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How to Make Your Indie Film Sound Professional (on a Micro-Budget) · Indie Film Podcast

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Welcome to Indie Film Podcast. This week we're talking DIY
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sound design for indie film and how to go beyond the bare
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minimum. So we'll be discussing some
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resources and techniques that we've learned, like what does
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basic sound design include? Where can I find a free online
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sound library are? Those free libraries any good?
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How do I get better at indie film sound design?
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On that note, I'm Vic. And I am Chuck.
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We are two indie film makers doing our best to make art for
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little to no budget. We should talk about film sound
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and start with George Lucas, I think.
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Oh, because George Lucas has a fun quote about this.
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He does, and we couldn't actually verify the interview
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that he had said quote, but it is the sound and music are 50%
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of the entertainment of a movie and variations of those you can
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find online. And sometimes that is forgotten
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with indie film makers because most of your efforts are putting
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the picture in the frame. As I heard it said once, Sound
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design is the red headed stepchild of indie film and I
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decided to not be offended by this, but I have heard it phrase
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that and I did find it a little bit entertaining.
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Well, as a location, sound record, us and sound mixer.
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I'm offended by your comment. You'd rather be a location sound
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record us than a red headed stepchild.
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Yeah, please don't compare us so.
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Thanks. Should we talk about the an
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example or some? Examples.
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Actually you were. You had a fantastic example for
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this. Yes, famous trilogy that was
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recorded in Italy. The dollar trilogy.
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This is Clint Eastwood's role that made him famous, I believe,
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because he was doing, you know, like western TV shows prior to
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these spaghetti westerns. So the dollar trilogy is A
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Fistful of Dollars, a Few Dollar More and then The Good and the
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Bad and the Ugly, which The Good and the Bad and the Ugly was the
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most famous of the trilogy's. Yeah, I have not heard of the
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other two. OK, well anyway, the the movies
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are great. I actually just watched them for
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the first time probably about a month ago, but the sound is
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rough. They were filmed MOS which I had
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to look this up before this podcast.
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It it stands for MIT out sound and I guess it's a German phrase
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otherwise it would be WOS without sound.
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But it's MIT out sound and these films were clearly foliate and
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80 yard all the way through and going back or excuse me, not
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going back, but watching these for the first time, having grown
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used to really solid location sound in most of the films that
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that I do consume, these ones were clearly the the actors were
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speaking whatever their native language was.
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So obviously Clint Eastwood was speaking English and then you
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could see people mouthing words in either Spanish or Italian
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because these were filmed in Italy and Spain.
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So did they all just have their own version of the script that
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was in their own native language and they just kind of rolled
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with it even though and everyone just had to assume that they
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were saying the right line because nobody was actually Tri
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flu trilingual? Bilingual.
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I don't know actually, but I there are very clearly scenes
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where people are speaking not English and then they ADR the
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English lines over the top of the actors.
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Which always looks very convincing.
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Yes, they do that with a lot of Netflix movies nowadays.
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Too. Or famously, Godzilla movies.
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Yeah, where it's. So it was a little bit hard to
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watch those films because the sound was distracting.
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And obviously then any of the ambient sounds and any of the
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Foley sounds like doors opening and footsteps were a little bit
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eerie, like they were just too much.
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Just not quite right. Yeah, yeah.
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But the movies themselves were great, like great story, great
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motivation for characters. But yeah, location sound was non
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existent and overall sound mixing was a little bit rough.
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Now that's kind of sad. Yeah.
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So OK, so sound does matter. And I think the biggest take
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away from that kind of sounds like, you know, sound has always
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been a struggle. This isn't new.
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Everybody worries about this. Everybody has, you know, some
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highs and some lows on location sound capture as well as mixing.
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So you know what? That's actually a little
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validating. Should we dive into it then?
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Yeah, let's go for it 'cause you, Oh, wait, no, actually I
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want to go into your, your really fun comparison 'cause you
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compared film to music. Yes, I liked.
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This I did write a quick comparison.
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So comparing film to music, sound is kind of like the rhythm
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section of your movie and the visuals is more like vocals or
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or lead guitar or whatever the lead instrument is.
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And sometimes you can get overly fixated on the visuals.
