Role – Supervising Sound Editor – Film Audio Project – SEM A

FINAL SUMMARY

13421070 / January 27, 2016January 28, 2016 / Audio Production, Contribution, Individual Reflection, Learning Outcomes, Process Management, Project Overview, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

Reflective Summary – G.Bailey – Production of ‘George’

The image above documents the positive email feedback we received on my group’s involvement with the production team during the production of George, which speaks directly to the achievement in my first learning outcome for the project pertaining to the role of Supervising Sound Editor – 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 – and one of my personal learning outcomes – To successfully manage a three person team in delivery of the entire soundtrack to a new piece of visual media efficiently.

Interaction with the client was one of the most critical parts of the process from my perspective as well as the most fraught, due to the two seperate directorial directions the film required and the production problems around the time of the original directors departure. The fact that we delivered audio for the film under complicated circumstances which met and exceeded the client’s expectations in some areas on time and on target (with respect to the extension granted us) whilst having had to guide the direction of the audio for the film with little collaborative support from the creative lead in it’s early stages, and still received universally positive feedback suggests I successfully managed the interactions with the relevant personnel. I dealt with a great number of logistical and technical problems for both the media groups involved throughout the production, generally made the final call on decisions about our priorities when I was able to do so, spent a great deal of time trying to keep spirits up on all sides as problems mounted, and attempted to encourage the other members of the audio team to look at things I felt they were perhaps missing (like trying to clear the director’s music choices via PRS, rather than taking an easy, copyright free, option). In managing the process here, I learnt above all that I should be more expectant of the kind of problems thrown up throughout because, whilst I classed them initially as unusual difficulties, according to the industry sources I consulted they appear par for the course in film production.

To judge the initial direction of and maintain the consistency of the overall tone of the audio team’s work on the piece, and liase with the director to ensure this is concurrent with their vision of the piece – This outcome is more difficult to judge because the initial direction of the audio for the piece was not necessarily the direction that was requested of our work after Christmas, which is not to say I misjudged either directors requirements as far as I’m aware, and no one aspect of the audio particularly jars with any other. There are plenty of tangible examples that stemmed from the requests of the two creative leads – audio devices influenced by Green Mile, the use of the specific radio track at the behest of the second director etc – in the final artifact that will testify to the attention to directorial requirements paid throughout both the pre production and production process. Of scenes in which I led the sound design, I feel we did everything we possibly could to bolster the story without overstepping the boundaries created by the picture, even though this was fairly frustrating as we could clearly see the initially strong idea being buried under the production problems, and I consistently pushed for the audio dimension to be given as much headway as possible to help tell George’s story, even as the picture was hampered in doing so. This approach was also, ultimately, in keeping with both director’s vision for the piece.

To manage the post-production workflow and contribute substantially to the sound design, construction and editing of the piece – Getting down to the nuts and bolts of the post-work aspect of the Supervising Sound Editor’s role, I can cite my overall contribution as evidence of my success here. I put a lot of time and effort (at least 60 hours of editing and foley work alone) into making a slightly confused final edit as good as it could audibly be across the various disciplines of audio post-production work, as well as dealing with much of the final quality-control decision making and the crucial final mix and master stage, all under considerable time pressure and with sometimes weekly changes to client requirements. The detail of some of the managerial and technical challenges are documented elsewhere in this blog, though it is worth mentioning the main one from an editing perspective was the lack of information forthcoming about changes from the films editor until we pressed home this information’s importance, and both my team and the client are apparently proud of or happy with the technical aspects of ‘George’ I’ve had a hand in. I also feel this level of involvement in the film satisfies my personal intention to have a good degree of creative involvement in the conception and direction of the soundtrack for the piece. There are plenty of ideas and work I can call my own in the audio of this film.

To manage the delivery of the soundtrack at various stages of the production along with relevant paperwork, to the director and producer – The various deadlines for all the groups have been met consistently throughout the process, and all paperwork completed as per the supporting materials of this blog.

Moving on to personal learning outcomes not particularly related to my official ‘role’ within the production I will say only a few words as I would hope they are self-evidently fulfilled by information furnished elsewhere in this blog –

To expand my knowledge of the theory and audio techniques deployed in the films influencing ‘George’, and in drama as a genre more generally – I refer to my research posts here, and ven though I at first thought the big budget reference points that were furnished to me for the films sound design would be difficult to find relevant material in, I was surprised at the amount of useful information I was able to glean from them through researching their creators.

