Project 1 Dragon's Den - Overview
- Ron De Guzman
- Apr 29, 2018
- 9 min read
The first project for the year is tackling an aspect of audio I have not touched on yet, Foley. I have again teamed up with Tavita Muliatele and also for the first time I'm working with Carter Kraaijmaat, our goal is to replace all of the sounds within a video clip whether that be an animation or a film scene. I have always been intrigued with the work that goes into sound design and Foley work, my interest stems mostly from the games I love to play. Out of all the many games I've played my favourites in regards to both game play and sound design are Dark Souls 3, Halo and The Last of Us.
I was open to do any type of video clip for my first attempt at diving into all of the aspects within sound design such as; sound FX, Foley, ambience and dialogue. My interests in combat related games and in martial arts inspired my curiosity in doing a combat sequence for this project. So within the planning phase it would be an idea I would suggest to my group.
The Planing Phase
The first thing we needed to do was to all agree on a video clip to work on, so we booked in a midi studio to go through possible video clips and discuss ideas.
We were mainly looking through a lot of short film animations but within that session I forwarded my suggestion to the group to possibly do a fight scene whether it be animation or film which we all were greatly interested in doing. So we ended up finding a fight scene from the film Ninja in the Dragon's Den.
The sounds we plan to re-produce start from 6:30 - 8:00
After the session, we continued to discuss the project plans via Slack. To write down an asset list we agreed to give each other 30secs each to review and take down all of the sounds needed. We were able to put together our project plan to have a clear overview of what tasks are needed to be completed within the suitable time frame to reduce the risk of delaying the final product.
Although, this our first time planning and taking on a project of sound replacement, we weren't certain on how much time it will actually take to complete these tasks. Knowing this, we were ready to allocate extra time to lower the risk of the final product being overdue.
The Designing Phase
After writing up our assets list we still had to figure out how we were going to create each of the sounds, so we booked a studio session in the C24. To prepare for this session I had gathered a lot of props for a lot of the prominent sounds in the scene. Mic placement was interesting to think about because we had to consider where the camera was positioned in the scene to make sure the sound suited the scene and keep the immersion.
We ran into a few problems with the studio which gave us a slow start to the session but we managed to test most of the props that emulated the sound of Katana sword. We started out by trying what knives sound best, when they are hit amongst each other it was interesting of how different the sounds can be while experimenting with different techniques.
We achieved to create a great 'shing' sound and also a great impact sound of when both swords collide. We found that the best sounds came from striking and sliding the bread knife and the butter knife together, the bread knife was much lighter than each of the other kitchen knives and it provided the perfect perception of weight for a Katana sword.
I mostly used the butt end of the butter knife when striking and sliding, which gave the perfect weight to the sound of the swords. The other end of the butter knife didn't have enough weight and when testing each of the other kitchen knives they just proved to be displaying to much weight when struck together. (This video helped me discover this technique)
The moments where the sword swings and misses I brought in my plastic cat toy to replicate the 'swooosh' sound that you see in so many in marital art films. We constantly swung it through the air and It worked very well because of how light it was, the sound matched the weapons perfectly.
We also utilised a lot of the wooden props that were available within the C24 studio. This greatly helped to test with a lot of wooden related sounds such as; footsteps and the times where the swords come in contact with wooden elements. There is a specific scene where one of the character's sword gets trapped in between a wooden chest throughout the fight. I brought in a wooden painting easel to act as the chest, we placed one of the kitchen knives on top of a thick piece of wood (shown in the pic above) and had the painting easel placed on top to emulate the chest opening and closing on the sword.
After the session, we discussed the risks and problems we had throughout the session to reflect and prepare for the building phase. During this session we finally grasped the amount of time it can take to record Foley sounds and we quickly became aware of how important our efficiency and planning are if we wanted to complete this project on time. One of the main problems we had through this session was the amount of time it took to record each sound and we needed figure out a more efficient way to record in regards to our Pro Tools session.
The Building Phase
Now that we had a better idea of what its like to record Foley sounds, we booked two 8-10hour studio sessions in the C24 and also to improve efficiency we've changed the way we run our Pro Tools session to make the process of recording much quicker. Tavita, the man running the Pro Tools session did some nice research on preparing a session for Foley and ADR which really improved our efficiency from last time!
The Pro Tools session consists of 5 main tracks which allows us to have a cleaner session and gives great assistance for the Folley artist.
1. Beep - The beep track contains a 3 second count-in beep, this is used to assist the Foley artist to know when to perform.
2. Slug - The Slug uses an offline clip and is placed in an area where you are looking to record in. It places a start and end to the recording, the clip within the beep track is lined up with the start of the slug clip to give a 3 second count down for the Foley artist to perform at the right time.
3. Record - Recording takes place within this track and we work off our asset list so the name of this track changes to whatever we performing.
4. Edit/Processing - This track is used for editing and processing a recording either on the spot or for later. Most of the clips that end up in this track are recordings that are going to be of defiant use.
