Major Project Writeup and Time Log

              For my major project in Audio 3 I decided to take on something I haven’t really done before: sound for video. It’s a shame that more classes don’t incorporate the audio and film tracks, I know there are some, but I’ve never taken any; I had a friend who could lend me a video and the original audio files for a class she did last year. It was a short film called Perception, the story is vague and mysterious, but it’s about a man who has multiple personality and his experiences. It was interesting since you don’t see the same character changing who he is, but rather, how the personalities see themselves. I had my work cut out for me though, since the team that worked on it were film majors and didn’t give as much thought to the audio as the visual.

              I got all of the original audio tracks, but I noticed a few things about them that weren’t that great, such as a lot of background sound, since they filmed outside in town, and inside of busy buildings. My first task was just getting a rough edit together of the script, which was also given to me by my friend; so I sorted out the lines into different scene tracks. I then looked for the best takes, and synched those up to the mouth movements to match the scene. There was a lot of background noise, so to cut that down I added a high pass filter on almost all of the tracks. The pass filter started at about 200Hz so it wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s dialogue. This had a very noticeable effect on the background noise, it cut it down and made the dialogue pop out much more. I never really wrangled the music to where I wanted it to; I questioned if it was the right choice, since I’m not sure if it conveyed the right emotion for the story of the video. I kept it though, since it matched what was happening, and I couldn’t really find a better choice. I was automating it from the outset, but kept changing how much went into the different scenes. I even changed the script a little, where I cut some of the dialogue to fit what was happening, at the part where the old man and the girl are in the park. I also used some of what I was given as background noise, so I readded it to fill in the gaps in the dialogue. After some automation for levels I had the sounds synched up to the video, so I had the base of the video done.

              After that I wanted to add more to it, and flesh out the story, since I got some criticism about how the story doesn’t really make sense. My idea was to have the other personalities talk and interact in the downtime between dialogue. Hopefully this helps drive home the point about how there are different minds in the same body. I took the extra takes and the used takes and ran them through the Yamaha outboard gear in the studio, which has some very nice reverbs, I then printed those and used them in conjunction with the original audio. I added the reverberant tracks back into the parts that didn’t have any dialogue. Those parts were very open and needed something to fill them out. I set up a few scenes, and it makes the narrative more interesting, but what I really wanted to do was add in new dialogue. I wanted to get the actos back into the studio and have them start a new conversation, one that actually explains the story; since the visuals are vague and don’t really seem connected. I had to scrath doing that, because of time contraints of using the studio and the actors were hard to get in touch with.

              After adding in those extra scenes, I added some more sounds. There’s a scene where a child is running, and I manually added in each footstep at the right time. I also got some more background sound to add more space to the scenes. Plus a sound effect of a door opening, because I needed one. I could have easily spent another 20 hours adding in more effects and more parts, but I just didn’t have the time.

              The stereo mix was pretty simple: music, dialogue, and abiance in the center. I used the secondary dialogue happening at different times to experiment with the stereo image, like moving a line from the left to the right and things like that. With surround I had the same idea; the dialogue and music were in the middle, but the extra sounds were moved to the surround field, making the experience much more interesting and confusing.

Time Log

April 9^th 2 Hours in the labs

April 12^th 4 hours in 006

April 16^th 2 hours in 006

April 26^th 4 hours in 006

May 2^nd 3 hours in 006

May 7^th 2 in the labs

May 9^th 3 hours in 006

Total Hours: 20

Total hours in 006: 16