To contribute extensively to the practicalities of creating and recording music for, and of recording location sound for the piece – This outcome encompasses my only real regret about the production in that I simply could not find the time to get involved in the composition of the music as I would have liked to. This is not to detract from the music in practical terms nor to say I didn’t have a hand in okaying the direction of the original compositions alongside my contribution to recording and mixing them, merely to say that as far my fairly ambitious outcomes are concerned this one was a bridge too far. As I more than fulfilled this requirement in terms of my first experience of location audio work and learnt a great deal from my colleagues in that matter, 50% will have to be enough here.

Conclusion – critical appraisal of the film as a finished piece:

Group Aim

To create and deliver the soundtrack to the film ‘George’ by Lucy Norton, Charlotte Hughes, Shaun Standring and Angelin Selvanathan.

Group Objectives:

To create an effective musical score and soundtrack that suits the themes of the film and supports the story in a manner concordant with the picture and the preferences of the director.
To successfully manage and conduct location recording to capture useful dialogue and atmospheres that will form the basis for some sound design aspects of the picture.
To create believable and relevant atmospheres and sound effects in post-production, and edit these into a full soundtrack using foley, location recordings, composed music and replaced dialogue where applicable.
To final mix the project and deliver it at a good standard.

Watching ‘George’ with a critical eye I cannot find an area where we have spectacularly missed the mark on any of the above objectives and we certainly fulfilled our main aim. I would make the following observations however –

Dialogue is intended to tell ‘the human story’ of the film, and the revised script’s lack of it is severely problematic in a film intended to tell one man’s story. My feeling is it fell to the music in George to attempt to make up for this lack of emotion, and as such I would have liked to have been able to increase the complexity of our compositions and recording techniques to make this more effective. This was an opportunity to prioritise composition we arguably missed in the early stages, though without picture to compose to it would have been very hard to do.

We found ourselves in the dreaded position of having committed detailed audio work to picture only to have the editor change the cut. I knew this wasn’t desirable as a method of working, but the pressure to get SOMETHING underway in the audio realm as the production lost coherence and fell further and further behind was overwhelming. This introduced a huge degree of inefficiency, necessitating spending some hours resyncing scenes, but was necessary in order to avoid having to condense the entirety of a month’s worth of work into a short period in January after picture lock was completed.

The axing of various complex audio ‘show-stopper’ scenes explains the ‘peaks and troughs’ of the audio dimension to my mind. Our more abstract sound plans were not always built upon similarly complex and layered foundations, and I think this means the sound in George is often found leading the image, but elsewhere feels somewhat strait-jacketed by the image as we were forced to use more ‘parallel sound’ than we would have liked by the picture. One could argue it’s a little inconsistent dynamically in this sense, and this will teach me to pay more attention to the core aspects of film atmosphere’s rather than getting carried away with the areas in which the team could show off.

In conclusion, production of George was a great learning experience and worked as an opportunity to really get into coordinating the audio side of a film production and problem-solving the inevitable issues, as well as providing ample opportunity for plenty of nuts and bolts audio production work. However, after making it the focus of our daily lives for almost four months, I can honestly say I’ll be happy if I never have to hear George weeping again and that I’m looking forward to seeing parts of the university which aren’t the Sound Theatre once more too.

– 1749 words

05/11/15 – Project Management – ROLE DIARY: Shoot Days 1 + 2

13421070 / January 27, 2016January 27, 2016 / Audio Production, Individual Reflection, Learning Outcomes, Process Management, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

03, 04, 05/11/15 – ‘George’ Set Dressing and Shoot Days 1 and 2 –

Production

The team has successfully completed the first two days of location audio recording for ‘George’ at an indoor location in uphill Lincoln. This has comprised roughly 16 hours of work time, with Rory Hunter taking the lead role as location supervisor and with Alice Asbury undertaking most of the boom op work. I have seconded Alice on the boom when required, and spent my time collecting secondary perspectives for action and dialogue, and wild tracks.

This has mostly been achieved with a combination of a PZM boundary microphone and a Rode NT4 stereo condenser, with the former recording into the main Sound Devices mixer and the latter managed by myself and recording into a Zoom handheld unit, as this enabled me to mix, manage and monitor my own audio without interfering with the main team. With these, I have consistently attempted to deliver a room / distance tone coloured by the set environment to specific action and dialogue for the picture, to enable us to have multiple audio perspective options for key scenes in post without having to build each one from scratch using FX or new foley work. An A/B example of our dialogue recording can be heard below, featuring the same scene from our “up close” boom mic and a second gleaned from a combination of secondary sources.

