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.