Recording in awkward places

While eating my breakfast yesterday, I was watching some of the 'Rode University' videos on Youtube by Rick Viers, who wrote the Sound Effects Bible and the Location Sound Bible. On the 'Indoor Location Sound Recording' video, Rick Viers shows us how the Rode NT6 can be the ideal microphone for recording in awkward places, such as inside a car, where a shotgun isn't practical and wouldn't necessarily produce the best sound.

According to Rode (and Rick Viers in the video, who's trying to sell us this microphone for Rode):
"The RØDE NT6 compact microphone is specifically designed for difficult mounting applications where the highest quality audio is required."

This microphone is well-suited to recording car interiors mostly because it's small and light (the specifications on Rode's website say the capsule head is only 45mm in length and 42g in weight) and therefore fairly easy to mount in small places. However, another reason this microphone is better-suited to car interiors than a shotgun microphone is its cardioid pickup pattern (the picture below comes from the specifications on Rode's website), which is much less directional than a shotgun microphone, meaning placement, while still important, isn't as tricky to get right as with a shotgun - with which you would have to turn and move the microphone to point directly at whoever is speaking in order to get good and consistent sound.

Finishing up No Country For Old Men

When I added the last foley sounds yesterday, I mixed them on headphones - which by itself isn't ideal, but the edit room I was working in had air conditioning humming all the way through, meaning even on full volume, it was hard to hear the dynamics of the mix through headphones.

Luckily, I was able to spend time in the Protools studio this morning to do a final mix on studio monitors. Some of the sounds I added were too loud, because I'd boosted them to hear them on headphones.

I added footsteps for the character to respond to at the end of the scene, and used a reverb to give them a rough acoustic space of being outside in the hallway, and used EQ to filter out the high frequencies for the same effect. When listening on speakers, this reverb sounded too 'big' for such a small place, so I had to rework the settings and turn down the level of the track to make it sound more believable and subtle.

I also used automation to boost the atmos towards the end of the scene for two reasons:
1) Since the sound is heard from the character's POV, boosting the ambient sounds shows his attention shifts to focus more on his surroundings after he discovers the tracker in the briefcase.
2) With not much else going on in the soundtrack, the sound seemed 'dead' and needed something to fill the space.

Overall approach to sound for 'No Country For Old Men'

I tried, as I'm sure is what a sound designer is supposed to do, to match the tone of the picture/scene in the sounds I used for this exercise. I decided to use to my advantage the fact that I haven't seen the film yet, and approach the soundtrack how I thought was appropriate, rather than having preconceptions about what sounds needed to be included from how someone else approached the scene.

I decided my approach would be to tell the story from the character's POV. This meant I didn't use as extensive a range of foley as I would have normally (the main sound from the character is footsteps, as this, according to what I've been told about the film by others, is what the character would focus on most).

One way I tried to tell the story from the character's POV was to automate effects such as reverb to reduce in intensity as they would for the character in the film-world. This screenshot shows how I automated the reverb on the key in the door to the motel room to reduce sharply as the character steps from the reverberant hallway into the more acoustically-dead bedroom.


One of my lecturers, Ron, told me that the film relies a lot of silence and what sounds aren't included as much as what sounds are included, and I thought this approach seemed appropriate and fit in with the one I was taking (which gave me confidence in that I must have been on the right track). This again ties in with telling the story from the character's point-of-view - what people have told me about the film is that the character suspects he's being tracked somehow (how, we find out in this scene) and so is listening to every sound closely.

To contrast this, I tried to add a sense of realism through the atmoses - in particular, the first atmos I used in the bedroom (before the character wakes up and opens the case of money) I recorded using the 'worldising' technique. I placed a Rode NT4 in a room in my house and recorded the sound of an American sitcom playing on television in another room of the house. However, this didn't sound convincing enough to sound like someone in another room in the motel was up watching television (which was my intention), and so this recording still needed processing before I came to mix the sound, and I used EQ to ease off the higher frequencies, making it sound more muffled, as though it was heard through a wall.

Aside from my approach to the technical side of things, I decided to record all the sounds for this exercise myself for two reasons:
1) I have experience of spending more time searching through soundbanks for specific sounds than it would generally take to record my own sounds;
2) I wanted to develop my recording skills, as this is something I've typically avoided in the past.

Mixing for 'No Country For Old Men'

Most of the recordings I made for this exercise I had planned beforehand, and considered how to record each sound in terms of location and microphone placement, in order to get recordings that required as little editing as possible before they could be mixed together. However, as I mentioned in my last post, some sounds needed editing before they could be used, as with the paper rustling sound, and some needed layering together before mixing to produce a stronger sound, as with two of the atmoses (the corridor atmos and the outside/window atmos).

Most of the sounds I used have reverb on them - in order to make different sounds and recordings fit together believably into a consistent acoustic space. There are two different-sounding reverbs I used, one for the corridor shots and the other for inside the bedroom. To do this, I copied the settings in Space Designer as closely as I could for each sound that needed reverb. In hindsight, this would have been easier and more CPU-efficient to achieve by using send effects - however, as I'm not as familiar with Soundtrack Pro as I ought to be, I wasn't sure how to do this, and decided not to spend much time learning how to do this if I didn't need to (which I realise is not the best way to learn, especially with technology). Another problem I had because of my lack of familiarity with the software was that I struggled to export a mixdown of the finished sound, despite having done so many times in the past with no problems.

Recording for 'No Country For Old Men'

As well as recording sounds specifically for the sound exercise, for which I've been putting sound to a clip from the Coen Brothers' 'No Country For Old Men', I made use of other recordings I've collected recently, including one I mentioned in an earlier blog post ('Designing sound for a poetic documentary'). I used this recording as the atmos of outside/through the window when the character (whose name I don't know, having not seen the film before) looks outside from his (presumably) motel room, in order to keep consistency with the rest of the scene, in which I tell the story through sound from his perspective.

