Week 11: Bite Nite Write Up

This post won't make a lot of sense cause this film hasn't been posted to the web, so you won't have anything to reference. But maybe you can still enjoy this.

I was asked by some good friends who are still at Fox to do the production and post sound on their Intermediate Directing final. This is my write up on my work over the course of three nights.

Night one

Today I got started at 7pm, and spent about an hour and a half trying to make Pro Tools cooperate. Not only was Pro Tools crashing while I wasn’t doing anything, it wouldn’t connect to my controller. So I spent time figuring all that out, but eventually I was victorious. First things first, I set to organizing the project, color coding, grouping etc. I only had like twenty minutes once I fixed everything before I had other obligations that kept me busy until 2am.

At 2am I returned to my desk and started Pro Tools back up, and everything worked miraculously (knock on wood). I started back to work on my organization. I wanted my track colors to signify which character/mic it was, which meant I had to organize all the dialogue files. Some had been renamed and changed positions in the timeline. I also went through and added in some additional dialogue tracks that I needed. This all took some finagling but I eventually got to a layout I like, color coordinated and all. After this, I decided I would do “some” dialogue smoothing. I went through and made sure everything flowed together, sometimes changing which take I used so it sounded good. I did some preliminary mixing, mostly just turning everything up to a good level and making sure the dialogue volume was relatively even throughout the film. Before I knew it, it was 5:30am. I had most of the dialogue smoothed out, and will go back and polish it as needed. That’s all for tonight.


Night Two

This night started with another healthy dose of trying to make Pro Tools work with my controller. After this I decided I wasn’t going to turn my computer off until I was done with this project. I received the music, so I decided since that was a key element I would focus on that. I received some guidance on what to do, but given mostly free reign. I assembled all the music, hitting the cues I wanted to. This cut took a while to perfect, I spent a lot of time making sure the cuts between songs were invisible.I sent a preview of this off to one of the directors to get some notes, she had a couple changes she wanted, so I set to making those. And that took a long time. A really long time. I tried to make these changes fit with what I had already done, but it was just not happening, so I went back to the drawing board. I changed bits and pieces of my original edit one at a time until eventually it was entirely different. There were four, maybe even five, cues that I really wanted the music to hit perfectly, but for the life of me I could never get all of them to work. If I synced one up, another one would be off. I did a lot of wrestling and finagling and bashing different parts of the music together. It’s a lot like working with a puzzle, except none of the puzzle pieces are cut out, so you have to figure out how to cut it up and then put it together. The song has three or four distinct parts, and I wanted to use them not in the order they are presented. So in addition to the puzzle pieces not being cut out, the puzzle has four different designs that I need to make mesh together. I eventually got SUPER close to having the cues right, I was only missing the one big one that I really wanted, but I had kind of written it off. At this point there were a lot of cuts that were close but not good enough for me, and I still didn’t like how my cues were landing. And I didn’t want to compromise on either the cuts or the cues, so I really buckled down and started working small. Moving things around, to see if they fit, copying in some drums to make sure I can hit cues etc. Eventually everything shook out and sounded as near to perfect as I think I could’ve done. There was a lot of work put into making the music work, and hopefully no one will notice. At this point it was like 5am, and I hit a wall, I’m not as young as when I was in college. But I also realized that my deadline was fast approaching (basically a day and half at this point) and I decided to try to “worldize” the music. This means making the music seem like it’s in the world, makes sense right? I also tried doing some wacky effects for one part and I didn’t really like it so I decided to go to bed.

Day Three

The big day. This was was my last day to work on the film.

Now that I only had one day left to work on this, I started earlier in the day to have as much time as possible. I received feedback from the other director who didn’t like one of the cuts - which is fine, it was the cut that I thought of as the weakest. I also received some isolated vocals so that I could try some crazy things without touching the music. But first things first, it was a quiet day - thanks to the city basically being shut down for snow - so I set up an on the fly isolation booth. It may have done nothing, it may have kinda helped, who knows. So with my boothy thing assembled I brought in Lauren to do some ADR for a couple lines. Once I was done with that I grabbed some clothes and did the foley for each of the main characters. Then I kinda tried to do footsteps and I wasn’t really feeling it. So I stopped.

With all the foley in place I moved into placing all the cut FX (sound effects pulled from sound effects libraries). A big part of this was picking the ambient noises for both exterior scenes and also getting a good party crowd noise. I found some good ones and put those in and gave them a quick mix and cut them to the scenes. At this point I decided to tackle a scene where one character gets scratched and another gets bitten on the neck. Both of these took a bit of finessing, the scratch more than the bite actually. For the bite, I grabbed a couple different effects that I liked together (an apple being bitten and celery being snapped), but it wasn’t enough I still didn’t like it. On set, the actors didn’t really make any sounds when biting/being bitten, so I pulled Lauren back in and had her give me a few pained screams. I then recorded me acting like a dog and biting my hand, which I pitched down just a touch. Everything together sounded a lot more convincing, but it still wasn’t enough. I once again grabbed Lauren and recorded a few takes of us reacting as the crowd. Some gasps and “oh my god”s went a long way to making everything sound more convincing.

Throughout my work on this, a thorn in my side was this one part where the music needed to get weird and I couldn’t get it right, I was never really happy with it, and neither was the director. I kept trying different things and just didn’t like it. Eventually I got some pretty good direction on where I should take the sound and I think I got something that was at the very least presentable. Next for the music, I had to figure out how to end this thing. There were a few parts that I could sync the music up to, but none of the music really fit. I figured out something that worked alright, but it’s not my favorite musical cue in this thing.

Sidebar, keep in mind a lot of this happened out of order, I bounced around between different tasks on this projects, more so than in the past. I would be editing music and then want to to move on for a bit, or I would remember something I needed to add.

I polished dialogue, and then I polished it more. I put some EQs on a few clips, made sure there were no obvious cuts, made sure the background noise matched for every track.

At some part, maybe around 6 or 7am, I ran out of things I needed to add. I put all the parts together and I just kept rewatching the film, every time finding one or two things I wanted to tweak. Maybe it was a transition that didn’t work, maybe it was mixing something higher or lower. And I kind of did this until I finally turned the film in at 9am.

Most of the work on this film was done in this night. I set the foundation for everything by spending two solid nights dedicated to assembling the dialogue and the music, but the film came together all in this night. And while I didn’t have a lot of time, I think this is one of my more polished films. There’s still a lot of issues in it I think, my mixing is still not very good, but overall I’m pretty happy with it.