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But if you don't have a good rhythm section, your your band
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is not going to be very good, right?
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It may not be what everybody notices, but you notice.
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Exactly, exactly. If you're not tapping your foot
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to the beat, it's or you know, whatever it is, if you don't
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have the supporting role of the musicians, they're like your
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lead singer is not going to be all that impressive.
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But also your lead singer will be even more impressive with the
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right backing band in my experience.
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No, it's true. I'm thinking to Rockapella when
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they finally got their rhythm vocalist, which is a, which is
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an acabella acapella band, if you couldn't tell by the name
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Rockapella. So once they got rhythm, like a
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rhythm section, just a guy who can do like the beatboxing with
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his mouth. I won't attempt to do that as a
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favor to everyone. Neither will I.
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But yeah, once they got him in, then it all changed.
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It took off. It did.
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People appreciated it more. Yeah, well then, I mean, then
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they landed the gig for the Carmen San Diego theme song, so
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that's pretty cool. Oh, so I actually do know this.
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Band. You actually do know this band,
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Yeah. Yep, so it was the beatboxer
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that made them. I mean, they were, they were
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already really talented, but I'm gonna say that having a a rhythm
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section probably helped substantially.
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Yeah, so get that sound section in your films and it's
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definitely gonna help out. We should probably talk about
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some free sound effects libraries.
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I will say having a gigantic library of sound effects
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available to me when I'm doing post audio has changed
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everything as far as the quality that I'm able to create just on
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my own. And I've done some gigs where
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it's the location sound where I've recorded it and it hasn't
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quite been ideal. I've done gigs where I'm mixing
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sound for some really awesome location sound recorders and it
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made it a lot easier, but I still had to lean heavily into
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my sound effects library. And then I've also done some
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gigs where I was helping film makers fix movies where they had
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a friend running boom that day. Which if you're an indie
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filmmaker and you've done some 48 hour film festivals or you're
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just trying to get something done, you've been in that
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situation where you're like, we can't find any sound person.
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We're just going to get a set of headphones, a cheap Zoom
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recorder and whatever mic we can find and give it to this person
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and be like, hey, record this. It's.
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Probably going to be ex cast member or ex crew members child
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or niece or nephew or something like that because they are going
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to be able to just drag them along against their will to set
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and make them hold a boom all day.
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Yes. Poor, poor kids and poor people.
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It hurts your shoulders. I'm going to say that.
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It can be exhausting. There's techniques and if you're
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running boom, look it up online. There are techniques that's
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helped me when I'm on set because some of those long,
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those long takes it, it destroys your shoulders if you're not
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careful. It's bad.
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So free, free sound, free sound effects.
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You can obviously go online and purchase a lot of them.
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That's what I ended up doing is I got a collection that was that
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was not all that cheap, but at the same time the clarity is
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amazing. One place that I used to go
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quite a bit was freesound.org. That one's great.
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And there's a lot of different, it's searchable.
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You have to create an account and a lot of the sounds do
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require some attributions. Some of them are just like open
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to the public and I have gone into those sound effects
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libraries if I'm missing something and picked one of
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those up and you know, as as a favor, I kind of do like the
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need a penny, take a penny, have a penny, give a penny.
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So when I do get my own location sound effects or my own Foley,
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I'll throw them up onto freesound.org.
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And then as an exchange for like some of the people that I've
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downloaded from that are, you know, just open free to the
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public, which is pretty cool. That's really nice though, and I
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guess that's actually probably how that library has been built
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out. It's a lot of people feeling
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sort of that same more obligation to contribute.
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Yes, yes, I would imagine, I would imagine, but they have a
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really great listing of sounds or a great library of sounds on
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that website. And it's just kind of all user
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generated. And so the sampling, being able
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to listen on the fly is really good.
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And I've I've pulled some excellent sound effects from
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that library. Sweet, Yeah.
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OK. And that's that's.
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Kind of the only one on this list that we that we made that I
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have experience with because we were looking at ZAP Splat.
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ZAP Splat actually looked pretty good.
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I've got some experience with a couple of these.
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OK, so Zaslot was just very popular and very highly
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suggested. And then looking at the website,
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it actually does look retty good.
