BLOG 1 - POST INTENSIVE

Postproduction, being a part of the audio industry feels very different than normal studio recordings and music. It’s a lot more than recording musicians to come up with a song. Sound for film is what we did in the first intensive as a group. We chose a short film called “Things left unsaid” and worked off for the sound of the same with given sync (reference tracks). As a group we watched the film a few times and analysed the whole theme of the movie and then, did a detailed spotting session. In the spotting session, we noted down every Foley/SFX that should be recorded and the exact time for the same.

Within our group, we assigned basically 2 groups. One to do Foley in the studio and the other to location-record various sounds. Recording Foley was a lot of fun. Especially if you have a good hand at it, you can get pretty amazing sounds pretty fast. You get a chance to put out your creativity into the studio which helps to emulate different sounds which can be as common as a buckle clip. Meanwhile, the other group was busy getting some different atmospheric sounds. While recording Foley inside the studio, it was being edited as we went along. So, it’s ready to be put in the master session ready to be mixed. We edited the dialogues and pre-mixed the dialogues before mixing the final film. One of us wrote cool music that suited the tense atmosphere of the narrative.

We all came together for the mixing session and mixed parts by parts until it sounded good finally. The process that we followed was pretty basic as we were being taught as we went along. I think, recording Foley sounds is a great skill to have to pursue a success in post. We learnt many things like the process of filmmaking, the timeline, the analogies that they use on the set, techniques of location recording. For us, the film that we chose was a bit of a challenge for us as the dialogues could have been recorded in a better way on the set and there was simply too much loud of a noise floor in the dialogues. We succeeded in cleaning some of them but not all. We had to add another atmosphere over the dialogues, and it would sound too noisy as a short drama narrative if not cleaned. Overall, it was surely a good challenge for us as the first project and we got a brief idea about massive productions. Our mix didn’t sound as polished as compared to other similar drama narratives that I’ve seen. We could have made some Foley sounds more impactful being recorded at an appropriate level. If given a chance, I would like to work as a postproduction engineer. With the location recording, there are many challenges that one face in order to get good sound of the sync.

Postproduction can be really interesting. Be it for any, documentary or drama film. Both of these narratives have their own set of sounds that must be recorded in order to deliver the message of the filmmaker. In a documentary, the story has already been made and lived into and it is just a matter of showing it to the people by someone who actually lived it while in a drama narrative, you make everything up in order to conclude the message ideally. There doesn’t have to be a message. There are different aspects in filmmaking that differs a documentary from a drama narrative by the amount of importance given to those aspects. For example, in a drama film, you want the sound of pretty much everything to sound in-the-face and in a way which emphasizes the underlying weight of drama in the film. With the documentary, it doesn’t have to be that heavy sound-wise, but it should be well-mixed to make it deliverable.

The sound of a documentary is mostly captured by boom microphones, Lavaliere mics on the fabric of the talent and a shotgun mic on the camera itself. Sounds captured from these microphones makes up the sync audio track which is very important for the sound in a documentary. Audio personnel for a documentary have the responsibility to get the best sound for a documentary and to do so, they go creative in a bunch of different ways to record the sound. However, a documentary doesn’t have that much Foley because the amount of Foley is something that separates a drama film from a documentary. To my knowledge, a documentary sound is not filled fully with sounds recorded after the shoot. In a drama narrative, you can use the sound to drive the narrative as wished by the filmmaker by using sound design, location recording and recording Foley in the studio. For example, the sound of someone shooting someone wouldn’t necessarily be a normal thing. It ought to be heavy and sad. Hence, for the same, we take sounds recorded after the shoot and use it in a drama narrative to bring up the dramatic vibe of the film. Foley artists and Foley recorders can be creative too in a million different ways to emulate the sound of the scene and in some cases, enhance it as well.

In both the cases, I think the amount of creativity is the same, but the application of the creativity is different. You can be smart enough to record a clean, not too noisy sound for a documentary but you can also be creative enough to record great post sounds and make sound effects that makes the fake picture of the scene lively.