Post Sound Design

John Avarese

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501327506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmregie & Filmproduktion

Post Sound Design provides a practical introduction to the fascinating craft of editing and replacing dialog, creating Foley and sound effects, editing music, and balancing these elements to a final mix. Based on years of experience and teaching this material to students at Drexel University, award-winning film composer John Avarese offers user-friendly knowledge and stimulating exercises to help compose story, develop characters and create emotion through skillful creation of the sound track. Starting each chapter with a real-life example, the textbook is structured in such a way to create a fundamental understanding of the physics and the biological foundation of hearing, and putting it into practice with suggested movie scenes demonstrating the discussed audio techniques. Post Sound Design engagingly demonstrates the individual areas essential to creating a soundtrack that will enhance any media production.

1 WHAT IS SOUND DESIGN?

Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. Undelimitable, it is impossible to protect oneself from it. There is no acoustic viewpoint. There is no terrace, no window, no keep, no citadel, no panoramic lookout of sound. Sound rushes in. It violates. Hearing is the most archaic perception in the course of personal history, even before smelling, well before seeing, and it is allied with the night.

Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music¹

WHY IS SOUND SO IMPORTANT?

Movies are like dreams. They send us to another reality. When we watch a really good film, we forget that we are watching something, but feel that we are inside it. I am sure this has happened to you. And then when the credits roll at the end, we are a little sad that is over and that we have to wake up to reality.

The role of a movie is to simulate reality. Most of how we perceive the world is through our sense of hearing: As we approach a street corner, our ears tell us that a car is approaching before we look at it. Bad audio pulls us out the film experience, however. When audio is bad, viewers think about the problems of the production instead of following the story, which is the opposite of what a film is supposed to do. Take for example, a scene that is shot in a large room, but where the focus is on an intimate exchange between a mother and a baby. The mother whispers tenderly to her newborn. We are drawn into the scene. However, if the audio sounds reverberate, the effect would be jarring, the tender moment is lost, and we wouldn’t believe the story.

Sound also gives us a sense of space. A common example is a warm summer evening: A door from an interior opens and before we see the outside, we hear the sound of cicadas and insects informing us of the external setting. Sound can give us information that the picture or dialog cannot.

There are many layers of sound that surround us all of the time. Our perception of it is almost subconscious. For us to work in audio post production, we have to learn how to hear the layers independently. It is a very different way to listen. One student once told me in a post class that audio post production is everything that happens between the words. They were right.

WHAT IS SOUND DESIGN?

Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives two awards for sound: Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. Sound editing encompasses both all of the audio edited from production sound, and all of the sound that is added to the picture in post production. So what is included in this award are a number of individual disciplines. The dialog editor will edit and clean the production dialog. The automatic dialog replacement (ADR) recorder will record and substitute in any dialog lines that are needed after production has wrapped. The sound designers will create and edit and sound effects and ambiences (or atmospheres) in the movie. The person in charge of all of the sound editing is the supervising sound editor.

Sound mixing takes place once the sound editing is complete. All of these elements are then blended to make the final mix. In large studio action films, there may be up to 1,000 tracks of audio to use in the mixing decision process. The person who is charge of mixing the film is called the re-recording mixer. What he or she does is take all of the recordings from the sound editors/designers and create a new recording—in essence a re-record—for the final mix.

There probably could be six or seven Academy Awards for sound in films, but we’ll take the two that we have.

LOW BUDGET PRODUCTION CONSIDERATIONS—AND A TRUE STORY

I have worked with many independent filmmakers as a composer, sound designer, and re-recording mixer all rolled into one convenient package. These directors hand over their baby to me to add an extra dimension, and give it emotion. They also need me to make the audio compliant to distributors’ specs, and pass the all-important quality control procedure.