Another recording I've discussed on this blog that made it into the mix was the vending machine recording I wrote about in the blog post 'Atmos recording'. I edited this recording at home using Adobe Audition, and tried to make the sound as realistic and as flexible as I could. However, because I wasn't editing the sound to the picture I'd be using, when I came to mix it as an atmos, the recording was far too loud and sounded very aggressive, as though I'd recorded from very close to the machines (when, in fact, the track is layered with a recording made close to the machines and another made at the other side of the room to the machines).

To compensate for this in the edit, I reduced the amplitude quite a lot, and added a reverb using Space Designer within Soundtrack Pro, which made the recording sound much more like it was in the acoustic space we see on-screen.

Although I did some work in the Harmer Protools studio, almost all the foley and atmos recordings I used were recorded at home. This is partly down to having more time to record when at home, and also because the mic stand I have at home is more sturdy than the two different ones I booked out from Stores at university - most likely because they get a lot more and much heavier use than mine does.

Recording foley at home added complications, however, because I had to work around unwanted noises like traffic noise from outside (whichever room of the house I went in at whatever time of day, this was an issue, apart from late-night recording, which wasn't always practical due to getting up for university or work), and also sound of neighbours and people passing by the house when I recorded near the front of the house, and wildlife sounds from the back of the house.

I compiled a list of foley that needed recording, which I followed for most of the sounds, recording each sound separately and then checking that it matched up with the picture, although some sounds, in particular the rustling of paper towards the end of the scene, I recorded whilst playing back the video in order to help synchronise sound and picture.

Although, as this screengrab shows, the recordings didn't always synchronise properly with the picture anyway, and had to be arranged in Soundtrack Pro to sound right.

Atmos recording

For the sound-to-picture exercise, I've been recording atmoses to put to the 'No Country For Old Men' clip. From what I've learned in workshops, and also from reading Ric Viers' 'Sound Effects Bible' religiously (get it?), I decided to use the technique of 'worldising' for one atmos. I set a Rode NT4 up on a mic stand, which I placed roughly head-height of someone sitting down, and recorded the sound of a television playing from another room. This I thought would fit for the apartment (having not seen the film, I don't know exactly where the clip is set), as it's likely that late at night, someone nearby will still be awake and watching television. For authenticity, I put The Big Bang Theory on, being one of the only American programmes on at that time.

Later, I took the Rode to the Adsetts building to record an atmos for the corridor. I placed the Rode in two different places, one at one end of the entrance to the building, and the other near to the vending machines, again as this is something I'd expect from an apartment block/hotel in the USA. The recording sounds good, but has had to be edited quite a lot because, even though I was recording at 10pm on a Wednesday night, a lot of people were still walking to and from the Learning Centre - I'll try to find less-busy locations from now on.

I bumped into a friend while I was setting up, and he found it funny enough to take a picture and upload it to Facebook:

Luckily, though, he's also given me a production photo. I had the microphone facing away from the machines because it gave the sound closest to what I was looking for. Facing the machines didn't sound ambient enough, and in the clip, the camera is facing away from what I imagine to be a corridor with vending machines and/or air-con.

Designing sound for a poetic documentary

For another module, I'm doing the sound for a 'poetic documentary' exercise. Our film is themed around isolation, and so I've decided to try to come up with the closest thing to a 'lonely' soundscape I can.

For one atmos, I went out on two separate nights with a pair of tie-clip mics and hung them inside grates on different roads. The first night I went out, there was a lot of wind, resulting in quite a loud deep rumbling sound, but the wires for the microphones were also blown about by the wind, meaning there was also sound of the wires hitting the metal grades. The second night there was less wind, but to be safe, I went to a road that was better sheltered from the wind, and recorded the rumbling sound (and occasional slash) of inside the grates.

In Adobe Audition, I've been layering different recordings together and editing some to produce a wind-like sound that has a strong low-frequency rumble.

 I added some fairly extreme EQ to one track to produce a wind-like 'howling' sound.

I then added a delay to add some ambience to make the track fit better with the other sounds, and also to add more to the 'howl' sound. This delay also adds a certain rhythm and otherworldly feel to the overall sound, but is for the most part masked by the other sounds, making this effect both subtle and, in a way, stronger.

A film designed for sound

I recently watched 'A Fantastic Fear Of Everything'. Having already seen the film when it was on at the cinema, I payed more attention to the technical side of the film, and the sound design in particular.

For the first half of the film, the story is told mainly through narration by Simon Pegg's character, Jack. The narration is told as though Jack is narrating for his own entertainment. Similarly, the sound in this first half - partly because most of the time, Jack is the only character in the scene, and partly for dramatic effect - is heard from Jack's perspective.

In these scenes, there tends to be focus on individual sounds, such as creaking sounds as Jack is paranoidly convinced someone is creeping around in his flat. These sounds get louder and more layered to build up the emotional tension in the scene. Just like Jack normally loses focus and is brought back to his senses, there is usually a disruption in the soundtrack before we are brought back to hearing real-world sounds, such as the sound of rain outside Jack's window.

Having read Randy Thom's article, 'Designing A Movie For Sound', I noticed that the script was clearly written with a strong consideration of sound. The most obvious example of this is a scene in which Jack walks into his bedroom as psychedelic music begins to play, and he screams (diegetic sound is removed, leaving only the music in the soundtrack) in time with the vocals. It's also clear from how well-constructed the soundtrack is, especially in the first half of the film, and how reliant the picture is on sound to help form a strong and coherent mood.