A2 Post Production Analysis.

Module: Audio Post Production

Student ID: 1086508
Date: 16/01/2020
 Contents.

The Theoretical Aspect of Sound Design.

The Technical Aspect of Sound Design.
Atmosphere
Foley
Footsteps
Cars, Vans and Buses
Dialog
Soundtrack
Arranging and Gain Staging
Processing
Conclusion
Reference List.
The Theoretical Aspect of Sound Design.

When Saussure talks about the relationship in between a signifier and a signified and the way that
language acquires meaning; he uses the metaphor of a sheet of paper where both side are inter-link.
Where a sign to be a sign needs to enclose both signifier and a signified (Collins and Mayblin, 2000, p.
65). In an ideal sound design context this is what we would like to achieve when creating audio for
visual content. That is, to have sound convey precisely with the object that it represent. Unfortunately
or fortunately, as sound designer we have the choice of at least manipulating one side of this sheet of
paper, to fit acoustic meaning with in a visual context.
Not only structuralism can help us understand the way sound represent what we see with in a picture.
Lucy Fife Donaldson, in her text Feeling and Film Making: The Design and Effect of Film Making,
borrowing ideas from Merleau- Ponty, explores the ways that audio-visual context and explicitly sound
can transmit sensory information. Describing sound design as an “Affective Labour” (Donaldson,
2017, p. 34).

Either way the structuralist or phenomenological approaches are not crucial to sound design but can be
very effective when it comes to world building inside the realm of sound design. Becoming crucial to
the way we decide to give meaning to what already has it on screen but needs to be completed through
our work. At the same time helping us understand our responsibility as sound designers which goes
deeper that only the technical aspect of the matter but unfortunately will take up great part of this
article.

The Technical Aspect of Sound Design.

Technically, when sound designing, the first thing is preparation or in some other sense division. That
is, division of the different parts that are going to form our acoustic space.
One approach could be David Sonnenschein division of psycho-acoustic space in cinema in six sound
spheres (Sonnenschein, 2011, p. 14):

-I think. What we hear and nobody else can.

-I am. Those sounds that are generated from our body.
-I touch. When we make contact with the outside world.
-I see. Which could compare with the classic conception of on screen classification.
-I know. That sound that we cannot see (off-screen) but we can identify.
-I don't know. Sound that we cannot see and we cannot identify (Idem).

A more practical approach could be BBC dubbing mixer David Cherry, who divides sounds from their
origins and the procedures that are need to be taking to produce them (Cherry, 2019). That is why
before starting our work we divided our sounds in six Categories: Atmospheres, Foley, Footsteps,
Vehicles, Dialog and Soundtrack.

But before we go into the technical aspect of our sound design, let us talk about our film. Martin Hache
is a 1997 Spanish/Argentinian film directed by Adolfo Aristarain which in the hispanophone world has
obtained somewhat the state of a cult film, which deals with the problems that youth encounter when
moving into the adult world. (Massanet, 2010).

As we analyze the original scene that we are working on we realize that most of the sound, excluding
the ADR, is on set sound, moving away from the more modern hype-realist approach. Having in mind
the limitation that we have with in the categories of space and time, we decided to take a mix approach
utilizing concepts like hype-realist, world building and acuasmatic sounds, to try and get nearer to the
original sound or, if possible, create a more immersive environment than that of the original track.

Atmosphere.

To create the atmosphere of this scene, we used twelve different tracks, as we can observe we have two
main ambient tracks to create the atmosphere of this film: The outside and the inside of the club.
For the outside, extensive research had to be made, like for the rest of the atmosphere location is
crucial.
In this case the first opening scene is an Argentinian city. Ideally we would have traveled to Argentine
to capture these sound. Luckily for us we have managed to find online atmospheres from the city of
Buenos Aires. Using this as the core of our outdoor atmosphere, we also added, the sound of the trees
and of a distant city traffic, to create a more immersive environment. Cars and buses were added later
in a different way, which will be explained below.
As the film evolves we see how there is a change of scene, but we are still in the same environment but
with a different camera shot. To achieve coherence we cut a section out of the atmosphere track and
pulled it back to fill the gap, this way we also have acoustic change with the change of scene b (Hunt,
2020).

