Tag: foley

AUDIO CONSTRUCTION – Final Scene Foley

13421070 / / Audio Production

A waterloo moment in George was the sound of the threatening teenagers spray-painting the house and then running away right at the end. I felt the perspective for the design here this should support the camera’s and be heard from inside the house.

There follows a quick, and largely photographic, precis of the various methods we used to try and achieve this.

Location Sound

The scene was shot multiple times, and we collected a considerable amount of location audio from multiple angles and with multiple mics. However, this was blighted by two things. Firstly, it was raining, but the picture doesn’t look as though it is in the final cut. Secondly, it was roughly 5:30pm on a week day, and traffic on the road outside the house was relatively busy at this time meaning we’d collected almost no clean takes of some fairly subtle sounds on review.

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The stereo mic position above did collect some unexpectedly excellent stereo fields of the cars passing on the road below, however.

First foley + sfx attempt

Turning to ‘easy’ methods in post, I tried to use a combination of sound effects from the library for the spray and cans and a walled off foley mic in various positions and concrete slab for the footsteps.

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Sadly, this didn’t have anything like the desired perspective effect.

Foley on Set

So, we returned to the set approximately three months after the shoot with a portable recorder and reran the action in location foley. Once again, traffic and circumstances conspired against us, as we pitched up during the bell ringing at the Cathedral, which is clearly audible across uphill Lincoln. This, alongside the fact that the set (an uninhabited residential house) is very old and not sound proof in any sense, meant that the audio we captured inside with the front door closed was also of the wrong perspective, as it sounded more like the action was outside and still very close.

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Solution

On our return from the above we recorded one more attempt at this foley on campus, through a large, closed double glazed glass door at the back of media loans. This finally furnished usable audio for the scene, once we’d cleaned the internal air conditioning sound out of it with EQ.

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KEY POINTS

Problem solving for foley perspective – Application of skills and conduct in production

  • To manage the post-production workflow and contribute substantially to the sound design, construction and editing of the piece.

RESEARCH – Mark Mangini’s Green Mile + How it informed ‘George’.

13421070 / / Research

The Green Mile was suggested by George’s original director as a film from which she drew some influence for the piece. Released in 1999 (US), it was produced on a budget of $60 million and returned $290 million, and was a vehicle for a number of big name Hollywood actors including Tom Hanks. It is a supernatural crime drama adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name.

The sound designer for The Green Mile was Mark Mangini, a 3o year veteran of Hollywood film-making and responsible for a broad variety of films from Shark Tale to Mad Max – Fury Road. He has run a post-production sound company in Hollywood for 25 years, and is currently a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“A sound designer is, simply, somebody who uses sound creatively to tell a story,” – Mark Mangini

The audio in Green Mile is grounded in gritty realism of the classic prison setting but also portrays the abstract realm of magic or the brutality of execution, and the writer / director Frank Darabont said that audio played an even more important role than usual as that dimension of his film is ‘…all about special little sounds, or even enormous sounds sometimes…that are given place in the movie,’ – (Cinema Secrets). He asked Mangini to make the ‘Green Mile’ part of the set itself a central character in the film through it’s sound design.

Taking this onboard, I tried to ensure my own approach to designing and editing the atmospheres for ‘George’ involved something similar. The house in which the character lives was designated as his ‘safe space’ by the director, and we discussed making this explicit with the sound dimension, in support of the characters story. We built peaceful atmospheres whenever George was at home and highlighted these with the sounds of the outside world trying to get in as his level of tension and anxiety increased (I discuss the outcome of this component of the sound script in this post).

Elsewhere, I decided to follow Mangini’s lead in Green Mile with my own approach to some of our foley sound design. Some of the foley in the film was recorded at the original sets after shooting had wrapped, which Mangini points out offered them an ‘…identical acoustic space’ to create in, and was recorded and directed via fibre optic link to a local studio. It wasn’t necessary to remotely record our foley, but I did return several times to the house location in George with a portable recording setup when I was unable to satisfactorily recreate perspectives in the edit, most notably the sound of kids running away outside through the walls and door of the building and footsteps on the stone flags and oak floors of the house.

“My goal through that whole sequence was to re-purpose and recycle critical sounds as clues and metaphor.” – Mark Mangini

Here’s a final aspect of Green Mile’s design which we used explicitly throughout George. Our soundtrack is woven with reused references to the characters past in exactly the same way as the flashback sequence in the film, melded with action on screen both subtly and noticably, as well as with the music track to an extent.

Moving away from Green Mile but staying with Mark Mangini and in the context of reflection on George, the following interview quote is useful –

“In other words, it’s all about the context. If a scene is working, is truly scary, just about any sound you use could work. We struggled a great deal with the lecture hall scenes and tried exhaustively to create what became illusory goal: making what was meant to be ‘real’ exorcisms on screen sound frightening. I think this was our sonic “Waterloo”. By that I mean, there is always one sound, one elusive sound, on every film where an inordinate amount of time and resources are spent in trying to achieve a goal that will never be achieved and failure is inescapable, for whatever reasons; the filmmakers don’t know what they want or can’t decide, the action on screen doesn’t carry it’s weight dramatically, etc. As is typical in many post-sound endeavors, we accepted what we had as the best we could do and called it a day.” – Designing Sound

For me, the picture dimension of George does not manage to carry it’s weight dramatically in some key scenes, and reviewing the final product I get the impression of the soundtrack as somewhat ‘out on it’s own’ in trying to convey the themes in the script at times. Our own ‘sonic waterloo’ was probably the graveyard dialogue track, which doesn’t quite work in terms of perspective despite at least three different approaches to try and fix a problem which essentially arose from problems with our location audio and no potential for access to the actor for ADR after the fact. In the end with this, we accepted we’d done our best and moved on as described above.

