New Website Colour Theme and work piece!

Hello to you all!

I have been updating my website according to feedback from myself and many others. I have decided to take away the darkness of the website and brighten it up with a nice orange, white and light grey colour theme as this looks much better than just having a very dull background.

I have also uploaded a brand new project that I have been working on and can finally release to you all! It is a short horror film called The White Lady and the on set and production audio was done by both me and my friend Chris Tamblin! Take a look at the website for more information on that!

There are more workpieces coming to the website to keep updated  on my audioventure on this blog, my website and via my twitter - @Seanmlp.

Thank you for your time :)

-Sean

Getting back into the swing of things.

Hello to all!

I have been absent from posting updates for a while and I feel like I am doing this too much. However I have not been doing just nothing! I have recently finished doing post-production audio for a student film that I was part of making as the audio mixer. I finished the post-production work within a week inside a D-Control studio suite provided by Futureworks University in Manchester. This was a challenge to do however the length of the film (around 10 minutes) made this that bit easier to make a reality and the film now sounds great, and the director loves it!

I have also now updated my portfolio website (SeanLewis.audio) with a brand new project that I finished a few months ago which I am now proud to show you as it was under moderation my my university. I now have my full marks and I am happy to finally show you what I have done with the audio to the strategy game level template from Unreal Launcher. I admit there has to be some changes to some of the attenuation settings for some of the sounds however I have it locked down as it is now because I want to keep the final product true to its final deadline instead of tinkering it past its deadline.

What I am now doing is playing around with examples from the book Game Audio Implementation, to practice my skills within Unreal 4 and in general with coding. This is going to take me a while to get used to as I am also trying to get myself into shape so expect an update soon on how that is going! So far there is little progress, but soon I will be at least fit enough to go up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath :).

I will start to make weekly updates to keep myself active! I just need to start being a bit more productive.

Oh and I have also started up a YouTube Gaming channel (Yes shameless plug). You can find it here! It is just something small so it may not be updated a lot. But its something to do at least :D.

Keep updated both here and on my website for more projects from me and what I do!

-Sean

Quick Portfolio Update!

Hello to all!

I have been in the process of trying to create a suitable domain name for my portfolio. Recently I found out that you could request for a .audio domain name. So I managed to grab a simple and effective domain for the website.

The domain for my portfolio is now: SeanLewis.Audio

I am proud of this domain and am keeping this for the foreseeable future.

Keep updated with all my work on my portfolio and it will soon be updated with what productions II have been working on for the past year!

Stay Tuned!

- Sean

What's new now?

Hello world!

I have recently been working on multiple different projects. One of which is learning the basics of the C++ language. I created the basic program of showing the words "Hello world!". It is only a small step to start learning about audio implementation within the language but with learning about the basics of compiling and variables. There is more to the language then just that but I am still learning some basics whilst working on other projects. 

I have been busy on a film set for a short horror film called The White Lady. I have a second shoot day upcoming on the 21st, this will conclude the shoots needed for the film. The first shoot happened in the middle of a woodland park which set the setting of the films horror aspect. The location was next to a lake and for audio in theory this would be a problem due to some wind. However this was not the case in this shoot. The audio came out clean and is almost all useable when it comes round to the edit. 

For my video editing, I have been working on a behind the scenes project for a short film called The Heist which is also another short film I have worked on. The videos all follow a house style of interviews with the talents with some layering video layers of the crew working behind the scenes.
This is only a small section of what I am working on right now. There will be more separate posts in the future going into more depth about what projects I am working on. You can keep updated about everything right here!

Whats Happening Now?

Hello to all,

After my April break, I have now finished my second year at university and am looking into many projects to complete over this summer. This month on the 14th, I will be working on a horror film on my first late night shoot from 8pm till 3am. This is all in good practice as I am getting more and more comfortable with the recording equipment and booming film shoots.


I am also going to be working on my game audio skills in multiple game engines other than Unreal Engine 4. I will still be using Unreal 4 as my go to engine for game audio but I wish to broaden my knowledge in this field that I am very interested in! I will be learning both FMOD and Wwise to get knowledge of the industry standard of middleware, and also not to forget to mention coding in c++ to try to learn outside of the engine.


I am also going to be looking into creating a sound effects library, along with creating my own music beats with my own recorded audio. I do not own a drum kit to make my own authentic drum samples. However that is not going to stop me from being creative in how I will record these.


All this is going to be taking place over the next 5 months, and you will see it here first with what I am working on. Hope you guys will enjoy what you see :).



-Sean L.

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.