After this, we can observe how people appear on the screen. As we mentioned before this is a
hysponophonic film, so detail has to be put into the language. Being so that if what we see
hyspanophonic subjects the sound that should go with them should be coherent with their language or if
this is not possible at least unintelligible. Internet has a great source of sounds, where we capable of
sourcing hypanophonic crowds at least for this scene.
Once inside the club and due to the reverberation of our crowd language is not so crucial due to the
unintelligible.
We used to difference crowds for the outside and the inside of the club. For the interior we used one
core sound for crowd and then three other tracks to go with the image, letting us play with the dynamic
range of each of them, pulling them in and out of the scene when the crowd is more present to us or to
our main character.
At the same time that when main character move towards the pinball machine a little bit of this was
added, much of which is inappreciable.

Foley.

For Foley, we used ten tracks. But relaying on the methods Pete burgis and Glen Gathard from
Pinewood studios, we recorded more Foley than that we used (BAFTA Guru, 2018). In this case we
have Foley, although imperceptible in some cases, all the way throughout the film. Automation was
crucial later when editing.

The Foley was acted following the moments of the characters. As well as adding more Foley tracks
when the main character is in the middle of the mosh pit.
On top on the rustling and other sounds we added kisses and hugs at the end of the video.

These were recording using a both small and larger diaphragm condenser microphones. Mainly because
in some cases my small diaphragm condenser are not up to industry standard and produce a sound that
is to piercing.
Footsteps.

Although Footsteps are also considered Foley they were group in a separated track. Not only to make
mixing easier but because they where recorded differently. Initially they were recorded at my home
studio and later convolution reverb was added to them. This proved to sound artificial. To resolve this
we used a portable recorder, and went to the same street where the individual cars were recorded. This
gave me a much more realistic feel. Taking a mobile phone to play the video as a reference to walk in
the same way our main character does. Obviously some editing needed to be done later in the mixing
process.
I also recorded some footstep in my home studio for the indoor scene, but these where excluded from
the final mix.
All these sound were recorded having in mind the way that Barnaby Smyth records his footstep.
Putting particular attention to the type of shoes and surface that these footsteps need to be performed on
and with (Audient, 2017).

Cars, Buses and Vans.

Even thought our atmosphere track contains traffic, this traffic proved inefficient and a bit out of sync.
To give a more realistic feel, every vehicle was recorded and mixed in one by one.
The main difficulty for this is acquiring an isolated vehicle. The best way around this is to find a
confined street with a moderated flow of traffic, so that we can capture only the sound of one vehicle,
without other element. That way all vehicles that are recorded are isolated from each other but all of
them are in the same space.
To minimize unwanted sound late night and early morning have proven to be the best time. After two
recording session with a portable recorder, the nineteen vehicles, plus some extras needed for this piece
of work were successfully recorded.

Unfortunately, modern buses are exceptionally quiet and don't sound nothing like those that appear in
our clip. So the recorded buses had to be disregarded and samples have been used instead.
Other techniques, like pitching down cars and vans were used, but proved ineffective.
Dialogue.

ADR proved to be challenging, not only the performance part but also the technical aspect. For
example, microphone positioning, which in this case was a standard vocal placement based on the
techniques that Michael Paul Stavrou describes in his book “Mixing With your Mind” (Stavrou, 2003).
For future work I would utilize the method that Doc Keane uses, positing microphones above the head
and at a certain distance to get a more realistic effect (Sound Works Collection, 2013). Although
attention has to be paid to having a correct space to eliminate undesired reverberation.

Doc Keane, also talks of the importance of recording everything, the way he rides faders to capture the
cleanest sound possible and the importance of first takes (Sound Works Collection, 2013).
Unfortunately for us, we did a try out run first with a dynamic microphone which was excellent in
acting but the sound quality was so poor that it had to be re-recorded. Not without an extensive
explanation to the actors of why those takes had to be redone even though the acting was perfect.

Soundtrack.

In the beginning the approach was to make a track to fit to the image. We soon realized that we are not
creating a track but an atmosphere of sound trough music.
Extensive microphone and mixing techniques where used in the recording, which I will not go into
deep but are all contained in these following books : “Recording Unhinged” Sylvia Massy (Massy,
2016), “Mixing with your Mind” by Michael Paul Stavrou (Stavrou, 2003) and “The recording
Engineer Handbook” Bobby Owsinski (Owsinki, 2017). For these purpose, which is a live band
playing and as we said we are not creating a track but an atmosphere through music, I also relied on the
book “The Live Sound Manual: Getting Great Sound at Every Gig” by Ben Duncan (Duncan, 2002).
Meaning. This meant disregarded some drums tracks and minimizing microphone techniques, creating
a sound that relates more to a live situation than that of a recorded one.
The vocals were recorded in a Foley, fashion having the film as a visual reference to make the voices
match the singers. Although some editing was needed later in the mixing.
At the same time special attention was placed on the lyrical content for it to be relevant to the film.
Arranging and Gain Staging.

