An Update on Work!

Hello to all!

I have been very busy as of lately with personal and university projects. I will firstly start off with some personal work I have been working on with my friend Chris. I have been working with some TV and Film students from Futureworks on some short films and a documentary. The shot above of me was taken for a behind the scenes section for a short film by Phil Cooper. This short film is to remain a secret for now but I shall talk more about this in the future. This next show was of the first shoot we did, including everyone that was working on the production.

These were shot on 2 different days and with the first shoot going smooth for audio. The second shoot was sadly run into a few audio issues. We planned to use two lav mics for the dialogue of the characters who were speaking. However radio signals were a problem and they could not have been fixed on the set. This meant that all the audio for the shots of the break in were all done by booming with a Rode NTG-2. The sound came through really well however there were some scenes that we decided to record some quick bits of ADR on set.

I have also been on a different set at a bar in Manchester called Cord Bar, who were very generous to let us film there. This shoot is also to remain a secret but I can show you a behind the scenes look as shown below.

This shoot went smooth with audio. The equipment that was used were a Zoom H6 recorder, a Rode NTG-2 boom microphone and also two lav mics which were working perfectly on the shoot. This made recording for the shoot go easy with no flaws. It was going too smooth for Chris and I. So we decided to record some boom shots from underneath the bar for some shots so we could get even closer to the talents without being in the way of the shot. This did involve us lying down on the floor of behind the bar but it was an experience which got us some great results in the end game.

Lastly Chris and I worked on the audio for a documentary presented by Jack Naven which included special guest Matt Bloom talking about the complexity of the film and TV industry. This was an interesting shoot as it involved us following Matt to start off giving food to the homeless of Manchester and then for me it was a strange task that I had to do. I had to both sound mix and boom operate whilst walking backwards throughout a section of Manchester whilst Chris was protecting the camera man form bumping into anything. I have been told sadly that that part of the shoot was not used, however it was pretty fun to do. There are no photos of this shoot however I will keep you updated on how this is going throughout the coming months.

With personal work out of the way I shall now tell you what I have been doing for my university course. I have been overloading myself with the threats of deadlines which start in April. However I have everything in placed to be put together and finished! Firstly I have been working on some game audio. This is the project that I have been enjoying the most because I am working with something I am passionate about which is games. I have learnt the basics of blueprint scripting in Unreal 4 and have been using a combination of recorded and library sounds to create some of the best sounds for a game level. The level I am working on is a Strategy Game Template which can be found on the learn section of the epic games launcher that comes with the engine. This template was strapped from all of its sounds and I have been working with different concepts of sounds and how to go around making a tower defence game fun to listen to. I made sure that the game level was not to be over saturated with sounds so the user can have a great listening experience as well as making sure no sounds repeat exactly the same which would be detrimental to the game. There will be a video about this very soon showing off what I have done with the level as I am right now in the final stages of mixing. There will also be a more in-depth review of what I have done on my portfolio which will be updated in the future.

For this next piece of work that I have been working on I have signed an agreement not to mention the film so I shall be talking about this in as much detail as i can but without mentioning the film, respecting the rights of the director. I have been working on the dialogue edit for a film which includes a lot of tense and action moments within the scene. My job is to get the best out of the dialogue and make sure that the dialogue is as clean as it can be. I shifted through 200GB of on set and ADR audio as I wanted to find out the best takes for the edit. However there are some parts that could not be replaced such as breaths that came after someone being injured. This made me go crafty as I created a track dedicated to breathing that could not be replaced and looped a longer breath sequence from another shot to try and make the scene flow and not sound jumpy between shots in the footage I am working with. I wanted to be creative with reverb making the space in the room well used as the scene was shot in what looked to be an abandoned office space. This would make the shots extremely reliant on reverb to create the best effect. However I wanted the reverb to be present but not too much when no one is screaming or shouting in the scene. When someone shouted in the scene I wanted the reverb to reflect upon the feelings that the character is feeling. This involved reverb processing on an audio clip that already had an inherent reverb to it without processing. I wanted to work with the audio clean however it could not have been replaced. so using the best take I could that portrayed the characters emotions well I made the choice to add reverb to it and worked with it. In the end it turned out to work well and when it was played back it made the feel of the room being full of anger and frustration which is what the character was felling at the time. 

This is all I can update you guys on for now! Stay updated right here with what I am doing as there is a lot more coming in the upcoming months!

