Tim, Sean, Mira and Mars: Sound Design
I was much happier with my sound design for this project but maybe just because it was simpler. We had known that the test shoot scene for KEEPER was going to be one of the hardest scenes of the film. Comparatively, the scene we were shooting for TSM&M didn’t involve any action at all, just people talking so I could really focus on the basics and make it a lot more polished in a lot less time.
I spent a day and a half total on the sound design. After helping give some feedback on the edit, Jake handed the AAF over the Monday and I had finished by Tuesday night.
The boom recordings in the projection room were quite noisy, some taps and the aforementioned engineering work in the background. Luckily the LAV sound was perfect so for Tim and Sean’s conversation I relied completely on this. For the auditorium scene, I used the boom with some noise reduction rendered in, and layered the LAV mic underneath to give him slightly more presence.
As I had planned (explained in the pitch), I focused on finding the unique reverb of each setting. Using the ‘Space’ plug-in, I found presets that were a similar match to the look and feel of the space on-screen and then tweaked them myself, saving them into my session folder for recall later. I also added EQ to the voices to make them sound more like they had been recorded from where the camera was stood. For example, Xander’s voice, coming from behind the window, has lost some of the high end frequencies to artificially construct this window/wall in the sound we are receiving. Aux tracks proved very useful throughout the session, allowing me to send multiple tracks to the same reverb plug-ins.
Once the dialogue was sorted, I moved on to creating a projector sound effect which would change depending on which room we were in. (Louder in the projection room, and panned to the left, quieter with less high and low frequencies in the auditorium.) I decided the sound should stay in stereo as it felt like a component of the atmos.
Then I needed to construct something to play from the cinema screen. I made an aux, routed dialogue to it so I had a temporary output to monitor and then added EQ and Space plug-ins to the track. I messed around with both plug-ins until I had a sound that mimicked the output of cinema speakers and I was pretty pleased with the outcome. The plug in settings are seen here.
I took to Freesound to find some ominous sounds and choral singing to recreate my own version of the Star Gate sequence soundtrack. The finished thing is primarily made up of creepy strings and wind, manipulated with Pitch Shift. I then routed this through the Cinema Speakers Aux and it worked!! The effect was more obvious with dialogue but I still like the result.
I automated the Star Gate sounds to drop in volume and pan to the left as we move to the projection room. I also automated an EQ plug on the routing folder they were in, so the higher frequencies were lost as they ‘passed through the walls’ into this secondary space.
Earlier in the trimester I had planned that I wanted to make it sound like an old movie so I watched a video about ‘how to create a tape effect on digital sound’. The main takeaways: compress the hell out of it to emulate the reduced dynamic range, reduce the attack of the transients, EQ it to favour the mid frequencies and at some kind of saturation. This guy’s video was talking about music, but I assumed similar principles would apply. I had already read about the reduced dynamic range in old films so this seemed about right. I decided to apply these effects to The Narrator’s dialogue - mid frequency EQ, heavy compression, some fiddling with the Enhancer plug-in. I briefly tried to experiment with side chain compression to make the Star Gate sounds dip under his dialogue but it wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out where I was going wrong. I thought this would have added to the vintage sound. It’ll have to be something I figure out in the new year.
Robbie then came in to take a look at the sound edit. His main note was that the Star Gate sounds were creating the wrong tone. Upon listening again, I agreed.
We had this idea a lot earlier in the trimester to use a piece of music in the sound design. It was a simple guitar piece that Robbie had written and recorded on his phone; he’d used it in a sizzle reel for the project. It was definitely lighter in tone, a little bittersweet sounding perhaps, so I imported it and added it under the dialogue exchange and it kind of worked.
I wanted to make it sound somewhat diegetic at first so I added EQ to make it sound like it was coming from a old radio (above) and panned it to the right (other side from projector sound to balance it out). I then automated the EQ to get it back to normal, automated the pan to center and the volume to increase as the scene transitioned and The Narrator’s dialogue came back in. The song remains this way until the end of the film.
I think the result is maybe a little too sentimental but it definitely changed the tone for the better. The end result now much better represents the tone of the film I think we were aiming for. And I like how rough the song recording is. In fact I just really like the song. Music is such a manipulator! I kind of feel like I’ve cheated. Like I’ve brought emotions out of the audience that I haven’t earned.












