Author: 13421070

20/11/15 – Project Management – ROLE DIARY: Shoot Day 3 + 4

13421070 / / Learning Outcomes, Process Management, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

11, 12/11/15 – ‘George’ Shoot Days 3 + 4

Audio for two of the final five locations was collected without problem, though the project has now fallen behind schedule as shooting was supposed to complete by the end of this week due to a spate of eleventh hour cancellations which have severely impacted the schedules of both groups.

This was concurrent with the abrupt departure of the film’s director from the working group just prior to this week’s filming.

It appeared from our perspective that the outgoing director did only the bare minimum to smooth the picking up of slack for the rest of her group which directly led to them cancelling a reasonably complex location shoot, use of the location for which had been offered on goodwill and only for a limited time. Nobody appeared to know how to contact any of the key people outside of the production team (location owners, the actor etc) in her absence, suggesting that this information wasn’t shared in an organised fashion within the group to cover such an eventuality. As such, it became necessary for me to liase with the rest of the production team, and to relay information to the rest of my group as decisions were made and the schedule changed, as well as replanning our own working schedule in response and trying to schedule in some kind of useful work on the project with no picture or storyboard available.

Unfortunately, in the longer term, the loss of most of two days shooting required a large amount of rescheduling, which in turn meant it was impossible for both groups to access equipment for at least the two following weeks. This has put the production back by at least three weeks, taken us from ahead of schedule to badly behind schedule and has required an extension to our institutional deadline which has now been granted. At this time, we’re told we’ll still have a picture-lock version of the film by December 20th, giving us a month to finalise the audio in time for the new deadline on the 27th of January. We’re attempting to fill the down-time this has created constructively by getting a head-start on the music and atmosphere work required for the picture.

A positive aspect arose from the uncertainty of the situation as, in the absence of the director during the full day’s shoot of the 12th which did go ahead as planned, the workflow, communication and creativity was much improved on set as the production team split the directorial duties between them.

The first director appeared to be no longer involved with the project after this.

— 500 words
Team management and interaction issues – Process Management, Professional Practise.

  • To successfully manage a three person team in delivery of the entire soundtrack to a new piece of visual media efficiently
    To successfully manage the audio team’s interaction with film’s director, editor and producer on a practical and creative level, and ensure the audio team’s work is delivered on time and to a good standard.

AUDIO CONSTRUCTION – The ‘Bread + Butter’ Song

13421070 / / Audio Production, Individual Reflection, Learning Outcomes, Research

The story of the song on the radio in George’s ‘Bread and Butter’ scene is worthy of mention as it’s an audio device demonstrating use of diagetic to non-diagetic audio, an example of which exists in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and which was developed over the course of post-production in a way which better served the story than the original plan for the scene.

This was one of the few music cues that was supplied by George’s original director, requesting the use of Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’ as the trigger for one of the characters fits of weeping, which was initially included as a nod to the movie Green Mile. The song is potentially out of copyright because it was written over 70 years ago in 1935, but as it was written for the film Top Hat there was some question as to whether copyrights could still be active, though research rapidly uncovered that Irving Berlin retained the copyrights for the songs in the film rather than the commissioning employer assuming them, in something of a landmark case. We were in the process of trying to clear this matter up with PRS when the first director departed the project.

As such, and precisely because I didn’t want the production team getting too attached to the inclusion of Fred and Ginger’s Cheek to Cheek (and because our original temp music for this scene was the Star War’s Cantina Band theme), I subsituted a temp track – ‘One More Kiss Dear’ by Vangelis from the soundtrack to the film Blade Runner – in a scratch mix I supplied to the new, incoming director before Christmas. I’d selected this track because I felt the lyric supported the story of ‘George’, it being suggestive of a final seperation between lovers.

The new director became enamoured with it, saying she much preferred this piece or something very like it to replace the original music cue and so we found ourselves trying to license a piece of music which was definitely copyrighted for our film’s use.

