Evaluation

For the final project this semester on our sound design module we were tasked to again create all the audio for a muted film clip and given a selection to choose from. Of this selection I chose an excerpt from the 1991 Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Delicatessen.

I chose this film over the others because it's settings seemed to be the closest to the environments that I would have easy access to. Also a few of the other options, such as Steven Soderbergh's Solaris (2002) and John Kosinski's 2013 work Oblivion were very clean, minimal and futuristic films and therefore seemed a much tougher task at the time.

Having finalised my choice of film I began thinking about my approach to creating the audio for it. Prior to this project, in Exercise 1, a technique I used for much of the sounds was foley. Russell Evans in his chapter about foley from the book Stand-Out Shorts describes the method as, "the process of getting additional sound effects to add extra quality to images - anything from footsteps to dismembered heads." This description seemed particularly apt given the subject matter of the film. Also relating to foley, I had recently watched the film Berberian Sound Studio which follows an English sound designer working out of his comfort zone on an Italian horror film. No actual gore is shown within the film but use of foley features heavily in the production and really focuses the viewer's attention on the sound behind the gore while conjuring up images of horror in their mind. Although the film in set in the 1970s, the foley techniques shown haven't really changed all that much. I took queue from this and began to think about interesting ways I could create sounds for Delicatessen. Before recording anything I watched through the section of the film with it's original sound, made a sounds list and addressed which were most important and why, for instance the off-screen horn sound is very important because it is reacted to by characters on-screen and it conveys the information that the truck is approaching. After compiling the list I thought of ways that each sound could be created and whether they could be achieved more easily in post production on computer software. I then booked out equipment for the university stores. The equipment I used was relatively new to me, carrying on with the Zoom H4N which I used on Exercise 1 but changing from the Sennheiser 416 microphone to a Rode NT-4. The Rode records in stereo and the Sennheiser is mono and primarily for Dialogue of which there isn't any in this clip. I also used a microphone stand so that I could enact the foley effects myself.

Door opening and creaking

Some sounds were relatively straight forward such as the atmospheric noise of the street which I recorded outside on an enclosed fire escape which was far enough away from the street to be quiet but still close enough to let the street noise be audible, also the door creaking was simple enough because luckily the door of my flat creaks. Other sounds were much more challenging and some I decided could be better achieve in post. 

The noise of the refuse truck was a mixture of a recording of a bus pulling up to a stop and a royalty free sound clip from freesound.org of a truck's engine. I also used this website for the truck's horn sound.Some sections of physically in characters were easier, such as when one man is rustling paper in a frantic way but this becomes a much harder task when the character is being delicate and when the sound is sparse like the tearing a small bits of newspaper from a window.  

Garbage men and truck

In the featurette Through The Ears Of Forrest Gump about the sound design of the film Forrest Gump (1994) Randy Thom who was the sound designer and sound re-recording mixer on the film says, "as usual we're going for what the best sound is not necessarily literally what you're seeing on screen." With this in mind I ended up using a classic foley trick for footsteps garbage men on a street by making a close recording of myself squeezing a bag of oats. Usually this method involves squeezing a bag of flour to sound like footsteps in snow but I used oats with the intentions of making a more gravel-like sound. In the end I combined this with the sound of real footsteps on a wood floor and I think it came out ok. For the tipping of the rubbish I generally used some actually rubbish such as empty bottles but also to add more weight and low end frequencies I recorded a number of shoes hitting the floor.

Inside the bin

To create the feeling and physicality of actually being in a bin, covered in paper and surrounded by rubbish I surrounded the microphone with rubbish and tried to move it in a way similar to the jostling on screen.

Knife sharpening

One of the hardest sounds to get right was the continuous sharpening of knives. This I recorded by scraping together a pair of scissors and a kitchen knife. I recorded many of the sharpening sounds which are actually seen while watching muted video so as to be exactly right but couldn't perfect all of them. Again in Through The Ears Of Forrest Gump when talking about the films extended sections of table tennis playing Randy Thom says "every one of those ping pong ball hits was recorded separately...and editors worked through the night to cut each one of those hits in synch."  I used this tactic to get each knife movement in synch by doing detailed cutting and editing of the sharpening sounds in Pro Tools 11. There were a few sounds that I couldn't address until post. for the swinging pig at the end of the clip I used the original door creak for both forward and backward swings but used the pitch shift effect in Pro Tools and raised the sounds by a different number of semi tones respectively. I was really struggling to get a convincing sound for the swinging pig but used the well documented technique of slowing something down and reversing it as inspiration but instead stumbled across the most fitting sounds by manipulating the pitch of the door creak. I also used pitch shift for the exclamation of the character when a character is in a bin and gets burnt by a cigarette. I recorded myself making a small shriek and shifted the pitch down a few semi tones.

