Music

Joseph Pallot / / LO2, music

While watching through the film, after foley and dialogue had been added, i noticed that there was limited opportunity for music, without subtracting from the main awkward theme from the film. The media team told me that they wanted specific music not by me for the dance scene in the middle of the film so instead i decided to create a sort of theme tune for the illusive villain named Basin, this made it clearer that the phone call at the start of the film was talking about the same thing that the ending is. another piece of music fills the silence while Olivia walks through the house, giving the film a sort of mysterious “something-isn’t-right” feel.

I used Logik to create the music because it has a lot more availability for synths and instruments that can be modified rather than protools. and for my creative process I listened to the sound track for a few of the Black Mirror episodes that i’ve already mentioned. I noticed that a lot of their background themes were very thin and less intense so it doesn’t draw attention away from the visuals of the film and decided that this was an important aspect that needed to be included in my own compositions.

 

 

location research – Microphone Tape

Joseph Pallot / / LO1, LO3, research

So some important research for us was finding out how to get the best results from our radio microphones, this proved to be a challege because not only does the type of tape affect the quality but also the way that you use the tape.

In multiple online forums there were different bits of advice with people swearing by specific brands and types of tape, the main ones being either moleskin tape or medical tape, we opted to go for the latter because of ease of access to buy.

This forum post was helpful with experimenting the different taping techniques once I’d found the right kind of tapes.

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/remote-possibilities-acoustic-music-location-recording/412231-art-attaching-hiding-lapel-mics.html

After practising I found that making 2 loops out of tape, attaching one to the clothing and one to the chest, then wedging the mic in the middle gave the best sound with the least amount of rustling.

 

watching through the picture lock

Joseph Pallot / / foley

once we received picture lock we were able to make a list of everything we needed to finish the sound for this film, we listed all of the foley that we could see, as well as constructing an order in which we could record it. we also discussed the opportunities for music and atmos too.

At first it seemed like there wasn’t a lot to record in terms of foley, as a lot of the scene is filmed with the actors either walking or sitting with not much interaction with anything that would make noise, but we quickly noticed how empty the soundtrack was without the smaller noises such as glasses being placed on tables, bags being scraped along people’s bodies and other little sounds that people normally wouldn’t give a second thought to.

While listening back to the atmos tracks that we recorded we also discovered that the recordings were all very bland and that the pre-amps on the zooms made more noise than the rooms themselves so we knew that we would have to construct our own atmospheric tracks too.

dialogue editing problem?

Joseph Pallot / / problems

there was a misunderstanding between both teams and tutors, we were under the general understanding that we would line up the dialogue tracks ourselves and then give them to the media team to start their editing, but it turns out that it is the media teams job to line up the dialogue to the picture themselves, then give us picture lock to edit to with .aaf or .omf file types so we could clean up the dialogue tracks retrospectively.

At first this was unclear to us so we started to line up the audio and then give the shots to the media team, but then we found out that it was the media team’s job to sync the dialogue while they were making the picture edit. This became clear after a meeting with the Media tutor who explained that it should be the media teams job because they are the ones that are picking which scenes they are using, it is just our job to make it work afterwards.

 

Home Nightclub Filming

Joseph Pallot / / Filming, LO1

For one of the flashback scenes, the actors are dancing at a nightclub, there was no foley or specific sound for us to record as the film crew wanted this scene to be artistically mixed to make it obvious that it is a flashback and not just another scene.

Instead of not recording anything though, we decided to record some random lines of dialogue and conversation to layer over the music, with relevant effects to add to a dreamy feel.

we did this by watching what the actors did while filming, then taking them somewhere quieter and reminding them of some of the things that they said before to get cleaner recordings.