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It looks like you have to add some sort of attribution in your
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credits when you use stuff from there, but you can pay for it
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and then you don't have to. So you've got some options.
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The BBC Sound Effects archive. You've actually brought that one
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up before. Yeah, the BBC, it's kind of
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famous if you're in online or Reddit groups that discuss
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audio, The issue there is if you're a nonprofit or if you're
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using it for public television, then it's you can use them.
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But if you're creating your own work or you're doing commercial
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work, then it's going to be limited as far as the usage.
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And so good for students. Yes.
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OK. Yeah, that would be a good one.
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Just look at what their their limitations are.
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And I should preface this by saying I have not used any sound
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effects of my own for commercial work, like if I'm doing a
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commercial versus narrative artwork, if that makes sense.
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And so those, those you have to be really careful if like you're
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doing something that's advertising because those are
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going to be separated out on a lot of the, on a lot of the
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sound effects libraries, Like if you're doing this for like
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commercial work or, you know, commercial for a company, yadda,
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yadda, yadda. Look at the license you are
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purchasing to make sure it covers your specific use case.
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Yeah, exactly. And so large tech firm where I
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worked previously, they had their own sound effect and music
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library that we were limited to using for their commercial
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productions. Because that's what they've paid
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for and own in perpetuity. Exactly, exactly so.
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Especially since they were an Internet, still are an
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international organization. Yeah, which also adds some
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complexities. I bet talk to the legal
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department. It's fine.
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Everybody loves talking to the legal department at a giant
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global corporation YouTube audio library.
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I've used a couple of times for little Shorts and and some of
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the music on there is actually completely palatable.
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Nice. Yeah.
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I'm not going to say that it's the best.
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I'm not going to say you should necessarily lean into any of the
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songs with the lyrics. OK.
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Some of them and, and maybe I this was years ago, so if you're
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a YouTube Music creator, sorry, maybe I just didn't see your
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stuff, but some of it can be a little out there.
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I remember quite a few synthesized banjos, which was
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which was new. OK.
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So I don't know if I'd recommend it, but hey, it's there and it's
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available and if it. Fits your if it fits your
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project. If you need some synth banjo,
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which I actually didn't know that that was a thing, so maybe
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I'll create a movie around a synth banjo so that it does fit.
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Like what? Where it, like sounded like
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somebody had just, you know, a digital keyboard.
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Instead of playing a keyboard noise, it made a banjo noise.
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Yeah, I got it. Yeah, MIDI.
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MIDI banjo. Oh, MIDI banjo is probably how
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that This is why I don't do sound stuff.
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OK, so right on the next 1. I actually do have a fair amount
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of experience with this Audionautics.
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Got it. And that one is apparently
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mainly or just I can't really tell the musician Jason Shaw,
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which is kind of cool. But as long as you throw
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something in your credits that says, you know, additional music
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from audionautics.com or maybe it's updated now that you could
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say Jason Shaw. I used some of his music three
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years ago now, so it was a hot minute, but it's actually really
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good music. It does sound really good.
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Oh, right on. Like that mobygratis.com just
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reopened, so the musician Moby, you can download a whole bunch
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of his tracks that he recorded, and this one is pretty solid.
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I started to dig around in there and the nice thing is that he
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has the stems that you can download.
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So if you're unfamiliar with stems are it means that he has
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his music that you can download the tracks.
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There are two 3 minutes and there are some restrictions on
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there. Just go to the website, check it
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out. But for each song or for most of
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the songs that he's uploaded, you can download each individual
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music musical part and then use just that stem for something.
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So like if you just want the baseline, or you just want the
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guitar part, or you just want the drums, you can take those
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parts out individually and then kind of build your own.
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Oh, that's really cool. So that way if you wanted to
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have people like listening to a song inside and like a club, and
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then suddenly you're outside and you just hear the bass line
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coming through the walls or something, you can do that
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pretty easily. Yeah, that.
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Would definitely. Help for that?
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That's cool. So while we're on the subject of
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music, I'm going to jump around a little bit because music is
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obviously something super important to make an indie film
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sound great. Yeah.
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And one of the hacks that we learned early on at Lower Gentry
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Studios was to film musicians live.