Dialogue Editing for Film - My Experiance

Hello to all!

For the past week I have been working on a dialogue edit for a film and thought I would share my experience working with dialogue in film. Before I started to do the edit I first wanted to research what I am getting myself into. Taking information from Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures by John Purcell, dialogue editing is described as "Removing the film making from film." this is due to the fact you are removing sounds from the film set so the viewer can focus on what is being said by the talents. Before you even start to the dialogue edit you must watch through the film copy provided by your client so you can take notes about what you have to start doing. You also have to manage your time of work before you start to do the dialogue edit because you never want to spend too long working on the same project because mistakes will be made after long periods of working. This also leads to the days of working where it is best to space the days you are working with the dialogue because as mentioned before, too much time on one project can lead to problems. It is best to work in a quiet environment when working with dialogue. This is because you need to make sure you can hear everything that is going on in the edit you are working with. If you have background noise whilst you are working, you will not be able to grab the frequencies that show the most in the audio. 

The next step that you can do is to sync the OMF or AAF files you get from the client for you to work with. This is so you know what to expect to work with when it comes to finding the best takes. These file types contain the scenes and shots of what were used for the video edit and it is the dialogue editors' job to find these sections and find the best audio takes. If there is no hope for the scene, ADR is usually the best result. However this is sometimes frowned upon because of the costs of bringing in the talents and studio hiring. It is also best for when you are doing the dialogue edit to work with a session template so you can easily organise your work and easily figure out where to put the audio for certain characters, scenes and shots. 

With some research done I felt like I was then ready to start the joys of dialogue editing. To start I synced the AAF file received with the clients film and spotted the dialogue within Pro Tools using markers. This personally made the job of finding scenes that bit simpler. However the naming conventions used on each take did not match the scenes that were shown in the AAF import. I found out later from the director that they improvised most shots to try out different takes for the feel of the scenes. This made finding the best take a bit of a challenge. To make the job of searching through 200GB of audio, I used the workspace window in Pro Tools to help search through the final scenes of the whole production audio because I am working with the final scenes of the production. This then expanded into searching for plenty of parts of ADR for shots that could not be replaced with set audio and for noise reduction plugins to come in and help with eliminating background noise in the set audio. The noise reduction plugins I used were created by Izotope, and in many cases during the edit, the plugins provided were a God send as this helped with so many times that audio clipped, crackled or just had too much noise, but the take was too good to lose. With the amount of times that these plugins saved the audio I would recommend Izotope to anyone who works with audio.

I spread my days out working with the dialogue and made sure I did not exhaust myself and took up to 2 weeks to complete the dialogue edit which totalled up to 10 minutes of dialogue. Below you can see a final example of what the session looked like after the process of editing.

The Feeling of Sound

Hello to all!

In this post I am going to be talking about my personal opinion on the feeling of sound. This is something that all sound designers and anyone in a sound department should employ into their work ethics.

Sound in pretty much anything you see or hear today will always have a massive impact on how you feel. Whether this will be emotionally or just that gut feeling you get when you have just seen or heard something awesome or sad for the first time. This is in music, films, TV shows and games. Going into depth about what I am trying to portray is that the sound designer, music composer, audio mixer and everyone else in the audio department, always thinks about the way they want the viewer to feel when these moments happen.

Games are a perfect example of this theory mostly because instead of focusing on what is going on the screen and some ambience's like films and TV shows, designers have to build a world for the player to be engrossed in. Take a game like The Last of Us for example. A game about a zombie apocalypse, that starts off as everything being normal. Instantly however you notice something is wrong. You get the feel of isolation from having very few sounds playing in the background and focus on the dialogue. The music is also played with few instruments as possible to back up the feel of isolation but to also make the connection with the relationship between the Joel and his daughter.
The sound effects in this scene such as the explosion from a distance are made to be sharp to make it feel like you are in the house with her. When the first explosion has happened you can hear distant dogs barking and car alarms ringing which symbolise the chaos of what is about to happen. As the scene is not chaotic as of yet this creates unease for the player making them have this sense of fear of what is really going on in the world.

If you watch the whole scene you can really tell how much depth and planning went into making this scene whole. Watch it below and have your say in the comments what you think about the scenes audio or even just the scene in general (Yes it is an emotional roller coaster but it is a very good example!)


This is what audio departments expect you to achieve when you are working on a project with them. If you are able to get that cinematic feel to have a bigger impact on the audience. You have succeeded as a sound designer.