Initially the soundtrack used 35 seconds of the piece for quite an important aspect of the film which is very much brought to the audience’s attention. We felt that we were unlikely to get license to use the original piece in that context (and PRS obliquely agreed) and as such the music supervisor felt that constructing a cover of the piece was the best way to go. She made this enquiry to PRS, and received the following –

Prog As Completed - One More Kiss PRS Release

Our music supervisor deconstructed the track to its piano component to create a guide, and we rerecorded the song’s other instrumentation seperately. I played the bass and we asked a local vocalist to sing the version for us before I recorded and mixed the minute or so of the piece we’d created, of which we ended up using 28 seconds, and which is available in this post. Furthermore, our use of the piece in the transition from diagetic to non-diagetic audio can be construed as a nod to the opening of Shawshank Redemption which uses a very similar device.

I learned three important things from this whole process:

“For many composers, working with a temp track is the creative equivalent of a straightjacket. After weeks or months of cutting the film to that amazing John Williams theme, the director has usually fallen in love with his or her temp score and nothing else will do.” – Trueherostudio.com

First, temporary music tracks are to be used sparingly. We were warned about this phenomenon in Lol Hammond’s guest lecture and this scene proved to be no exception to the rule, but in this case I think the result was worth the effort of recording an entirely new cover of the song and this was likely a simpler process than composing a new song in a similar vein which would then have needed recording anyway.

Secondly, I think it would have been more efficient to pick up the phone and call the PRS with our requests. We were dealing with this particular cue towards the end of a very short period of post production and, whilst fairly prompt, the combination of the email turnaround time and a couple of miscommunications as we tried to clarify the situation was inefficient.

The final thing I’ve taken away from this is that Star Wars Cantina Theme can brighten up ANY scene –

https://youtu.be/boPpfiaUNsw

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Key Points

Research and contact with PRS – Planning & Research

  • To expand my knowledge of the theory and audio techniques deployed in the films influencing ‘George’, and in drama as a genre more generally.
    Examine and implement professional practices in their production work in relation to professional contexts, clearances, ownership, copyright and commissioning.
    Comply with legal and ethical codes of conduct; health & safety regulations.

Involvement with production of cover version for the soundtrack – Application of skills and conduct in production

  • To contribute extensively to the practicalities of creating and recording music for, and of recording location sound for the piece.
    To have a good degree of creative involvement in the conception and direction of the soundtrack for the piece.
    Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes

Reflection on the process – Individual reflection on learning and team role.

  • Critically reflect and evaluate individual learning outcomes

 

RESEARCH – Dialogue Editing For Motion Picture – J. Purcell

13421070 / / Research, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

The original script for George contained a great deal more dialogue than the final piece as it is presented, but I’d already embarked on the excellent Dialogue Editing For Motion Pictures – A Guide To The Invisible Art by John Purcell before these changes took place. Some of the information I gleaned from the book was useful whilst working on George, nonetheless, and I’ve precis’d a couple of things I learnt along with how I used them below.

Dialogue panning + depth

“People interact differently with dialogue than with music, sound effects, backgrounds, or Foley. We’re both more critical and more imaginative with dialogue, and when it’s panned, we’re not the least bit forgiving,” – (Purcell, 2008, 174)

Purcell dangers of panned dialogue above, and admonishes us to resist the temptation of ‘hyper-realism’ in the sense of placing the dialogue where the character is in the shot, simply because it doesn’t work for the audience (accurate, but annoying to be precise). He also points out that panning the dialogue will also pan any room tone on the dialogue, which is incredibly disconcerting, and that it can have seriously effects when mixing for theatre’s where the audience may be sat in a large area where it can alter the experience of the dialogue for different quadrants of the stereo field.

I have stuck to the mono/central rule with the dialogue editing in George except on one occasion when a line is spoken off camera. This line is slightly panned to the position where we presume the speaker would be, and I did this because the line seemed to clash strangely with some very intricate foley work shortly before it that places the emphasis on another characters movements.

His concept of ‘depth’ in dialogue is also useful. He refers to scenes in which every sound is given equal weight as ‘flat’, and applies this to the dialogue specifically. For him,  it is about keeping the tracks around the dialogue clean and uncompromised by stray effects which may remove the breathing room of the voice, and about dulling or brightening the overall tones it is surrounded by at crucial points to bring the nuance to the fore. This can, for example, enable you to focus the audience on one character in a group. He also believes that micromanagement of faders is crucial to achieving this, that compressors and limiters cannot make up for these and that a proper dialogue premix is crucial. I didn’t apply this level of work to the mix on George because there simply wasn’t enough dialogue (or enough problems with the dialogue) to warrant the investment of time by the end of the process.

