Aural Stories: Part two-The writing process

Earlier I wrote about using aural stories as a practicing tool to keep your sound designing skills from going rusty, well today I’m going to do another aural story however I will show you the writing process behind it.

When deciding to create an aural story its always best to write it down before doing it so you don’t go off in a tangent and you have a clear goal. When writing you should be very descriptive to the sounds that you will hear as well as what is going on in the story. I will write a quick story here to illustrate how it should be done.

The start of this aural story will begin with a man in his early twenties who is sleeping in his bed in his apartment with traffic noise going on outside to illustrate that it is the middle of the day. He slowly groans and wakes up to his dog barking at the door, which has been ringing for quite some time now. As he begins to wake the sound of his dog and the ringing doorbell become getting louder until he has fully woken up. He then gets out of bed slowly as you can hear the movement of the bed sheets. He walks down the hall you hear his bare feet on the hardwood floors and meets his barking dog and shooshes him. He then grabs the door handle and turns it slowly and opens the creaky door to no one. Sounding flustered he walks back to his bedroom and falls back to sleep.

Boom operating

When it comes to getting a job in the film industry in sound, your most likely not going to get sound designer right off the bat, you might get editor, recording mixer, or even a boom operator.

What is a boom operator? A boom op for short is responsible for capturing the dialogue of the film on set. This can be quite difficult because they have to find the best position for the microphone to capture the dialogue without getting in the way of the camera operators or actors. Most people can think this of as a very easy job, but I beg to differ. I have done a few boom op jobs so far and it requires a lot of patience and upper body strength as well as being nimble on your feet and being self-aware at all times.

The reason why you need the upper body strength isn’t because the boom pole and mic are heavy, it’s because you have to be holding them in positions for a long time that can get very tiring. You also need to be good to talking to people because sometimes you may need to voice out your opinion to a director, he might not know that they was something in the audio that was unusable so you have to be able to communicate that without causing any trouble or getting angry if they ignore you.

Some key skills to have as boom op include:

·      Excellent aural skills

·      Good physical condition and stamina

·      A good memory

·      Patience

·      Flexibility

·      Attention to detail

ADR: what is it?

 One of the things that you might not encounter as a sound designer is ADR. ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement. This is usually done by an ADR recordist in most big budget films however for aspiring sound designers you might be working on student films or home made films currently and do not have an ADR recordist or the budget to hire one. So the responsibility may fall upon you to correct the audio. ADR is used when the dialog from the location audio can’t be used. Reasons for this can range from unusable audio, maybe it clipped and there’s distortion, a plane flew by and its on the type, someone was talking and you cant get rid of it, basically anything that is distracting or not intended to be recorded.

The way to efficiently record ADR is through a process called looping. With this process you basically create a portion of the film that you want to track the new dialogue over and loop it over and over again until the actor gives you the right take as well as the right synchronization.

One problem that I have noticed with ADR done by beginners is not the synchronization of the lines over the visual. It has to deal with the emotion they capture. As an ADR recorder it isn’t enough for you just to record their lines and make sure its in time, your job is to basically direct them to give you the performance that matches up with the scene. Imagine it’s a chase scene and the actor does his lines perfectly everything is in time but he sounds bland like hes not even being chased, it will pull the viewer right out of the moment. So when doing ADR go for the performance!

Creating a pilot voice: for game of film use

When designing sound in either films or games you often come across having to design vocals or dialogue in order to fit a certain environment or situation. This is different from sound effects because your not specifically going for a specific sound, well that’s not true when using sound effects you should always try to match it to the scene or other sounds so they mesh together. What I’m talking about is what do you do when you have a film where there’s a pilot or a someone on the phone or on the radio, you cant have it sound like a natural voice, it would seem out of place and contradict what we come to expect when we think of sounds like that. So how do you make a helicopter pilot sound like a pilot.

Well when you think of this situation there’s two possible routes one can take. The first is assuming that you’re in the helicopter with him, so not only do you have to think how he should sound you have to incorporate the sounds of the propellers and electronics. If were not in the pilots view but in the view of someone receiving his dialogue through a radio than that is different situation, your probably not going to get much of the helicopter sounds just his voice.

When creating the voice you want to put a high pass filter and slide it to about 500 hz or more, and then put a low pass filter and cut off most of the high end as, remember your trying to simulate the sound coming of the radio and they do not have frequencies that go up or down that much. Finally to add the final touch you can add some distortion to really make it sound authentic