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Key Points –

Research of the film ‘Green Mile’ and it’s sound designer Mark Mangini – 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.
    Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes

Reflection on specific aspects of the completed sound design of George informed by reference material and research – Application of skills and conduct in 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.
  • To manage the post-production workflow and direct the creative contributions of the audio team as efficiently as possible.
  • Develop creative, original, and innovative strategies within an audio production project.
  • Structure intellectually rigorous and coherent ideas to an advanced level in order to communicate ideas through the integration of form and content.
  • Individual reflection on learning and team role.

RESEARCH – Naked by Mike Leigh + How This Informed ‘George’

13421070 / / Individual Reflection, Research, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

Mike Leigh’s Naked is a British, semi improvised drama starring David Thewlis. It is a favourite of mine in the drama genre, and I thought it could be useful to study it’s audio dimension with reference to ‘George’.

Most aspects of the piece are very realistically constructed, and the audio as no exception to this rule. I felt this would give us some useful pointers for the sound design of George’s static sections.

Graham Fuller, interviewing Mike Leigh, pointed out that he is ‘economical with the camera movements in his films,’, and watching the scene below we can see how audio is used to enhance the power of the actor’s performance where the camerawork simply allows it to happen. The audio however tells a different story, walking the line between enhancing the mise en scene without compromising the realism of the environments, with the objects that are active (the postcard, for example) in any shot are given a sound focus to draw attention to the actors interactions with them. The postcard signifies an aspect of the two character’s shared history in the story, and the audio is used to draw attention to this, but without compromising realism of the scene.

We attempted a similar thing with the radio in the second scene (post titles) of George. The report being broadcast from the radio (cleared for use from the BBC’s The Report on Radio 4) pertains directly to the story of our character, and slips in and out of the audio ‘shot’ throughout the scene as well as remaining tied to camera perspective.

As for further observations on Naked, dialogue is a massive part of the audio and in most cases the rest of the scene is very much subordinated to it, and it is here that it digresses most substantially from our project. What is useful however, is the way the people’s bodies are put into the scenes even when they’re not speaking through the sound of mouth movements, breathing and the general sound of the physical. Considering the fact that, as post production of ‘George’ advanced we realised that the main character’s lack of dialogue (and corresponding lack of bodily movements etc in our location takes) meant the character often doesn’t seem ‘present’ in the film, I decided we should pass over the entire film and record an extra track of these. Most of the sounds the character makes in the film are additional if they are not dialogue.

The film had no specific supervising sound editor, but it’s dubbing mixer – the person who would have handled the final mix of the various audio aspects – was Sue Baker, who apparently worked in sound design for film fairly sporadically from the 1980’s to 2000, but worked as a supervising sound editor on both Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral. The scene from the former below is interesting from a props / dialogue mix perspective (ignoring the music) – A sense of threat and claustrophobia is suggested by the close perspective of the moves and breathing of the characters.

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Key Points –

Research of the film ‘Naked’ by Mike Leigh – 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.
    Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes

Project Overview + Learning Outcomes

13421070 / / Audio Production, Learning Outcomes, Project Overview

Semester A Audio Project AUP3003M group comprising:
Alice Asbury (Music Supervisor) – http://aliceaudioproject1.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk
Gareth Bailey (Supervising Sound Editor)
Rory Hunter (Location Audio Supervisor) – http://roryhunter.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Project Overview + Film Synopsis:

The Semester A project for the above group is to provide the audio for a 10 – 12 minute short drama created by a group of Media Production students, directed by Lucy Norton.

The following synopsis of the plot was provided by the client – “The film is about an old man (George) who struggles with everyday life tasks, encouraging the audience to sympathise with him. However, through the film there are suggestions that George has a dark and unsettling past that asks the audience to questions exactly how they actually feel about him. The film is based around the themes of judgement, punishment, forgiveness and loss.”

Client Requirements + Timeframe

We are engaged to provide a full score (preferably composed), location field recording of the audio and dialogue on set for roughly 8 days of filming, and full audio post production and editing of the audio, including additional foley and dialogue replacement as necessary.

Filming is due to commence October 26th for a two week period and scheduled to conclude by Sunday 8th of November, and the project audio must be completed and delivered in compliance with BBC audio guidelines by the 17th of December 2015.

We will receive an assembly cut of the film circa 4th of December, and will deliver the finished soundtrack to picture by December 16th leaving time for quality control, final paperwork and submission for all parties before the deadline. Prior to receipt of the assembly cut we will have provided a number of temp music tracks and work in progress for audio atmosphere, as many specific plot devices and scenes edited prior to the assembly cut’s delivery as is feasible which should enable us to deliver scratch mixes of the audio tracks for all or part of the film as required.

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.

Outcomes as the project’s 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.
  • 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.
  • To manage the post-production workflow and contribute extensively to the design, construction, editing and mixing of the audio for the piece.
  • To manage the delivery of the soundtrack at various stages of the production along with relevant paperwork, to the director and producer.

Other personal learning outcomes:

  • To expand my knowledge of the theory and audio techniques deployed in the films influencing ‘George’, and in drama as a genre more generally.
  • 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.
  • To successfully manage a three person team in delivery of the entire soundtrack to a new piece of visual media efficiently.

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