Tag: Learning Outcome Two

Sound Design in Immort

Matthew Jones /

With Immort being a science fiction film the sound design of the film is an important aspect of it.

This turned out to be a difficult endeavour as in order to design the sound for the VFX parts of the film, which were the parts that really needed good sound design to help sell we had to see where they were and what they would be doing. However, for the most part we didn’t receive any renders of VFX until the 2nd May.

This meant that in order to complete the sound design work in time we needed to have our approach sorted and ideas and plans in mind beforehand.

Now, with Immort the key thing to realise was that it didn’t necessarily need massive sounds in the scale of something like Star Wars or Star Trek. The drones in this for example aren’t massive and are powered by fans, therefore the sound for them didn’t require some huge sound like you would perhaps expect to hear when talking about drones in a sci-fi film.

There is an instance in the cut we handed in of Immort where the fly by of a drone is missing due to it only being on an earlier version (rendering issues meant they didn’t put everything in the cut). This can be seen here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2MbOMliWJxaNWVmdGw4Qi16ak0

Another instance of a missing effect with some sound design done for it is the glitch in the food:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2MbOMliWJxaVWpsbEQzSVlUUFk

Another key aspect of sound design in the film was the HUD. One of the major points in the film is how annoying these are, with information being constantly shoved in your face 24/7. A major part of showing this would be through the sound design. The constant notifications and adverts that play on Sici’s HUD are designed so that by the time she turns them off in the film, you, the viewer are glad that they’ve stopped. The contrasting silence in the film after this (and also in the beginning) helping to show just how intrusive they were on her life.  This leads on to the fact that you only ever hear her HUD making any noise. This is for two reasons. The first is simply that the film is from her perspective, therefore the point of how annoying these sounds are can be better made by only showing hers, otherwise the silence in the second half of the film would not be as present, therefore failing to get that point across as effectively. The other was for reasons of practicality. As it is Sici’s HUD has a lot of sound associated with it, especially in the form of the notifications. Now, when Paul, her brother enters the apartment, imagine if he also had all of this going on – it would be audio chaos, you wouldn’t know what to focus on, therefore the decision was made to only show her sounds. This also works in line with the way the technology in the film’s world works – the nanobots being inside you would be able to feed you sound information, but they would have no way of projecting that out into the world. This is why there was no attempt to make the HUD sounds sound as if they were coming out of tiny speakers as the sounds are in her head, therefore they is no reason why they would not be full bodied.

The appearance (and disappearance of the glass) glass, food and nano pill cup were interesting to do the sound design for, the challenge being to make them all similar enough to show that the same process was creating them all, but also slightly different to reflect the different objects that were being made. This is where on two of the three occurrences more natural sounds were used, albeit in a heavily processed manner, this was done to show that despite the things being created looking exactly like real world things, they aren’t and are in fact themselves heavily processed and not ‘real’. This was in part initially influenced by the anime Psycho-Pass in which things appear in a similar kind of manner.

The sound of the nanobot’s was odd as we never actually saw any visuals for them, we knew that they were going to be in the pills that Sici takes – and that there would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them, thus the sound of them is a chaotic high/mid noise which denotes the swarm of them lying within. This sound then translates to a few other instances in the film, such as when the nanobot pill cup appears you hear them more clearly than you do in the other appearance sounds. They also make a showing after Sici slaps Paul, albeit incredibly subtlety (this is down to the fact that it has been mentioned before that they would work to repair any damage to Paul after being hit, but the VFX at this point don’t denote anything of that sort happening. The other time they appear is perhaps the most interesting. When Sici turns them off you hear a cacophony of sounds, mainly of the HUD messing up, but also of the nanobots wheezing and dying.

The Hologram is an odd thing, the way we handled the sound for that was to make it seem like an automated thing, where they insert various phrases as and when needed into a stock hologram video, which then helps to give the corporation who are the ‘antagonists’ of the film a quality of being automated, digital and not natural.

One of the key influences in the sound design work is the following article talking about creating emotion trough sound design:

http://designingsound.org/2015/08/emotional-beings-a-creature-sound-design-discussion/

In this it talks about how by utilising real sounds it can help to elicit an emotional response from the audience. This is the case in this film with the very messed up sounds of the bits and bobs appearing. But, flipped on it’s head, the sound design work is designed, in part, to showcase how emotionally un-empathetic the world seems to be, with the constant notification being a good example of this. They aren’t designed to do anything other than showcase how annoying they are. Also, voices like the HUD adverts and the hologram  have processing that is perhaps un-needed added to them, however slight that may be in the case of the adverts.

