Today we dive into a pool of sound, not literally of course, although that would be a touch

of awesome.

Welcome to Film Riot, the show that takes the mystery out of the effects and techniques

that goes into some of your favorite Hollywood films. I’m your host, Ryan Connolly.

Off the bat, I’m going to get sidetracked. We just did a game on Film State that I thought

was a lot of fun and I think you guys might dig it too. It’s the IMDB Movie Game, which

you can play along with. Tons of fun, so if you want to check it out, go here.

What’s this? Love Losses, especially the sound. Really hoping you do an episode on

what went into creating the sound for Losses.

We have covered some Foley and whatnot in the past, but still I think a behind the scenes

look at the audio I did for Losses may be of help to some of you. So, first thing I

do when starting audio for a project is to sit down and watch it with a pen and paper.

Of course what I’m watching is the final edit. So I watch through the edit and I start

to jot down all the sounds I need to create from Foley and which ones I can get from a

sound library. I will watch the project four or five times in a row to make sure I don’t

miss anything, and I’m writing everything from footsteps to gunshots, even something

as little as a clothespin hitting the table.

Once I’ve done all of that, I start with the biggest sounds first. Most of these I

can get from a library or have already made myself, like the gunshots which I used a combination

of sounds I made myself and some I have from a sound effects library. Or the punch sounds,

which was also a mixture of sounds I made myself and some from a library

Now everyone has there own method and I personally like to keep everything clean and separate

and then I bring it all together in the end. So I render the video out from premier and

then I bring it into Audition, use as my reference. Next, I start laying in my library sounds

and mixing them and adding EQ and reverb to help them match their environment as much

as possible.

After I finish that pass, I move on to Foley, which are sounds I will make from scratch,

using an assortment of things. I actually did an episode on Foley in the past which

you can find right here. In that episode I give you a pretty good way to create your

own punching sounds, so check that out.

Now, I’ll just grab a stick and whack away. For Losses, some of the more fun Foley sounds

I made were the sounds of stabbing Bruno, the sound of the pool stick breaking and where

Josh stabs Nick with the pool stick. Half the fun of Foley for me is finding the sound,

going through different things, looking for that perfect sound for what you are looking

for. And then that awesome ah ha moment once you hear that sound. For the sound of Bruno

getting stabbed, I tried a few different things, including stabbing a few different types of

fruit with a similar object to the paper clip. What ended up doing the trick for me were

two sounds. One, the sound of me jerking a fork back and forth inside of a potato. The

second sound was me stabbing a spoon into a far of peanut butter. Once I had them recorded,

I picked a few I really liked and used them from the different stabs. I also had the peanut

butter sound getting louder with each stab since I wanted it to sound a bit more wet

with each one, so it felt a bit more gory every time, like the blood coming out on his

neck.

Two of my favorite sounds to create where involving the pool stick, one where it breaks

and then the one where Josh stabs Nick. For the break, I used a lot of different sounds,

I think eight in total. One of them was me snapping a stick, one crushing thin pieces

of wood, a hanger whipping past the mike, snapping a belt together, crumbling some wood

chips on to another wooden top and a few other things like it. But, it still sounded a bit

empty so I put away the obvious and started looking around my house for sounds. And funny

enough the thing I found to finish off my sound was a bag of salad. This added an extra

crunch I needed, whipping the salad this way and that, still inside the bad, which is a

big reason I love Foley because you never know what it is that is going to give you

the sound that you need. So, keep an open mind.

And just to push that thought a bit further. For the sound of Nick getting stabbed in the

back, I once again used my bag of salad, but also added sounds from my own mouth. I felt

so ridiculous while doing and Josh and Stark were looking at me like I was crazy but it

worked perfectly. So if you want to add Foley to your film, just keep an open and creative

mind in the process. But now, a quick break and we’ll talk a bit about ADR and my recording

set-up.

What are you fart baskets doing? Trying to come up with a new ad for domain.com for Film

Riot. How long have you been in here? Three days. Serious. Domain.com and Film Riot. How

hard can it possibly be? Harder than you think, it has to be both comical and informative.