5. Hero - The purpose of this track is to store completed and finished sounds to be exported into our master session.
To ensure this process works make sure you set your Pre/Post roll to 3seconds and have record mode on 'punch'. This will allow you to perfectly line with the beep clip. This method really proved its efficiency in the studio and if you wanted to know more about it view the Lynda tutorial or visit Tavita's blog.
The two microphones we used throughout all of the building phase (C414, SM57)
SESSION 1
06/03/2018
In this session I planned a session plan the night before to ensure we don't loose track of time, i made sure that we had plenty of breaks in between which really helped us refresh our minds when a problem occurred. First off, we aimed to focus on recording the most prominent sounds to get them out of the way. The prominent sounds we decided to focus on was all sword related sounds, wood impacts and some body movement.
We decided to start with the sword sounds, there was a discussion on performing each of the sounds individually or only recording a good handful that we could re-use. We realised that when a character repeatedly performs an action, each performance still seemed quite different. So, we decided to do each sound individually to give more of a realistic feel.
After completing the sword sounds we moved on to recording the footsteps of each character. The wooden floor board in the picture above is what we used to replicate the wooden floors they were fighting on in the scene. We used this exact same set up (minus the thick wooden plank) to record the footsteps for each character.
We also recorded body drops that were performed by Carter
What we had after this session:
SESSION 2
13/03/18
This was our last session to record all Foley sounds because we were behind on our planned schedule, so this was the session to record everything left on our asset list which mostly included: - Body/Clothing movement - Punches and Kicks -Swords swings and misses -ADR
Tavita brought in some old jeans that was used for our body/clothing movement and it worked extremely well. Carter and I would alternate and try various techniques to emulate the movement on screen. We would extend the jeans with a burst of speed to emulate the kicks and punches. We also would rustle the jeans up against the wall to emulate the parts where they are fighting up amongst the wall.
For the punches and kicks we recorded a leather couch by hitting it from different angles for a variation of sounds we could use, we also put a towel on top to reduce the high frequencies coming through.
For the sword swings and misses we used the my cat's toy, I had to bring in another one because of its durability from constant swinging it ends up causing it to bend and snap. The sound that came from the cat toy was great but we also had to have a high gain on the microphone to actually capture the sound. This resulted in capturing unwanted background noise from the TV within the Foley room, we fixed this with the help of de-noising in post.
The ADR performances were done by Carter and I which we both did in one take, Carter was the elderly man and I acted as the younger character. We were running out of studio time but we ended up being pretty content with the takes we did. Although, I can't stand the sound of my own voice the team was happy with what I had performed. ADR was interesting to perform because of the emotions you have to act out with also trying to match up with the character's mouth, very challenging but also fun and hilarious!
Raw edit of what we had after this session:
THE SCORE
12/03/18
We actually made the score the day before Session 2 and the idea was inspired by one of the soundtracks from The Last Samurai.
We wanted to bring out more emotion but also still making sure it fits the scene. First, we needed to figure out what scale we were going to play on, we researched and viewed through some oriental scales. Carter suggested the D Phrygian scale which is still related to an oriental scale and it worked effortlessly. The score was made through 5mins of improvisation and turned out exactly how we wanted it.
The Editing Phase
Even though we were in the editing phase of our project, we still had Foley sounds left to record. Throughout this process we were simultaneously editing and recording the last sounds on our asset list. We all discussed on what audio assets each of us can individually edit. Tavita went on and edited all of the body movement sounds while Carter edited our ADR recordings. I was left with editing all sword related sounds, I felt that the sounds recorded did not need much processing due to the good quality of our recordings.
The last mastering session we had in C24 was one very stressful session, when bringing all our edited sounds together we had a lot of problems with importing the right sounds. Some were missing and some plug-ins in Pro Tools wasn't working, luckily we were able to solve one problem by finding the missing sounds, but unfortunately we were unable to get the the plug-ins within Pro Tools working. These problems pushed us out of our studio time and left us exporting the final product outside within a car park at 11pm in the evening with some good late night pizza. Throughout this last week our team really pulled it together to create the final submission of this project, although we had setbacks during the building and editing phase everything turned a lot better than we anticipated. This project experience helped me learn a lot of what the process is like for Foley work and it was great fun!
Here is what we had at the end :)
Reflection - Podcast
References
- A Blog by PremiumBeat. (2018). Foley: The Art of Making Sound Effects. [online] Available at: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/art-of-making-sound-effects/
- Academy Originals. (2016, June 13). Foley Artists: How Movie Sound Effects Are Made [Video file]. Avaliable at: https://youtu.be/U_tqB4IZvMk
- LinkedIn. (2018). Preparing the session for foley and ADR recording. [online] Available at: https://www.lynda.com/Pro-Tools-tutorials/Preparing-session-foley-ADR-recording/77862/85442-4.html?autoplay=true
- Youtube. (2012). How to make sword clang sound effects. [online] Avaliable at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfdgJJeVmbs
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