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We actually started in this space, if you're watching us on
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YouTube, we did kind of like an NPR Tiny Desk ish music series
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called Treasure Valley Live. We would bring bands in and we
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basically just kind of like film them.
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They were happy to have the video assets.
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We were happy to have the practice.
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And then we had like a YouTube channel around that for a while.
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And it was great to get in contact with these bands because
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after we built a relationship with them, there were a lot of
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them that were willing to share their albums for our projects.
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Which if you try to compose something, that's a lot of work.
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If you are friends with a with a group of musicians, then they
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are most likely going to have a high quality EP or LP available.
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And if you put that in your indie film versus trying to
15:30
compose something or pay somebody to compose something,
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it's going to take a lot longer, it's going to be way more
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expensive, and the results might not be what you expect.
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Yeah. So if you're in a city that has
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a decent music presence, I think it's really important to just
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listen to all the local musicians music, find some stuff
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that fits your project and instead of going the composition
15:52
route, just start there. I'm also going to throw out
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there is a very popular AI music creation tool that will make you
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a song. It'll either make up the lyrics
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for you or you can put your own in there.
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And I would, I would second Chuck on this one and say go
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talk to a band before you do that.
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Yeah. They know what they're doing
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musically. They do and the AI just isn't
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100% there yet. Maybe for some of the non
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vocalized thing but I just I think you should just talk to
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the real band. Lean into the musicians that are
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doing what they love because the passion really shows in music.
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It does. It does.
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It and it stands out and makes your short film instantly better
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if you have a track that hits really hard.
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So should we talk about the mixing techniques?
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Yeah, actually I was just going to ask if you would be so kind
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as to walk through maybe some of the the less expensive tools,
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right, Because we know that that the Pro Tools is probably out of
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budget for a lot of indie film makers and maybe even just
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overkill in some cases. So what are some tools other
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than Pro Tools that you would suggest using?
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So I've actually never used Pro Tools before because it is very
17:07
expensive. And as a production company,
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small production company, we've always used Premiere to edit our
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films. And so obviously Audition
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communicates directly with Premiere Pro and it's really
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easy. You can actually just take your
17:24
Premiere Pro project and open it in Audition.
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Which is wild. That was a mind blowing thing
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that you taught me. Yeah, it's.
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It makes it much easier to communicate then it's it's
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pointing at the files and you don't have to do like kicking
17:38
out stems and it's you have access to the entire audio file
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then a lot more easily. It however, it's set up on with
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with whomever edited it. You just have to make sure you
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only get one video track. So you just have to make sure
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that you you export the video only on Premiere Pro and then
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you can slam that into the audition video one video track
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and it keeps all the multi track audio.
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So definitely recommend Audition if you're working with Premiere.
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I've heard good things about Davinci Resolve.
18:07
I've never edited audio in Davinci Resolve and the only
18:11
reason for that is because I did not like their audio cleanup for
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dialogue and that was kind of something that I it's something
18:21
that I use all the time. However, I recently switched to
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Isotope RX which is a plug in and it works phenomenally.
18:30
A plug in for Audition. It's a plug in for any DAW which
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is a digital audio workstation. So it works in Premiere, it
18:36
works in Davinci, and it basically gives you like a live
18:43
monitoring of dialogue clean up. So it has a lot of different
18:47
tools in there, you know, like if you have noisy dialogue,
18:49
it'll isolate the dialogue. If there's a lot of room reverb,
18:52
it'll take care of that. If you know, if you get some
18:55
hard s s like I'm, I'm probably blowing out people's ears, but
18:59
it'll fix that in the EQ. They're all separate plug
19:02
insurance. They're a little heavy on your
19:04
processor, oddly enough. So even if your computer runs
19:09
video processing pretty well, some of these audio plug
19:11
insurance aren't optimized for multi core processors.
19:15
And so when you run them, it can kind of lag your system down,
19:19
which is really strange when you're working with audio.
19:21
But it's it's especially if you have a system that can deal with
19:24
you know, like 6 KB raw footage and then you go to like put a
19:28
dialogue clean up on a track and you're like, why is this running
19:31
so slow? It's it happens so.