What was really interesting about the sound design on Immort was the process by which we had to do things. They were a very organised team, but ended up running into issues such as render times, which pushed back the dates by which they could give us rough versions of the final VFX products by several weeks. This was made worse by the fact that not everything was ready for the first cut we received of the VFX and we ended up getting two more, which meant I spent a significant amount of time waiting to receive cuts while not being able to do any work on the film, which meant that the work me and the team did on the sound design was compressed into around three days, of which half of the time at the minimum was spent waiting for new cuts. The plus side of this did at least allow me more time to help out on other films. The speed at which we had to work was good in some regards, with articles like this showing the speed at which professionals have to work in the industry:

Sounds for Superheroes: Behind the Supersonic Sound Design for The Flash

This article states how the turn around time for a 40 minute TV show is around a week, with episodes often having between 300-500 sections where detailed sound work needs doing beyond the regular instances of dialogue. This means that the sound team in post production has to work at an extremely quick speed. This is obviously helped by the show being a running TV series, so many sounds have to re-used from previous weeks to keep continuity.

It also demonstrates the way in which the sound designer for the series has to answer to various people above him in the chain of command.

 

The Game of Moving Rather Loudly While On A Throne

Matthew Jones /

So, last night I watching the latest Game of Thrones episode and several times during the episode I was taken out of it by loud clothing movements. Now this could easily just be me being in the frame of mind to be judging levels on everything and therefore being more aware of sounds in scenes and what they’re doing, or it could be that it was just that little bit too loud.

This has been something that I have been trying to be very aware of while mixing, as in past projects I feel that some of the Foley movements haven’t been quite subtle enough, being a bit jarring compared to other elements and therefore risking taking the audience out of the film.

As Randy Thom points out in his blog post ‘Detail Orientated (https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/detail-oriented/) “What really matters is the nature of the details, not the number of them”. This shows that simply putting sounds in where they technically should or could be is not actually enough to create a good finished product, to create a good finished product you need to in a sense pick and choose carefully, which sounds you use and why, accentuating a movement for example for a particular character who is doing some fantastical move jumping over a balcony would work, because the sound, hearing someone do that can bring the audience closer to the event and make it seem more plausible that could happen. However, accentuating someone moving their arm to shake someone’s hand doesn’t work to the same extent, making that way over the top would take the audience out of the film as that is already a plausible thing, one we know how it sounds when we do it already, thus it is a sound we don’t really pay attention to. That isn’t to say we don’t need any Foley for that, often we will, as it helps to just make the scene that much more realistic, bringing the audience further in to the film.

That was a considerable tangent as I was originally talking about more subtle sounds, but the concept still stands for the more subtle sounds, do we need to hear clothing every single time a character moves? No. Do we need to hear footsteps for every character under important dialogue as they walk down a busy street? No. So, while it might still be worth trying them in the mix, recording the Foley anyway, if they’re at risk of interrupting the flow of events or getting in the way of other, more important sounds, then they probably aren’t needed and risk taking people out of the film.

End of Location Work

Matthew Jones /

Over the course of the last month and a bit we have been focusing mainly on location work for Immort, Descent, Feel Good and Remember.

The fact that there was five of us in the group really helped out in this regard as it meant that we had enough people to spread out over the various shoots, this was especially helpful when people were unavailable due to an R&D visit or other similar issue that caused people to be busy.

On location I mainly acted as the boom op on the shoots I attended. For Immort, despite being the lead Sound Designer on the film, I decided that Rory’s greater experience on set and with the 633 made him the better choice to be in charge of the location work. On the one shoot Rory couldn’t attend, Gaz took over from his role, with me remaining as the boom op despite at this point me being completely happy using the 633 the reasoning behind this being that it was a re-shoot and having already done this once and gotten good results, I figured that I was better off continuing in the role as I knew whereabouts the shots would be happening and where I could stand and so on.

It was interesting being in a position where in terms of Immort, with me being the lead Sound Designer on the film, Rory would normally be under me in the chain of command so to speak. However, on set it was the other way around. So I answered to Rory on the aspects of location sound, however, having an eye on the whole picture of the sound of the film I also had to make sure we were getting everything I needed for things like the dialogue edit.

Over the course of our work on location I became familiar with the 633, something which I wasn’t beforehand, having only used it very briefly before, so in a sense that was my biggest take away from the location work, learning how to confidently use a new piece of gear, which is potentially greatly beneficial for any location work I take on in the future. My other big take away is that I feel that my skills as a boom op have improved. Being the boom op is a role that comes with a fair amount of pressure, stemming from the fact that you need to stay alert over long periods of time, making sure that you’re holding the boom properly and in the right position consistently while also making sure you are aware of lighting and camera set ups so that you can avoid getting in shot or casting unwanted shadows. As an extension of this you also need to keep track of dialogue and movement so that you follow the actors appropriately.

Now that the location work is over post production tasks are now at the forefront, which at the time of writing my main responsibilities for the next week or two consist of:

  • Composing the music for Immort
  • Composing the music for Descent
  • Completing the dialogue edit for Immort
  • Starting sound design aspects on Immort and making sure everyone else is aware of the plans for the film and what is required Foley wise and sound design wise.