Make you giggle while pointing out how domain.com’s easy check out process makes it simple to

find domain names, and set up a website. Plus, pointing out that domain transfers to domain.com

are only $7.61 and if you use the promo code FilmRiot, you get 15% off your domain purchase

or transfer. That’s only $6.47 for a domain transfer, no… I know math. Wait, I’ve

got an idea. Josh and Stark can be standing outside and I will come on and like “Stark,

you should use domain.com”, and he’ll be all like “nah”. I pull out my Samaria

sword and start hacking him to bits while Josh is all like “sweet God, open your light

of mercy and stop this.” That’s morbid and it has nothing to do with domain.com.

Did you miss the exposition when I told him to use domain.com? That’s not exposition,

and it’s morbid. You just say things that I say, I say things that are good, and you

say dumb things, two times, you hurt my feelings. I got another idea. Don’t want it. I’m

curious. Josh is on the computer, getting a domain from domain.com and all of the sudden

a little Ninja comes up and starts hacking him to pieces with a Samaria sword. Don’t

piss off little Ninjas, that’s worse than the last idea, you killed me even though I

told you I was already using domain.com. Yes, but you didn’t use the promo code FilmRiot.

Bam. Marketing. Nice. Not nice. You’re impossible to please. No, I just want a good idea. Then

just do one ad about trying to come up with an ad. We did that already. Not with me. True,

it’s genius. It could go viral. No, it will go viral. I’m confused, did we already shoot

it?

Welcome back, now on to recording and my set up for recording was super simple. I didn’t

use pro tools since I wanted to give Audition a try. For the mike, I just used the same

shotgun we always use for production sound. And I ran the shotgun mike through my H4 and

zoom which I use as an interface for Audition. That’s it. Then I recorded straight into

Audition and I was very impressed with it. I loved how it is set up to mix and work with

effects so much more than sound tracks. For quick turn around work, I think it’s a great

alternative to Pro Tools. One of the things that impressed me most was noise reduction.

For the final scene in Losses, there was an intense hiss in the audio from the room I

was shooting in and it ended up being pretty distracting. So I brought that audio into

Audition and used their noise reduction process by applying it and then selecting a section

of just noise, setting the noise print and this tell audition what frequency the noise

actually is so it can single it out. So now I can select a whole track and tweak the parameters

until I have what I want. To show you the difference, here is a before and after.

Of course you have to be careful how far you push this or you will start getting this obvious

digital sound, but even with all the post work you can do in audio, there are still

some things you can’t salvage and for that we have ADR, which again we got into deeper

in older episodes so check that out here and again, this was a super simple setup. All

I did was have Todd go under a blanket so we could cancel out as much room noise as

possible, which was helpful and amusing. Now for Losses, I originally intended to do a

lot more ADR than I actually did since there were a few times when the production sound

would actually peek. But once I started doing my ADR, I realized in one or two particular

moments we were losing the intensity of the performance with the ADR so I decided to let

it go for the sake of performance in those two sections. This is something you will have

to decide on your own, which is more important to you. But for me, the emotion was a lot

more important here than the technical.

But there you go a behind the scenes look at the sounds of Losses. Now, Losses was a

quickie shoot, done for a little amount of money and in a little amount of time. Some

stuff did suffer for this, like the final mix of the audio for the film, since I had

to record all the Foley grunt passes and so on and do my final mix all in the same day,

in all honesty I think the audio in Losses came out just passable, I would love to have

a few more days to work on the sound, but that is how things are in this industry. You

have a deadline and you do what you can up until that moment.

One of my favorite sayings is: a movie isn’t finished, it escapes. And it is so true. Why

am I telling you this? I think there are a lot of scenes and moments in Losses that are

not as good as they could have been and it is due to the sound not being 100% so make

sure you spend the proper time on your audio when you work on your film in post. The great

thing for most of you, you don’t have a deadline, your project is done when you want

it to be so be sure to give your sound the TLC it deserves.

That’s it my friends. As always you can follow me on Twitter, at twitter.com/ryan_connolly

if you do so choose, or our Facebook page for some delightful delights and if you are

interested, check out my triunefilms Facebook page, we just put up a bunch of new film maker

TV designs and just like last time, we want you to help us decide which ones we are going

to make. So jump over there and vote for the two you like most by liking the pictures of

those shirts. The two that get the most ‘likes’, will be the ones we put into production right

away so go there, check it and let us know what you think. I’ll see you guys next time

when some friends and I make a space ship that looks like an old shack and then we fly

it into space, just to find some aliens who are teenagers too. Look at that.