19:33
Don't do it at the same time you're filing your taxes, no.
19:36
OK, that would be a bad a bad move for sure.
19:39
Got it. So anyway, as far as
19:41
recommending people, if you're already working in a nonlinear
19:44
editor, like if you're working in Premiere Pro, just use that.
19:47
I know I looked up Audacity's free online.
19:50
I've used Audacity like way back years ago.
19:52
But yeah, I remember Audacity used to be like they'll go to
19:56
for it was it was up there with Da Vinci.
19:58
Like if you wanted a free solution, you went with
20:01
Audacity. Yeah, I definitely wouldn't
20:03
recommend doing that. I would rather edit my audio in
20:06
Premiere Pro than edit it in Audacity because you already
20:11
have everything there. No, that's fair.
20:13
OK. How about walking us through
20:15
some of the basic steps that you do as far as actual cleanup
20:19
goes? Because I know we did one
20:20
episode where you covered just the basics, but can you kind of
20:24
walk us through in more detail what it looks like?
20:26
Absolutely, absolutely. So as soon as I get the project
20:31
from my brother usually or whomever, whomever edited the
20:35
project, I'll open it up in audition, which fortunately most
20:38
of the people I work with edit in either Davinci or Premiere
20:41
Pro, easy to open it then in audition.
20:43
And when you're working with somebody that just does video
20:47
editing, normally you see whatever audio was recorded with
20:52
the corresponding video, which usually it's a boom mic,
20:57
sometimes it's a boom mic in a couple of labs.
21:00
And so it could be one track, it could be multiple tracks, but
21:04
it's just the audio taken from that frame, from that take, from
21:10
that shot, OK. And my goal is to make that
21:15
audio as clean as possible and also make that audio as
21:21
consistent as possible between shots.
21:24
Because the first thing as a viewer that's going to pull you
21:28
away from watching a film is to have those hard janky noises in
21:34
between shots where it's this shot is completely clean.
21:38
This shot you can hear the camera fan running.
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Because you've just you had to have your boom operator closer
21:45
to the camera for whatever reason.
21:46
Yeah. So you want to make sure that
21:48
all of that stuff is clean. It's not very often that I
21:50
completely silence tracks, but if you're getting a close up and
21:54
it's nobody talking and maybe you're somebody just like
21:56
tapping their finger on the table and you get a close up
22:00
shot of that, they try to get location sound, but the camera
22:02
fan was running and the mic was very close to the sound source
22:06
and the camera fan. It's like, well, it's quicker
22:08
for me just to mute that and put some tapping sounds in foleyed,
22:11
you know, rather than try to clean all that stuff up.
22:14
But there's ways to do that. So my first goal is to just get
22:17
a clean dialogue track. And what I actually do is I
22:20
remove as much of the room tone as possible from everybody's
22:24
dialogue. And this is something that I do
22:25
myself and I'm not trained in any type of like by any
22:30
production company. I'm completely self-taught.
22:32
But I have my own room tone that's a stereo recording.
22:36
And a stereo recording doesn't fight with a a dialogue track as
22:43
much because the dialogue track is mono.
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And so room tone when it's coming from the left and the
22:48
right channels, like it's not filling both channels at the
22:51
same time all the time where is like the dialogue comes out both
22:56
left and right. OK.
22:57
So it's it allows me to turn up that room tone a little bit
23:02
louder since it's it's varying between left and right channels
23:05
and can help me cover up more mistakes.
23:08
Oh nice. That happened during the during
23:10
the recording process. So not mistakes, but you know,
23:13
just random noises that pop up. Yeah, some of the some of the
23:17
fridge hum HVAC stuff like little things going on in the
23:20
background if you can't completely get rid of them.
23:21
Yes, exactly. If they're there, then I then
23:24
that's when I start masking. If it's 'cause you don't want
23:27
ADR, you want to avoid ADR as much as possible because it's
23:31
hard to do. It's hard to get it to sound
23:33
natural. It's hard to get the actors to
23:36
repeat their lines in an in an like in an exact way that they
23:42
did it on set. Not to mention the fact that
23:44
since we're talking indie film here, like it's not budget
23:48
friendly to have to adra bunch of stuff, it's a lot of extra
23:51
time for people. It is.