The telephone split

“…another convention in film language allows us to hear both sides of the conversation, as though we were listening in,” (Purcell, 2008, 180)

Purcell’s step by step guide to editing a telephone split was useful to the answer phone scene in George for one small nugget of information. He points out that it’s necessary to edit the two dialogue-sides of a scene with two sets of room tone, which I’d never considered before.

This came about naturally with this scene in George (which is not strictly a conversation anyway), since the tone at the end of the line is literally recorded in another room and it’s designed to sound as though it’s coming from the phone in George’s hand to an extent.

Production FX (PFX)

Another useful industry concept introduced to me by this book is that of ‘production FX’. These are all the sounds which exist on the dialogue tracks but are not dialogue, and the book goes on to give an overview of the practicalities of using these as distinct from the standard procedure for the effects tracks. It is important, for example, to seperate these if a film is intended to dubbed into another language, as it saves a later mixer having to open the film’s dialogue stem audio. Many of these techniques can also help to wring the best out of any effects the picture editor may have added to the version the dialogue mixer receives, which are also often classed as PFX.

George’s track lay utilised these techniques, with PFX built into a subsection of our SFX section.

– 700 Words

KEY POINTS

Precis of specific points from book on dialogue editing – RESEARCH

  • To expand my knowledge of the theory and audio techniques deployed in the films influencing ‘George’, and in drama as a genre more generally.

RESEARCH – Mix Requirements + Final Mix

13421070 / / Audio Production, Contribution, Learning Outcomes, Research, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

“Mix Stems are used to create the final print masters for film and high-end TV productions…If done correctly, mix stems will combine at unity gain without any adjustment.” – (Shepherd, Pro Tools for Video, Film and multimedia)

Our client did not specify any particular requirements for their files or mastering levels, so I suggested we deliver a single stereo mix and component mixes of dialogue, sfx and music tracks, to which they agreed. We also agreed with them to mix these using the BBC technical guidelines for audio which seemed appropriate for a drama of this type. An alternative would be to mix for theatre’s, given the intention to potentially show the piece at film festivals,or to the technical specifications of an average film festival. However, few of the major festivals I researched (including BFI’s and Canne) offer any specific technical guidance on audio mix levels, and it is difficult to mix for a large room without calibrating your mix environment to do so, and I’m unsure of the calibration in the LSM Sound Theatre.

Though my colleagues were still dealing with some of the specifics of the construction of our audio later in the piece, I spent much of our final two days on the project master-mixing each scene up to these standards and finessing the transitions. Again, this is not an ideal situation but we’d set ourselves the personal deadline of end of play on Saturday 23rd January to have completed the construction and mix of our hand-in version of ‘George’.

SUPPMAT - BBC Guidelines

The BBC guidelines above informed the mix of ‘George’, along with a passing reference to the EBU R128 recommendations, also mentioned above. Each master auxiliary – music / dialogue / sfx / foley – had it’s own set of automated processing, which was generally lightly compressed and / or limited in some cases. This fed another gently compressed master bus compressor. I’ve tried to be careful with the compressors as George’s audio is very dynamic – some scenes have little in the way of loud action, others are much more heavily layered – creating a ‘blocky’ mix visually. I wanted to retain this dynamic artistically, because backed off atmospheres and near-silence helps maintain a sense of stillness in some scenes, but balance this with the technical requirements above, specifically that nothing peaks above 6 PPM, and that the focus points of the mix remain roughly within the levels above.

Here’s a visual representation of the music mix structure in protools, blue tracks are the music components, orange the aux subs, leading to the burgundy master fader –

IMG_0361 IMG_0362

The final point in this process came after mixdown, with a thorough mono / stereo check of the final stereo wav before the audio was delivered to the director.

– Circa 400 Words

 

Key Points –

Interaction with the director to discover delivery requirements –  Process Management

  • To successfully manage the audio team’s interaction with film’s director, editor and producer on a practical and creative level, and ensure the audio team’s work is delivered on time and to a good standard.
    Application of skills and conduct in production

Research and application of delivery standards in the mix – Contribution, Research

  • Comply with legal and ethical codes of conduct; health & safety regulations.
  • Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes.
    Application of skills and conduct in production

Conducting the mix – Contribution

  • To manage the delivery of the soundtrack at various stages of the production along with relevant paperwork, to the director and producer.