When I began editing the sounds I had gathered in Pro Tools 11, I first set markers on the timeline at points in the action as a guide to follow. I built the sound up beginning with the atmos tracks and then went through the clip chronologically to get the basic sounds in the correct place. For some things this was easier, for example the bell on the door needed to be in the clip at two very specific points, when the door opens for the first time and again when the character in the bin is carried through the door. The main aspect to get right about this was again the timing of the bell sound and the character's reaction to it. The sound as the viewer is taken up into the piping system of the building is a section that doesn't really have one way that it should be done. I interpreted this in a very literal way by recording the radiator pipes in my flat numerous times and layering them over the top of each other in different tracks.

The piece really started to come together when I moved on to the leveling, equalizing, mixing and automation of the tracks. I mainly approached the levels by automating the track volume within the timeline. Either using the latch tool or by writing the automations in manually with the pen/line tool.

As the audience is taken away from the butcher, the knife sharpening is still heard but the sound has to change with the motion on screen. For this I combines a gradual lowering of volume with a gradual building of reverb on the knife sounds. I used the D-Verb plug-in for the reverb and automated it on latch mode while watching the clip at the same time.

D-Verb - this reverb is at 100% with a small amount of decay and a fair amount of high pass filtering.

The EQ of the sounds was very important for things like the physicality of the rubbish being tipped into the truck. I upped the low frequencies to add more weight and density to the sound using the 7 Band EQ.

This is a shot of the EQ for one of the paper rustling tracks and therefore has more high frequencies than low because the sound should generally be more light

At the point when I felt confident with the diegetic sound of the project. Although there was already more going on sonically in this clip when compared to my work on Exercise 1, I wanted to skirt away from the more minimal and scoreless approach I had previously taken and put in some musicality to really help convey moods within the piece. I signed out an M-Audio Oxygen 25 MIDI Controller to use as a direct interface with the plug-in instruments in Pro Tools.

The primary inspiration for this was the scoring work of Angelo Badalamenti on the television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) by David Lynch and Mark Frost. I tried for to emulate a similar eerie yet calm sound through the first couple of minutes of the clip. I did this using the Xpand! plug-in and adding to the release time, lowering the attack time and making the cut-off longer. While the character in the bin is being carried through to the shop and then waiting to lift the bin lid I wanted to really amp up the tension by adding a continuous MIDI timpani drum and automating the drum hits to build up to the reveal on screen that the character has been caught. I then added one final large drum hit when the butcher swings the knife down and the visual cuts to the title screen.

This is the Xpand! plug-in which has many different presets to easily achieve desired effects

I then added in some eerie piano playing for which I used the Mini Grand plug-in. This plug-in emulates the sound of a grand piano and gives you access to lots of variables such as where the piano should sound like it is and how hard or soft it should be played.

Mini Grand plug-in

At this point in the project I presented what I had done to my tutors and my group and I was then given feedback and advice about what to add, remove and change. I can up against a huge problem when attempting to act upon this because between the presentation and me going back to re-edit the piece, my hard drive had died. Luckily I managed to get a new one and back the old one up onto online cloud storage. Then it took me a very long time to work out how to make Pro Tools recognise the lost films and where to find then. I had to eventually link up every film manually as shown here.

The window on the left of the screen is the file linking window and the small orange symbols to the left are linked files.

In the end I got the project working and re-linked most files. I also had to reimport a few. I then acted upon the feedback by dropping out the string MIDI tones as the viewer is taken into the pipes, added a mysterious wind-like sound when the door to the shop first opens, made the noise of the pipes more apparent and made bought the reverb in the stairwell a bit higher in the mix.

Overall I think this piece went OK but I ended up having a lot of technical problems and because the software is new to me I struggled to fixed some of them for a long time. Given the chance to do it again I would probably plan the whole thing more rigorously and also better research how to make certain sounds such at the horn which I had to get from royalty free websites. Given the chance again I would also like to work on my blog a lot more because I really didn't manage my time well enough and set aside enough time after all the technical issues I ended up having to fully show my ideas and working.

Bibliography

• Berberian Sound Studio. 2012. [film] Warp Films: Peter Strickland.
• Delicatessen. 1991. [film] Miramax: Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
• Evans, R. 2010. Stand-out shorts. Amsterdam: Focal Press/Elsevier.
• Forrest Gump. 1994. [film] Paramount Pictures: Robert Zemeckis.
• Freesound.org. 2012. Freesound.org - Freesound.org. [online] Available at: http://freesound.org 
• Oblivion. 2013. [film] Universal Pictures: John Kosinski.
• Solaris. 2002. [film] 20th Century Fox: Steven Soderbergh.
• Through The Ears Of Forrest Gump. 1994. [video] Paramount Pictures: Randy Thom.
• Twin Peaks. 1990. [film] CBS Television: David Lynch and Mark Frost.