I'm taking a break from working on the audio to write about working on the audio.
The world is made of noise. I'm drinking coffee from a blue mug. There's a tiny ting when I touch the cup. I make a little swallowing sound when I take a sip. There's a little bump when I set it down on the coaster.
And behind all this, there's the usual sounds. My many harddrives that power our little operation hum away. The heat just switched off. My office chair makes little leather-squaking sounds.
Only two kinds of people see the world this way:
- Blind people, who construct their entire reality out of little noises with explicit detail. (And seem to have superhuman hearing as a result.)
- Audio engineers, who know the difference between footsteps on wood and footsteps on concrete.
Building Reality
For the movie, this world is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, all those little sounds give authenticity to the movie. We're using to hearing those noises, if we know it or not. And when they're not there, we can tell something is wrong.
On the other hand, our raw rootage is littered with little air conditioning noises, wind sounds, and uneven volume.
Sometimes it's because of where the mics are positioned - and sometimes it's because Gary just talks louder than Emily.
The goal of audio post is to clean all this stuff up.
For Those With Lot's of Money
Big studios do a lot of ADR - Automatic Dialogue Replacement. You go to a sound studio, you bring your actors back in, and you revoice every scene so you have perfectly clear, crisp sound from every voice, which you can mess with as you please, and mix in all the little noises of the world later.
If you're budget is less than $1 million, this is a terrible idea. Doing ADR right is expensive and time consuming, and requires some serious expertise. Doing it wrong, well, then the actor's lines don't match their mouths.
For Cheap Independent Shops (Like Us)
We do cheat, however. We'll frequently take sound from another take. Sometimes the actor is looking away from the camera, and so you can't tell that their lips don't match the sound. And sometimes we get lucky, and they say the line the exact same way, so there isn't a mismatch.
We do some folly - going out and recording little sounds so we can deliberately mix them in. Lot's of indie filmmakers use sound effects libraries - we won't touch them. You can download free noises all day long, but if you step away from you'll laptop and spend an hour recording little noises, it will always seem more authentic.
We're not alone in this argument. Ben Burtt - who pretty much ruled the sound design world since he created the Chewbacca voice - still runs around banging on things, playing with all the little noises in the world to create an audio language.
Our Next Steps
Right now, I'm trying to balance the volume across the movie, so nobody has to adjust the volume on their TV constantly. When I'm done, I'll go through the movie again looking for little noises - things we don't want that I can suppress, things we do want that should be a little louder, taking an equalizer to any dialogue that sounds hollow to try and make it suck a little less.
I'll be the first to admin, I'm not a great sound guy. But if you've seen Salad Daze in a theater with a serious sound system, you know that for our purposes, what we do is good enough.
Speaking of which, I need to get back to normalizing Act 3.