With low-/micro-/no-budget films, the effort has been put in the image. Directors can get decent cinematographers to shoot their project since it will show off their work. However, while directors control the set, audio is not a priority: Watching the images and concentrating on actors comes first, and typically little attention is paid to the production sound (it’s assumed that the sound people will “worry” about the audio). The filmmaker will then go through the editorial process by editing it alone, or relying on a trusted colleague, who is often working on the project for free. Most of the time in these situations, they are listening on inadequate speakers that cannot accurately reproduce the audio recorded during production

After this process, they hand the film over to me and I will work on it by myself—usually handling a lot of damage control, like removing room noise, or editing out extraneous noises from the dialog. while making compromises in the audio—before the director, usually with their editor, comes in for the mix and we go through the film together. This is the first time that they hear their film in a proper environment with proper speakers, and gaining an education on film sound in the process. Many times this first session lasts about ten hours, and I can see the blood gradually drain from their faces. They often have no idea what was involved: In fact, on one project, the director told me that he knew he had bad audio, so he kept the sound volume as low as possible on his laptop computer, just barely enough to understand what was being said, so he did not have to confront the issue of bad sound.

IT ALL STARTS WITH CAPTURING THE SOUND

The above example isn’t the only example of a filmmaker on a steep learning curve. In another incident, there was only one track of audio in a room where four people were having a dialog, and it did not sound good: It was very roomy. When I removed the reverberation from the audio, the sound became very “thin,” or contained only high frequencies. This is uncomfortable to listen to, and the director asked why it sounded so bad.

I pointed to the screen. “Look at the ceiling,” I said. Taped to the ceiling was a lavalier microphone; it was the only one used in the scene and was in the shot. (Nobody had noticed this in the editorial process, except me, of course.) It still had the mic clip attached to it.

The point that I am trying to make to filmmakers is that you must plan audio as meticulously as you plan your shots. While technology in audio post can do amazing things, it cannot fix source problems. In comparison, if the picture were out of focus, what could you do about it in post? Nothing.

So, as the person who is in charge of audio post production, whatever your title may be, meet with your director and producer before the shooting starts and implore them to get good, “clean” sound. The time, effort, consideration, and budget that they invest in good sound prior to shooting will pay off many times over when the project is in the final stages of post production and time is tight.

WHY YOUR LISTENING ENVIRONMENT IS SO IMPORTANT

Before you get started listening to your first project, it is important to consider how you are hearing. What system will be the reference that will determine your decisions? Every decision that you make will be based on your perception of how you hear the audio and every decision that you make driven by your opinion. Remember that it should not just be the speakers that affect your choices; the environment where you listen is an important consideration too.

Speaker Choices

Since you are attempting to recreate a movie experience in your audio post workspace, the closer you can get to a theater playback system, the better. While that may not be financially possible for many of us, I do not think that you have to spend a lot of money in order to obtain a system that will enable you to make important decisions confidently.

Choose speakers that are “full range,” meaning that their frequency response is the same as the best of our hearing (20 Hz–20 kHz). Very few reasonably priced speakers extend that far. While the top higher frequencies may be reproduced, often the low end falls short of what is acceptable. If you can get speakers that reproduce low-end frequencies down to 40 Hz, you’re in good shape. Reproducing frequencies below 40 Hz may require larger, heavier speakers with a large diameter woofer and a room that can handle the bass response.

Low-budget filmmakers are often surprised at the amount of low frequencies that exist when they get in a mixing environment. When I ask them what system they are listening to, they tell me that they listen on their laptop speakers. Typically, laptop computer speakers do not reproduce below 115 Hz. While I am aware that some film viewers may watch on their computers and smart phones, we, as audio post decisionmakers, must have the correct tools to assess our decisions.

You can easily find the frequency response of your existing speakers (monitors), or those you wish to invest in. Here are some examples of speaker choices and their frequency response, as of late 2016:

JBL LSR305 5″ Active Studio Monitor	43 Hz–24 kHz
Yamaha HS8 8″ Active Studio Monitor	38 Hz–30 kHz
Focal Alpha 80 8″ Active Studio Monitor	35 Hz–22 kHz
KRK ROKIT 10-3 G3 10″ 3-way Active Studio Monitor	31 Hz–20 kHz

Now you may think that a monitor with a frequency range that goes up to 30 kHz is better than those that cannot produce frequencies that high. But consider that our hearing, even at its best, can perceive only up to 20 kHz. So do not chose speakers based on numbers only. Go listen to a selection of speakers, and when do you so, select music that you know very well to use as reference audio. Use your ears and then choose the ones that you like.

If you already own a pair of speakers, you can listen and find out where they stop delivering low frequencies by playing sine waves of specific frequencies through your system. Most audio applications can generate a sine wave at any s...