23:52
It's, it's an enormous amount of time for them to have to repeat
23:56
their lines. So assuming that you you're
24:00
trying to avoid ADR, the next step is to just layer in ambient
24:04
sound. So I had mentioned I have a
24:05
stereo room tone that I use and what I'll do is on the dialogue
24:09
track I always crossfade on all the dialogue tracks.
24:13
What does that mean? Which means in between each shot
24:16
you're going to have a hard cut of audio.
24:19
And then, and hopefully nobody was saying anything with enough
24:25
space after one shot and before the next shot.
24:27
Because I, I crossfade that audio so that it goes from one
24:31
to the next. Rather than having a hard cut
24:33
and audio, you always want to be giving it an extra like second.
24:38
If you have it on one end extended each shot into the
24:41
next, extend the audio from each shot into the next or pull it so
24:45
that it, it, it goes into the shot before.
24:48
And what that does is it helps you avoid those those sharp
24:52
audio changes. OK.
24:54
Super important to do that so. Of course, I'm going to
24:57
sidetrack you. Sure.
24:58
So in the case where you have maybe an L cut or AJ cut over
25:03
that, Yeah, like over and during a line, yeah.
25:08
So then you would just move that crossfade back to the beginning
25:11
of that actual audio cut, even if the image hasn't changed?
25:15
Yep, sorry. OK.
25:17
Or yeah, after the image changes.
25:19
OK. Yeah, it's it.
25:20
I'm talking strictly audio. It doesn't matter what the
25:22
visual's doing because yes, if we're doing, if you're doing
25:24
hard or you're doing L cuts or J cuts or you're throwing an
25:27
insert shot where people are talking and you're not using any
25:30
audio from that insert shot, that's not as important as those
25:34
those audio cuts because a hard cut in video.
25:38
Works sometimes. Yeah.
25:40
I mean, as long as you have a match on action like you can,
25:42
you can do it. Yeah.
25:44
But a hard cut on audio can be very jarring.
25:47
Fair. And so you always want to fade
25:50
it in. And even if you have some areas,
25:52
let's say that you have the director yelling, you know, cut
25:56
or action, but that part of the take is actually on the shot.
26:00
If you have to cut that up, that audio out, you still want to
26:03
slowly fade that audio in from nothing.
26:06
You don't want to have the audio just start out of nowhere.
26:08
You always should be fading it. I mean, I'm sure there are
26:11
exceptions, but I always fade it because it's going to be less
26:15
noticeable that way. So that said, once you get all
26:19
the fades in so that it sounds decent, I start to layer in
26:22
ambience and I try to do, I've mentioned this before, I try to
26:28
do a few tracks of ambience for throughout the movie as much as
26:33
possible, and I'll add even more tracks of ambience if the scene
26:39
is noisier. So can you give an example of
26:41
what you mean by a few? Because I can imagine I myself
26:45
would be like, oh great, I have some room tone and then I've got
26:49
just like a light buzz. Perfect.
26:51
There's a few. Yes, not.
26:53
I mean you can add more. So for example, your short film
26:56
dive, it took place in a dive bar.
26:59
There were a lot of refrigerators and what I did was
27:03
I had the room tone, the scene started outside and so I had
27:07
cricket noises going much more loudly on the outside scenes.
27:12
But then what I did was I carried that in to the bar along
27:18
with the buzz from the light source.
27:20
So outside the intro, it apexed with all the sounds, the
27:25
cacophony of sounds, which was crickets chirping, outdoor
27:28
noise. I still had my room tone in
27:31
there, which is very warm. And you can just kind of use it
27:33
throughout the entire track. I just turn it down when it's
27:37
outside. And then the the buzz from the
27:38
light was going as soon as I went indoors.
27:42
What I did was I just lowered the volume on all those.
27:46
And then this other trick is, is called a low pass.
27:49
And so if you listen to music that's happening in another
27:54
room, you can just hear the bass, right?
27:57
Yeah. So you can do that with the EQ
28:01
on the ambience as well. So if there's something
28:04
happening outside, you just take and turn down all the high
28:07
frequencies so that you're left with the low frequencies.
