center to the surround to convey the sense of expansion. Past that, I needed not only the explosion but also the slapback from the small space they are in. Most importantly I needed the driver of the explosion itself, I used a gunshot, a recording of a real explosion, and a clap. Put all these together in mono, and then used a bunch of saturation to increase the perceived loudness, but still maintain headroom.
SFX in the mix session, most have been printed down to conserve tracks
Dialogue
My all-time favorite aspect of sound, Dialogue, or Dx. The most important part to nail is the voice-over and dialogue from this. Dialogue is so easy to recognize when it's bad, and more than anything else can ruin the suspension of disbelief. Capturing the nuance of a voice is very difficult, and I spent the most amount of time practicing and testing just that. After multiple tests, I landed on the Rode K2 tube mic into the Sound Devices 702 (cause the 722 for some reason doesn't like to transmit S/PDIF over coax). For some recordings, I used a Nagra IV-S tape recorder, this provided incredible timbre and gave some beautiful saturation to the voice.
The Main Voice Over work (voiced by Brianne) consisted of 3-4 tracks. To give the Vox the power needed I employed a few tricks. The first was just a simple algo verb to add some dimension. Next was a stereo-izer plugin that pushed the mono voice over two channels and then saturated them to add some thickness. The final two tracks were doubling the voice, track 3 was a copy of the original VO run through a doubling plugin and then panned to the surrounds. Track 4 was a double-tracked version spoken in a deeper register, then saturated, and occasionally got a reversed reverb to give it a haunting sound.
Dx that shows all main characters and also shows the efforts of supporting characters
Walla
Suspension of Disbelief is at the heart of sound design. To fully transport the audience to the world you are creating, you need to re-create all surrounding elements, and for a market scene that means A LOT!! of walla. Over the course of about 6-7 walla recording sessions, I was able to create all of the background walla and specs.
The opening market scene is hugely important to the feel of my piece and required a lot of detail and even more creativity to imagine what all manner of conversations and interactions would be taking place. To add to the challenge, I had to make all of this immerse the listener in full surround, so it required a lot of creative panning, and flow from one speaker to the next.
Walla from the market. *This is the stereo version of a 5.1 walla mix*
Et Voilá