VFS Final Project - Anomaly 2

This was my final audio project at VFS, and utilizes all of the audio skills I learned in this past year. The audio is a complete re-design with the majority of original audio added to the sound edits. The music provided by 5 Alarm.

VO:

I recorded the voice over and the majority of the sounds for the final trailer. I used McDSP's Futzbox plugin to get the radio effect for the introduction and scavenger voices; I made a wet/dry mix with a low-passed signal of the recorded audio as the dry. For the commanders helmet reverb, I took an impulse recording of a ripped piece of air duct from the factory and used it as the dry signal with a different futz as a wet. Overall, the process was very challenging. The human voice contains many nuances on top of adding in processing from both reverbs and radio futzs. I had a lot of EQing to do in order to balance the quality of the voice with the effect I wanted in the end.

SFX:

Many of the mechanical sounds for the B-E-A-R tank were recorded in a real metal factory with a few library sounds to accent the current design. The evil dinosaur bots were designed from the squeaks of various doors opening and closing at the film school combined with bowing an old metal oil drum. The intro was especially fun to work on; I took a lot of recorded announcer dialogue from previous VFS school projects (with permission of course) and futz them in combination with sonar pings and radio tuning, distortion, and static. It made for a great opening soundscape to establish the context of the rest of the action later on. Many of the snow sliding sounds were taken from a skiing trip at Cypress mountain in northern Vancouver. The laser and gun design was all done with Komplete Synths: Massive and Reaktor 5.

The most challenging thing for me personally was perspective. With POV (point of view) changes, I had to take into account how much "air" or distance was between the camera and the point source of the sound. I took this into account when recording a lot of the mechanical sounds and ended up making three batches of recordings: close, medium, and far distances. This gave me more leeway when I added my edits.

I hope you enjoy the final redesign of this Anomaly 2 animated intro!

~MJ

Need for Speed Test Video Assignment

This was a time constrained class assignment in which we were given 24 hours, audio files, and a video from EA’s Need for Speed (Shift 2) designed to emulate a real test video package for game audio applications. We were able to edit and process the files any which way but we were not allowed to use any audio files outside the ones we were given. I did my sound design the very old fashioned way: by taking existing audio and manipulating them with time compression expansion and pitch shifting. The only plugins I used were Altiverb (Outdoor Stadium), Futzbox, Waves Doppler, EQ-7 band, Pitch Shift, and Time Shift. I pitched many sounds up and down, as well as high or low passed on an EQ to find new frequencies. I slowed specific sounds down and sped them up to increase or decrease the energy of a sound in a specific situation. Speeding up a very long sound will increase its energy or impact. I made great use of the doppler plugin for many of the car-bys and animal roars and breaths to accent many of the transitions in the piece.

Editing –

I wanted to make the first half about the race. My goal was to make it seem like the listener was at the race itself without getting too literal into that idea. I put specific announcer lines and audience cheers at the beginning before the picture started to warm up to that feeling. Instead of emulating a realistic situation of all of the car-bys, I threw in all types of variations of multiple bys throughout the entire first section. I created low LFE’s by pitching down and low passing the audience sound. The idea here was to recreate the feeling of exhilaration and excitement one gets when they play a racing game.

I built that sonic feeling until the transition scene. I added delayed pieces of the wood snap sound to the transition in addition to a classic camera shutter because it accented all of the quick cuts and chaos of the camera shots. A reversed cymbal served as a sound design rise that took us out of that chaos and into the surprised look on the drivers face.

The vision in the second half of the video was to accent the idea of the fast-paced collision action of a racing game. I added in a high-pitched sound I got from pitching up and high passing the fire sound that coincided with the announcer’s call of a crash. I then started to add pieces of collisions as the camera gradually zoomed out and added bys to fast transitions. The last transition sound I layered in a few bys with the whoosh breath and doppler’d the pig squeal to get an extremely high pitch zippy sound that worked quite well. When we hit the black screen, I originally had just the announcer speaking, however I realized that the point of this is to sell a racing game, and why would we not hear an engine with that? I wanted to lose the low end and have just the two layers play off of each other as the title came up.

Mixing –

The mixing process was pretty simple. Almost all of the car-bys were doppler’d in different ways. I thought adding doppler would be better and less jarring than just hard panning the bys. I did not pan many of the bys for that very reason – adding too much pan takes the audience away from the point and the excitement of the sonic experience. I added in futz and some EQing to the announcers voice to make the experience feel more authentic. I also added outdoor reverb to many of the bys and collisions to make it feel like we were in the space of the arena. I did not do this to every sound because I wanted there to be foreground sounds and variance in addition to the background sounds. In so doing this, the piece felt like it had more depth of field.

This was probably one of my favorite projects to do at VFS thus far. I love working a story through a limited scope of constraints when it came to the audio files we could use. After all, it's what I used to do before I attended the school!

~MJ

Film School Shorts

Hey all!