28:10
And then you leave that going in the background and the audience
28:13
just kind of accepts that that's an outside noise for the most
28:16
part. So flashing back to several
28:19
episodes ago when you mentioned for example, if you have
28:22
construction noise you're trying to shoot around, yes, and you
28:25
have an establishing shot outside of this construction
28:27
noise, then maybe if you can isolate some of those noises the
28:32
I don't know what construction things are called, but as those
28:34
machines move. Big cats.
28:36
Big cats, Sure, let's roll with that one because I don't know,
28:39
it's not a backhoe, but I don't know what it is anyway.
28:42
So you could take this those sounds and and take out those
28:46
higher frequencies to sort of not only dull the noise that you
28:50
couldn't get rid of in the 1st place, but also just add to the
28:53
fact that it's outside. Yes, absolutely.
28:56
And and inserting some of that noise too when you need to.
29:00
So if there is some really janky cuts in the movie and dialogue
29:04
that you can't quite clean and even with the crossfade, like
29:07
you notice like this sharp increase in ambient noise, what
29:12
I'll do for example, like if we have a scene outside that starts
29:17
out outside, I'll have just the sound of traffic driving by.
29:20
Nobody notices that there's a traffic sound like just car
29:23
rolling on the street. And then when they get inside,
29:26
I'll just do the low frequencies of the car rolling through the
29:28
street, establish that. And then when I have a very
29:32
strange, janky audio cut that I can't fix, I'll just layer in a
29:37
car driving by right at that cut.
29:39
Oh, that's smart. And then it'll make it, it'll,
29:42
it'll just kind of mask whatever audio issue I'm having for that,
29:46
you know, brief. It gives you another excuse to
29:49
cover it. U.
29:50
That's brilliant. OK.
29:53
So that's that's what I do there.
29:54
And then once the ambience is laid in, go through and just
29:58
fill in all the sound effects that you need to, whether it be
30:00
footsteps or. Staplers.
30:02
Staplers. Your favorite?
30:04
Stapler yes, that's something that I did in the first feature
30:06
film is I used a staple sound effect in almost every single
30:09
scene. But but like for example, you
30:12
know, on dive I got location sound, which I ended up using
30:16
this fully of of the actor pouring the drink.
30:21
And so when we were in between takes, I was sure to get clean
30:25
audio of that. And I use that most like over
30:29
and over again because a lot of times the location sound, when
30:33
you were cutting in between shots, he was still pouring, but
30:36
there wasn't enough pouring there.
30:38
So you know carefully, like layering those sound effects in
30:42
so that it sounds natural and nothing's janky.
30:45
Which was impressive actually because the pour always just
30:49
sounded very clear and and good so.
30:51
Yeah, you just insert it. You make sure you get a really
30:53
long one, and then sometimes you just have to cross fade in
30:56
between it. So it just sounds like it keeps
30:58
going. And that's why you want to make
31:00
sure that you have a long enough take.
31:03
Yeah, if you want to make sure you have a long enough take so
31:05
that you can, if you need to repeat the same sound, it
31:09
doesn't sound like it's, it's like coming out of a loop
31:12
station or something. Or because if it's, if it's too
31:14
short of a sample, it starts to sound like music.
31:17
If it's only like a couple seconds long and you're
31:19
replaying it and replaying it and replaying it like it's has a
31:22
sense of rhythm to it and then it's unnatural.
31:24
So you want to make sure you get, you know, a good chunk of
31:27
time if you're going to take something and then repeat it
31:30
over and over again. No, that's a good point.
31:33
And maybe, only maybe, cap it at a certain point.
31:35
Maybe don't reuse it more than 7-8 times.
31:38
Yeah, yeah, it helps because the audience might recognize it at
31:41
that point. So and then the last step is I
31:44
usually mix the music in which on diva that was, that was which
31:48
I, I, I'm pretty sure I talked about before we had the speaker
31:51
system. And that was part of the
31:53
ambience was to have music playing like it sounded it was
31:56
coming from a crappy speaker inside the bar.
31:58
Yeah. Which was perfect.
32:00
And that that Gary dive bar. Exactly.
32:02
And that helps cover up a lot of mistakes too or or audio issues
32:06
that are really difficult to clean up.
