New Project

So we’ve gotten past our first week with Studio 2 which was mostly introductory as to what to expect for this trimester. I kind of went pretty in detail with it in my last blog so I think it’s safe to jump straight into the fun stuff...

It’s project time again!

As I mentioned in my last blog, this trimester (at least for the first half), we’re focussing on post production. For our first project we will be undertaking a sound replacement task. Essentially what this is we take a pre existing video clip from another piece of media (such as a movie scene, music video, trailer), we then take away all the sound from it, and recreate the sound from scratch.

I formed a team with Justin and Tom, Who I’ve not worked with before on a project and we began to brainstorm ideas for what we were going to do. We decided after some back and forwards between clips to put the Trailer for the second season of the Netflix TV series Castlevania. Here’s what the clip looks like:

As can be seen there is kind of a lot happening in this clip, especially since it’s a trailer for an action TV series, there is a wide range of sounds to work with. This clip works well as it has a range of different sounds happening so it gives us a bit to work with, there is general foley sounds, special sound effects, dialogue, and music which gives a team of 3 people a decent sized job to do, but isn’t too over the top in any area.

This week we created our project plan, where we arranged and prepared what needed to be done and how it would be done. A critical (but mind you time consuming) part of this was creating an assets list with timestamps, so that we know exactly what we need to record and where. We did this on a spreadsheet that was accessible to all of us (Google Drive), and spaced out our assets into different paged categories to help with efficiency when recording. For instance, we’ve had all of our footsteps separated onto one page so that we could record all of them without having to alter the mic position too much in between takes.

Something that we foresee as a potential area that will require more time will be in the special effects. These are a more difficult task as they require some trial and error in both the recording itself and also in applying effects in post (post recording that is). Some other sound design techniques such as the use of synthesis may also be needed in some areas.

After speaking to some people (outside of the creative industry) about this project, I’ve found that Foley isn’t exactly a household term. Essentially, Foley is the recording of everyday sound effects that are put into film in the post production phase. these are things such as footsteps, doors opening etc. ADR on the other hand stands for Automatic Dialogue Recording, which is the replacement of dialogue. I will likely do a blog later on going more in depth into these processes.

Justin particularly has had quite an interest in post production work in the past and has done it before so I’m looking forward to working with him, and Tom is great at creating orchestral pieces, which is a favourable skill as music needs to be created for the trailer.

After compiling the assets list, it’s worth noting that we also noticed that there is actually not as much foley in the trailer as we expected, and that quite a lot of the trailer is based around the music, and musical cues. This has led us to have more of the workload put into the musical aspect of the task. On the positive side, the style of animation has it so that the mouths of the characters don’t move smoothly, which makes the ADR process a lot easier to sync, taking some of the workload off in another area.

Quite a few of our learning outcomes get ticked off if we can pull off this project in the right way - So it’s pretty highly regarded that we work towards the task efficiently and start as early as we can to help ensure a complete product.

At this point the plan is looking like we’ll start with the foley sounds first, knock out as many as we can (including special sound effects), then we can move onto ADR and finally the music.

Here is a table showing our rough milestones that can be found on our planning document

We should start recording our foley for next week so i’ll update on my blog how that goes!

Here’s a link to our planning document if you’d like to have a look:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xos7OH3sNui0t4lDUDv-eDcfxs8wO7yAPdMQaAsRe0M/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for reading!