In terms of mic placement, I’ve found myself inverting a good deal of the technique used in studio work to avoid or cut out reverb or room-tone because that’s precisely what I’m after, and thus sticking a Rode NT4 into corners, out of windows, in corridors, stairwells and under beds…Having never handled a stereo mic or worked location audio before, this entire process was a trial and error learning experience for me. I spent much of the setup day prior to shooting listening to the rooms and testing mic positions relative to them as the production team organised the set, as well as capturing ‘base’ atmospheres and specific foley or SFX from the local environment.

Obligatory photos of the shoot –

The NT4 is a stereo mic (two capsules at 90 degrees over and under one another) and seems exceptional for ‘immersive’ captures and was often placed a considerable distance from the action, often in another room altogether. Whilst this did away with a couple of moments where I might have captured a ‘live’ stereo aspect to the action, it tended to create unusual and slightly unbalanced stereo atmospheres as the reflections travelled from room to room and struck the pair of mics relatively unevenly. I judged this would be more useful to the team later, as what little action takes place in ‘George’ can easily recreated if necessary, but that these various perspectives would be harder to obtain.

We used the boundary mic to take advantage of the exclusively stone and wood floors of the set-house – we located it under furniture for concealment, under the floorboards themselves at one stage, or either directly on the floor or taped to the underside of a table or bed. This really enabled a pre-synced and consistent ‘chunkiness’ to footsteps, furniture motion and prop motion, which I expect will come in handy later. The mic-heavy ‘live’ approach above was arrived at through a group decision as a method of getting us ahead of the game with some of our requirements for foley and atmospheres for the picture.

Logging the collected audio properly when using a second recorder was naturally critical as it lacked the convenience of being recorded in sync with the 663 audio, though this was somewhat complicated by the haphazard nature of the picture teams workflow. This necessitated annotating each days shooting scripts carefully with filenames etc, and rapidly editing and renaming these after each day’s recording was wrapped.

Team and communication management

Whilst our team’s audio outcomes were positive, it has been reasonably difficult to manage our interactions with the film crew.

Prior to shooting we had pushed for a ‘dry run’ style test phase in order to be able to establish some idea of the workflow on set, but this was not possible. The knock-on effect of missing the opportunity to meet, brief and dry-run together as one team was a rather optimistic shooting schedule which in turn meant that some important shots were dropped or moved to later days as they were beyond the time that was realistically available, and this despite a surprising number of ‘got-it-one’ takes. The time issue was exacerbated by a habit of shooting in ruthlessly sequential order, necessitating the technical setup for audio and video for shots in the same scene to be unnecessarily rigged and de-rigged. The audio team variously offered the director advice on these matters but were ultimately required to defer to our employer’s method of working.

The location audio team are making communication on set a key issue going forward. As well as the issues outlined above the production team appeared reticent to inform us (or indeed their actor) of schedule changes or even when they had returned to work after lunch, and maintained noticeable distance from us. This made for several rushed set-ups on our part and we’re keen to build a more cohesive team approach for the rest of the shoot.

All told, these first couple of days have gone reasonably well from the perspective of results. The dialogue and action collected is clear, and the multifaceted perspectives collected at source should help minimise the amount of foley work necessary in post production. However, I realise that I will have to revisit the set at night for further collection of atmosphere audio as traffic noise was a key issue with this location, a fact we had established during recce. The general audio atmosphere’s for the piece during these scenes are intended to be quite important and as such it’s necessary to collect some ‘noisier silence’, which simply cannot be done during daylight hours or indeed with a working crew present.

1000 words

KEY POINTS –

Technical process for ‘secondary sound’ on-location recording – Contribution + Role, Individual reflection on learning and team role, Application of skills and conduct in production.
Learning Outcome – To contribute extensively to the practicalities of creating and recording music for, and of recording location sound for the piece.

‘Artistic’ and overview decisions for secondary sound on-location recording – Process Management,
Learning Outcome – To have a good degree of creative involvement in the conception and direction of the soundtrack for the piece.

Team management and interaction issues – Process Management, Professional Practise.
Learning Outcome – 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.

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

13421070 / January 26, 2016January 28, 2016 / 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.

RESEARCH – Dialogue Editing For Motion Picture – J. Purcell

13421070 / January 25, 2016January 27, 2016 / 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 / January 24, 2016January 26, 2016 / 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’.

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 –

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.