This is in relation to learning outcome two.

Immort – Location and Post Planning

Matthew Jones /

The majority of the shooting for Immort has now taken place, with one day of pickups remaining. This allows me to reflect on the process of the location work and begin thinking about once more about post production and how things will work there.

First off then is the location audio side of things. The easy way to put this is that things on set went very well. Despite me being the lead Sound Designer on this particular film, I decided to defer to Rory for the location sound recording aspect. This is because, while I have done location sound on several films before and taken the lead in doing so, Rory had more experience than me, so to this end it made much more sense to defer to his judgement while on set, so to sum this up simply, Rory operated the mixer while I was the boom op. This worked out rather well I felt, with communication between both us and the rest of the film crew being very good. Filming days were not rushed, but well planned out and sound was not overlooked at all, which made it much easier for us to do our job well. By this I mean that while on set we could easily gather information on what is happening in each shot, the shot number and scene number and we were also given ample time to work out the best way for us to set up for each scene – checking for boom shadows, checking the framing of the shot, hiding radio makes and making sure that doors for example would close quietly during takes so that we could capture the dialogue cleanly.

With only one day of shooting left to complete for this film, we will soon be handing over the audio from location to the director who in this case is also the editor. This will be done by creating a mono mix of the audio gathered on location, with the files named so that he can easily match the correct takes with his own video files. Once this is over we will be handed an OMF of the session from which we will begin our dialogue mix.

In terms of post production and the direction of the sound, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking having seen what the aesthetic of the film is like and having ascertained a better idea of the type of film this will be once it’s complete. While many of my ideas need to be okayed by the director still, I feel as though I have a good idea of how to progress from here. This will be discussed further with the director at a spotting session which will take place once the non-VFX cut of the film is finished. I’ve been keeping the rest of the group up to date with my thoughts on the sound design for Immort by posting word documents which detail the sound requirements for each scene on our Google Drive folder.

I tend to quite often act primarily as a composer on film projects and this being a Sci-Fi was the perfect excuse for me to branch out and start thinking more about the sound in the movie on an overall level. This led me to Randy Thom’s blog – https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/ – where he posts thoughts on aspects of sound design. One aspect that is particularly appealing to me is the post about Cacayanga, described as “a sound or set of sounds that seem authentic, but embody a mystery that pulls you deeper into the story in part because they aren’t immediately identifiable.” This concept is appealing for two reasons, the scenes in the film set in the city street are the main part of the film that can take advantage of this – this is because who knows what the future sounds like? No one, which gives us the opportunity to create a soundscape ignoring the usual commotion of a big city like London, instead taking into account the world that the director is creating and combining that with some sounds that will help to sell the world by making it seem populated, but also helping to really distinguish that this is the future and a far off future at that. The other reason this is interesting for this film is the nanobots themselves – they are a key driving point in the film and they sound like a mass of whirring noises, but at some points they will have to be used in peoples bodies, repairing them and such like at which points they will need to be fleshier at which point we once again loose reference as to what that would sound like, giving us free reign again to create sounds that draw people into the world.

As an end note to this post, I want to clarify one aim of the sound design in Immort – this is to help with the worldbuilding in the film, by creating a soundscape that is believable, we can immediately immerse people in the film, helping them to buy the concepts presented in the film, something which is vital to do in a Sci-Fi film such as this.

This is in relation to learning outcomes two and three.

Pre-Production; AKA: All The Meetings

Matthew Jones /

From the title of this post, you can take a pretty good guess as to how I spend a good deal of time during the pre-production stages of film work. However, attending meetings, while an important aspect of the process, in order to work out dates with whoever needs to know and to make sure schedules are workable, the direction we should be going in with the sound design and music, it is not the only part of pre-production, especially in a team this size, with the number of projects we have ongoing.

On the project I am in charge of sound wise (Immort) we have had fairly regular meetings, especially in more recent weeks, as filming details change and we start getting through more materials from the director.

With filming yet to happen, it is hard to get too stuck into things, due to the lack of visuals. Luckily on this project, an animatic has been produced as a form of storyboarding, which has meant that we have at least an idea of what will be needed after filming and VFX are completed. Combine this knowledge with the script and designs from the VFX team and we have some concrete visuals to work from, if not exact details on how exatly they’ll look and work within the context of the film. To this end, we have started producing audio content, something I’m calling ‘Concept Audio’ as it may need to change as the project progresses. We are starting now so as to alleviate some of the work-load down the road, as this time of year, most of our projects are still in pre-production so our workload is comparatively light compared to what it will be like later down the road.

Using Google Drive, I have uploaded documents which detail my ideas for the sound direction of the movie, as well as a document where everyone can detail what they are working on at any given time, so that we don’t overlap in terms of the content we produce, this allows us to keep up to date with all the progress as well without having to meet up any time we have a progress update.

This is in relation to learning outcome two.