So—with film school in its 5th and almost final block (out of 6), I just got back from the film school’s premiere of the film shorts we worked on in collaboration with the film school. Part of the curriculum had us go through the entire sound pipeline for a film, from pre-production to production sound, all the way to post-production and mastering. We navigated through an intense but brief process and collaborated with the school’s film department to orchestrate 7-10 minute full shorts over the course of four months. A student in the sound department would work production on a film, then would work as an editor and then as either dialogue or SFX mixers for the same film two months later in the pipeline, working with all of the turnovers, AAFs, stems, EDL’s, and handoffs as they happened. However, while the average class was between 12-15 people, we only had 6 in our class, meaning that we had the added challenge of recording, editing, and mixing not one, but two short films instead and working as both dialogue and SFX mixers. It was an amazing experience, and I truthfully wished the entire curriculum was a lot longer—I just wanted to keep making more films!

Dr. Voodoo was the very first short I worked on. I worked production sound for both the pilot and part II and then edited both SFX and dialogue on both versions later on. This often meant a lot of hurry-up-and-wait on sets. As teams of three, we swapped roles on production sound as the boom operator, the on-set mixer, and the sound assistant. It’s amazing how much time and work has to be done to only record a short amount of footage that later gets chopped down even finer as the production pipeline continues! Needless to say, I gained an astronomical ton of respect for anyone that works in film production from that point onward. I loved working on editing the dream sequences in these especially! Check out both episodes here:

I worked next on the Brenda the Exterminator series. (and another called “The Job” that I unfortunately cannot find) I worked several audio post jobs due to the size of our class: I mixed the dialogue and music, recorded and edited the walla/looping, ADR, and foley, and was the music supervisor and music editor. The dialogue mixer is probably the most important position at the console on a sound stage. We have a saying in the sound industry that “dialogue is king” and that is definitely the truth. A sound mix for a film is separated into three parts that all have different tracks and routing: dialogue, music, and effects. On larger films, there’s usually a dialogue mixer who mixes dialogue and music and a sound effects mixer to mix sound effects, often separated into subcategories such as backgrounds, sound design, and foley. The dialogue mixer will level and attenuate all the volume set to the dialogue, meaning the dialogue will always sound the loudest and come to the forefront of the mix. The dialogue mixer also has to make sure the dialogue sounds smooth using different software plugin tools like equalization (EQ) and compression. The mixer is also responsible for making sure the dialogue sounds “in the space” of where the scene is taking place, including any ADR (automated dialogue replacement) tracks that contain dialogue that was re-recorded in a studio to replace non-desirable dialogue lines from production. For example: on Brenda, there’s a scene where she starts talking while in an enclosed area that used ADR lines, so I added some reverberation at that moment to create a sense of realism that she’s actually saying what she’s saying in that space. I also had the added fun of deciding what kind of filter I wanted to use for all of the phone calls. In the biz, we term that as “futz.”

I have to say, re-recording mixing was unlike anything I have ever done in the profession. It felt like an extremely unique, complex, and organic process, one that was constantly changing and expanding due to the nature of replaying certain parts or scenes over and over again while using automation to write and re-write volume, pan, or any other parameter for a plugin that the mixer would design. We each mixed four short films and a final project in a span of four months as part of our curriculum; I truly wanted to work another year, hell, two years, just to understand all of the nuances of re-recording mixing and the editing-> mixing pipeline process.

Check out Brenda Part II here:

…and now it’s time to dive into the final 8 week block of school and to start working on my final. I’ve got a video already lined up and I’m planning a trip to Cypress mountain planned to record myself on skis for some of the sfx. That, and a mechanical shipyard for a lot of robot and servo sounds. I won’t reveal anything more but it’s going to be a ton of work, and after 10 months of schooling, I feel like I’m more than ready for it. Stay tuned for the final video in the month to come!

10-4

~MJ

Wrath of the Lich King Opening Cinematic

This is my take on the opening cinematic for World of Warcraft’s second expansion: Wrath of the Lich King. My favorite part of this was editing and mixing the voice over; a realm that is very new to me. I got my partner to record his deep voice for the part of Terenas Menethil II, Arthas’ father, whom you hear speaking in the opening. I dropped his voice by one semitone and added 2:1 compression, followed by reverb using the Altiverb plug-in. I used two separate 7 band EQ’s, one for color and one for ducking out frequencies that were consistently boomy or shrill to the ear. The human voice has a ton of nuance that is taken for granted due to the nature of our ears ability to naturally compress and EQ what we hear before the brain processes it. A microphone does not have that luxury and as a result, we get a very “raw” like quality to the voice that will sound extremely cacophonous at times. That’s why we have our guardian angels: the dialogue mixers.

Check this out! This was a fun one to make, and I learned a great deal along the way.

~MJ

Foley!

This was an audio project done constructed with Foley ONLY for an animation at the Vancouver Film School. This was done as a project for a Foley recording class and contains only Foley sounds. If you don’t know what Foley is, it’s basically emulating real world sounds cut to picture in real time. For example, I did all of the balloon rubbing and bumping in this short by taking two balloons and handling/rubbing them while recording for the duration of the piece. It was quite fun…and I got to pop them too! If you’re thinking “Woah, some sounds are definitely missing,” it’s because they weren’t added intentionally. The point of the project was to do JUST Foley sounds and nothing else. A completed project would have BG’s, Music, SFX/SPFX, and Dialogue (this includes efforts); Foley is just one of the many layers of sound added to a film, and what we did is a good example of it. Check it out! 

~MJ