Dubbing Sound
Seeing as the overall sound quality of the footage I have is poor, I have decided to overdub all the sound including sounds such as footsteps meaning I will have to create my own Foleys. I decided that it would be best to not record all of the Foleys first and then the dialogue, I felt it would be more effective to record in the order of the length each sound would last in the opening.
Location: Recording Studio
Order of Foleys:
- Foley - Footsteps
- Dialogue
- Foley - Stabbing
- Ambiance
- Pixies - Tame
- Foleys - Wallet drop, clothes rustling and stroking the knife
Equipment Used
- Behringer B1
- Shure SM57
- Firefly 808
- Logic Pro 9
- Wooden board
- Wallet
- Watermelons
- Cabbage
- Knives
- Chairs
- Coats
- Chopping board
- Wet cloth
- Soundproofing boards
Foleys
The job of a Foley artist is to enhance the sound of a scene and make the audience believe that everything in a scene, such as a floor made of plywood painted to resemble marble, is real. Foleys are very important to my thriller opening and I will be required to create Foley effects for all the footsteps of the scene, stabbing sounds, the wallet falling, stroking the knife and the sound of clothes rustling. The day started with my group and I experimenting between three different sounds for the footsteps, the options included just the floor in the recording room, a thin wooden board and a much thicker wooden board that I fortunately found on the way to school that very morning.
For the footsteps for the shots inside the hotel, I decided to use the thick wooden board which made the sound most similar to that of the real footsteps in the rough edit. This proved to be a very long task as it required perfect timing between the sound and the feet on screen hitting the floor. However when it came to the alleyway footsteps, I decided to use a chair to for the walk as it resembled the sound of walking on concrete and by this time, recording Foleys was becoming increasingly straightforward. Other Foley sound effects such as the stabbing sound required the stabbing of both watermelons and cabbages, these fruits and vegetables resembled the sounds of a knife entering a body as well as the knife being pulled back out of the victim. Acquiring the right sound for this was crucial as in the extreme close up of the blonde woman on the floor, she is stabbed again however I plan to only show this through her facial expressions and the sound of a knife stabbing a watermelon, a technique famously used by Alfred Hitchcock. Other techniques I used included wiping a knife in a wet cloth to get the sound of the killer wiping the knife clean, as well as rustling a coat for the the sound of the tramp getting to his feet in the second scene right before he is stabbed.
At an early stage, dialogue posed a problem as Adam Canning was not available to join us for his lines, therefore Joe took over and portrayed his character's voice. Because of the recent changes to scene two, the scene now only shows Hudson saying the end of his final line 'it's my goddamn job to know' meaning that only that line had to be in sync with what is being said by Hudson on screen. However, because the parallel editing now makes scene two longer, whilst editing the overall soundtrack, I had to try and draw out the length of the lines for as long as possible so as to ensure there would not be long pauses throughouy.
Pixies - Tame
As a result of my musical background, I am familiar with Logic and therefore the majority of the sound recording, processing and editing process was left to myself, Tame being one of the more challenging tasks. Due to the sophisticated nature of music in general, in order to cut a section, you must split it at the end of beginning of a bar in order for it to line up with the next segment. This has to be precise and requires a lot of careful listening and minute trimming of the audio track. The edited edition of the song had to last the length of scene one and also be perfectly timed to the door being kicked as this is where it needed to crescendo. After the first stab, the panting of both of the singers in the band begin and are accompanied by the sound of Joe’s breathing, which I cut and layered over the top, to resemble the killer. This breathing will continue as the music fades out and into the fade to black transition at the end of the scene to ensure that the audience are not let off the hook as soon as the scene ends.
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