32:08
It's just kind of like the path of least resistance.
32:11
So there we go. That's what I would do.
32:14
That's the in depth walkthrough from Chuck of Lowered Gentry
32:19
Studios and Chuck Media. Chuck's media, not Chuck Media.
32:22
Chuck Media would be a different thing.
32:23
There's no. Apostrophe so it's just chuck's
32:26
so but it's I am the Chuck. Wait, Chuck's media is just
32:29
CHUCKS? Yeah, I didn't put an apostrophe
32:32
on it when I claimed the LLC. So it's.
32:34
Intentionally or. I just didn't know that you
32:36
could put an apostrophe. I just assumed that you
32:38
couldn't, but you can. Because Arby's is just an S,
32:42
right? Yeah, exactly.
32:45
Arby is the main guy. Arby's the main.
32:48
The main. The main How many Chucks are in
32:51
Chuck's media? All of them.
32:53
All of the Chucks. Anybody's welcome?
32:56
Any chucks excellent. So any I think we had one more
33:01
segment here workflow tips that was that actually kind of.
33:06
You know, it's like honestly, you covered most of that.
33:08
The only thing that you didn't go into a lot of detail on was
33:12
labeling your audio files. So if you have any tips or
33:16
tricks for that. Oh, definitely put as many
33:19
details into your audio file as possible.
33:21
Oh my gosh, I have one for this. You do.
33:24
I do. So whenever I'm labeling any of
33:28
my footage. I found out recently I need to
33:31
make sure I keep some information about the original
33:37
file name and rename it only within my editing system.
33:42
So now I rename all my files like, you know, seen whatever
33:47
shot, whatever, take whatever, and then I'll put an under score
33:51
and then whatever that unique identifier on the original file
33:55
name was. I leave that alone on my footage
33:58
and my audio unless I need to label like add an additional
34:02
like lav a or boom 2 or I don't know what you would use that
34:09
for, but you might. But that way if you ever have to
34:13
hand it off to somebody else and they they have a copy of the
34:19
footage as opposed to the exact same folder that you do, then
34:23
they can still relink all the footage because it has that
34:26
unique identifier in the name. So I actually have a tip for
34:28
that. Well, that's good because it
34:30
came up twice recently. So don't change the file names
34:34
of your footage, you're saying? Yeah, when you cannot change the
34:37
file names, just change it in Premiere or whatever editing
34:41
suite. Don't actually change the file
34:42
name. But if you have to change the
34:44
file name, keep the unique identifier on your audio and
34:49
your video. Nice.
34:50
Yeah, I dig that. One thing that I will add to
34:53
that exact same scenario is if you're opening a file in your
34:58
audio workstation. Some of them I know Audition
35:02
does for sure. If you go in and modify the
35:04
actual WAV file itself, it will save it to the WAV file that
35:09
it's referencing. So when I'm pulling from my
35:12
library of sound effects, I always make a duplicate copy of
35:17
whatever sound effect I'm going to use inside of the project
35:21
folder itself. So I create a separate sound
35:23
effects folder inside of the project.
35:25
That way I make sure I don't accidentally like if I'm trying
35:29
to take a, a footstep and you know, it's a, it's a like a very
35:34
tall person, I might pitch it down a little bit just to give
35:38
it kind of like make it feel like it's coming from somebody
35:41
that's, that's larger versus like if it's a child, you, you
35:43
want to like pitch it up, you know, it works.
35:46
Just something simple as that. But it'll potentially write that
35:48
to the file depending on how you mess with it.
35:52
So if you would like actually open the WAV file, which if
35:54
you're sampling it can do that, like if you slow down the the
35:57
file to make it actually last longer or like speed it up, it
36:02
might save it to the file. So always move those sound
36:05
effects that you've collected, duplicate them, and then put
36:07
them in that other folder so that you don't accidentally ruin
36:11
one of your files that you've. Worked so hard to get and might
36:14
never be able to find ever again.
36:16
Exactly. Nice.
36:18
There we go. Very smart.
36:19
That's all I got for chips. OK.
36:21
So shall we end succinctly. I'll try.
36:26
Goodbye. Bye.