One of the crucial points that can easily be overlooked in post-production is arranging and gain staging.
There is so much more dynamic range in post-production than in normal song, that it is important to
pay attention to gain staging; which would be impossible to correctly acquire with our properly
grouping, linking, putting in folders and arranging track as we can observe in figure 1.

figure 1.

Also grouping tracks gives us the chance to play and have more control of the different elements that
are in our sound field. Making automation much easy and intuitive.
There has been three decibels left of headroom and all the track have fades in and fades out to prevent
undesirable clicks (Thornton, 2007).

Processing.

This has been keep to the minimum in this case except for the part of the soundtrack. For all the other
elements' attention has been put to record the sound in the best quality possible and with the desire
effect. There is some corrective EQ, for example, some high pass filtering in some Foley and cars or
some parametric EQ around 650hz to eliminate the nasal aspect of the female voice (Owsinki, 2017)
(the actress had a cold in both recording session).

The other processing that had to be done is the use of convolution reverb. There are two reverb
modules: one for the outdoor scene and one for the indoor scene. Foley, cars, dialogue, soundtrack and
indoor atmospheres have all had reverb added, it is only the outdoor atmospheres which have been left
without, because they were already recorded with their own reverberation.

Panning has also been a crucial process to aid in the final outcome. All the cars are correctly placed
with in the sound field, the same way that the dialogue and the actor are.

Other processing that has been involved in this work is the automation of the EQ of the soundtrack.
When the two actors move away from the band some high end information is eliminated while the
return on the reverb channel of the soundtrack is increased to create the sensation of distance and
moment.

Regarding the soundtrack, we are not going to go deep into the mixing process of the individual track
than conform it. We will just remark the stylistic processing that has been used: harmonic distortion and
reverberation on the different elements of the track to create a sensation of space and grittiness.

Conclusion.

The final outcome is a piece of work which resembles coherence with the original. Acoustic meaning
has been given to the visual meaning that was already there. Audio and visual are now part of the same
side of Saussures peace of paper and also are capable of transmitting affective information the way
Lucy Fife Donaldson explains in her text Feeling and Film Making: The Design and Effect of Film
Making (Donaldson, 2017, p. 34).
 Reference List.

- Audient (2017) Recording Foley Sound Effects for 'The Night Manager Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbCY-PrH5Q (Accessed 10 January 2020).

- BAFTA Guru (2018) Inside the Pinewood Foley Studio. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQl_-MghIjo (Accessed 5 January 2020).

- Cherry, D. (2019) Quest session Dave Cherry (BBC dubbing mixer). Audio post-production, MP612.
Bimm Bristol, Week 3.

-Collins, J. and Mayblin, B. (2000) Introducing Derrida. Duxford: Richard Appignanesi.

-Donaldson, M F. (2017). “Feeling and Filmmaking: The Design and Affect of Film Sound”, The New
Soundtrack, 7.1, pp 31-44.

- Dunca, B. (2002) The Live Sound Manual: Getting Great Sound at Every Gig. Backbeat Books.

- Hunt, S. (2020) Post-production Workshop. Audio post-production, MP612. Bimm Bristol, Week 12.

- Manssanet, A. (2010) “Martin Hache” de padres a hijos. Available at:

https://www.espinof.com/criticas/martin-hache-de-padres-e-hijos (Accessed 13 January 2020).

- Massy, Sylvia (2016) Recording Unhinged. Applause Theatre Book Publishers.

-Owsinki, B. (2017) The Mix Engineer Handbook: 4th edition. Burbank. Bobby Owsinki Media Group
Publishing.

-Sonnenschein, D. (2011). “Sound Spheres: A Model of Psychoacoustic Space in Cinema”, The New
Soundtrack, 1.1, pp 13-28.

- Sound Works Collection (2013) Veteran ADR Mixer Doc Kane of Walt Disney Studios Available at:
https://soundworkscollection.com/post/veteran-adr-mixer-doc-kane-of-walt-disney-studios (Accessed
12 January 2020).

- Stavrou, M. P. (2003) Mixing with your Mind: Closely Guarded Secrets of Sound Balance
Engineering. Flux Research.

- Thornton, M. (2007) Using Fades and Crossfades Available at :

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/using-fades-crossfades (Accessed 12 January 2020).