Thursday, 18 December 2014

PRODUCTION REPORT

For my main sound project, I have chosen Solaris out of the other five clips. I feel like all the other clips have less room of creativity because what you see is what you hear. With Solaris, it allows me to design something new and interesting which is futuristic and abstract.
For this clip, I'm taking an abstract approach to it. This is because the film is dealing with themes of love, death and resurrection. These themes are very complex and when it happens in space it adds a different mood to it. It will have low ambient sounds all mixed together with the sounds of the spaceship and the character movements.
I haven't seen this film before or the original film. I have read the script of the scene which I'm designing and it has helped me think of how I could design the sound and what key sounds should be in there.

The highlighted sentence was a key thing for me. Visually when I saw it I didn't think there was a moment like that in there. I thought like he heard an alarm go off and that’s what drew his attention. But the alarm idea confused me because you expect to see lights go off and people running towards it of which that doesn't happen. Here a shot of him in the corridor as he has come down from his room.


Designing the sound to the script works well than designing it to your own understanding. As I continued reading the script it helped think of sounds to record. Like the liquid oxygen, how would it sound like? Is it similar to acid? And how does it react to the surface of the floor. This reminded me of a scene in Alien Resurrection, where Ripley is hit in the face and wipes of the blood which ends up on the floor eating through it. That’s the kind of idea I had for the liquid oxygen.









The other highlighted text 'is she dead', 'resurrection' and 'sexual' helped me think of the sound design. I sort of chose creepy and ghostly ambient sounds because experiencing death and coming back to life over and over again is not a humane thing and certainly not comfortable to watch. For the sexual part, I had a friend of mine do the sound for it as she watched it and it worked well.  
I watched the whole clip about 4 times and came up with a list of the sounds I needed to record. I didn't use any archive sounds because I don’t think I will be able to learn a lot from them. Whereas if I record the sounds myself, I will know what and how I want to use it in the sound design and it helps me improve my sound design skills.
The sounds came from different objects like:
  • A ladder and a bin for the steps and faint sound,
  • two different jackets, bed sheets and covers for him waking up and his wife shaking on the bed,
  • Boiling water and kettle for the liquid oxygen,
  • Lemonade for the gas escaping,
  • Two different freezers as an atmos for the rooms,
  • A big machine humming which I found within the university and used that for the corridor,
  • A female voice for the female actor.
I broke down the mixing into three stages. The first stage was designing the atmos sound. I used the sounds of the freezers and humming sound. I layered in the mix with the sounds for the liquid oxygen and a few machines. I added in an EQ and reverb to make it confined.


I kept on reducing the high frequency sounds and took out a bit of the low frequency sounds until I got a sound which is confined within a space.  I added a reverb to the sound to make feel like the sound is bouncing off within the spaceship. I tried panning the sound to make it feel like the sound is coming from a certain direction in the ship but it changed the effect of the entire sound. In the corridor it sounds fine but I got into the rooms it was a matter of perspective.


The second stage was adding the steps and other character movements. The most problem I had in this part was syncing the steps. It was ok in terms of the surface but how pronounced the steps were, was mostly the major issue. Creating a pace for the steps was also challenging as there's a part where he runs and is carrying his wife to the room. I thought of his weight in the different shots and how deep and loud the steps should be.  






As he enters the room you would expect the sound to change because of the surface and this is what I did. I removed a lot of high frequencies to make it sound deep, which takes out the metal clinging sound. I also changed the volume of the steps to create depth. Below is a screen shot of what the volume looked like for the steps. In some instances I had to individually reduce the dB level of the different steps and have it increase or decrease as he moved.







The third stage was designing the music. I used MIDI for composing it and I wanted it to have a different tone and mood as the scenes progressed. At the start of the clip is a haunted effect to create a feeling of something has wrong. I used the low frequencies almost to make it sound almost like a horror but making it not too scary. This was influenced by Aliens as they create mood as you watch of what,s about to happen next. 





Towards the end, I made it more intense as she coming back from the dead which is an unnatural sight. The sounds there were to sort of make you insecure but at the same time connect with her emotionally.



I feel my main weakness in this sound design is the music. I'm happy will all the foley sounds but if I had more time, I would changed the sound of the footsteps in certain areas. This would involve re-recording steps on different surfaces and seeing which works well. 

With the music I don't think it fully brought out the effect I wanted. I had problems trying to find the right sound within the sound bank of Pro Tools, as there are just so many options to choose from and this required more time to experiment with. I tried layering different rhythms together and in some scenes it worked and in others it didn't.

For this scene I layered two rhythms together. One is a low melody and the other is like a haunted house effect. I feel it worked because it introduces the character in a smooth way and not distracting the viewer.


In the corridor I was able to layer 3 rhythms together. At one point there were too many sounds at the same time as you have the atmos and footsteps but it was a matter of balancing the levels for each sound and giving each sound a time to come in. I also played with the different pitch for each note. The grey bars indicate how strong the pitch is. If its light, its a soft pitch. If its dark then its a high pitch. 

One important thing I noted to be crucial was the difference of mixing with headphones and speakers. In the headphones, the sound was fine and as soon as you play it on the speakers it would change. In some scenes the levels would be too high or too low and if your not aware of this it could change the perspective of the film.

I had problems exporting the video with the sound. I kept on getting this error message but if you changed the sample rate it would work sometimes and sometimes it didn't. I'm sure what really caused this but if it could get sorted out that would be really helpful for future projects.




Overall I have enjoyed this module and learnt a lot from it (mixing, panning, changing levels, recording sounds, which mics to use for different sounds, composing and designing from the script). I wish I would be able to do it again for next semester as I now have more ideas on how to approach sound for different films.

REFERENCE

Alien Resurrection. (1997). [DVD]. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. USA, Twentieth Century Fox.

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