15.04.2022 - 20.06.2022 (Week 3 - Week 12) Lulu Luisa Linardi / 0349358 / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media Video and Sound Production Project 1
LECTURES
Fig 1.0: Thumbnail
LECTURE 1: Film Sound
Sound Elements
The mixing of sound elements below creates an audio setting that supports the action and engages the spectators. Three types of sound elements are speech, sound effects, and music.
Fig 1.1.1: Sound Elements
1. Speech It is one of the most important tools for understanding the story of the film. Speech is divided into dialogue and voice over.
- Dialogue, a conversation between characters in the movie.
- Voice over, the voice of an unseen narrator speaking.
2. Sound Effects Sound effects is divided into ambience (backgrounds) and hard or "cut" effects. - Ambience, audio refers to the background noise present at a given scene or a location
- Hard or "cut" effects, almost every sound we hear at the movies that aren't dialogue or music is a sound effect. The examples are train sliding door open and close, footsteps, train moving on tracks, the ambience in the train, etc.
3. MusicMusic in a movie is to enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact.
DubbingDubbing, or automated Dialog Replacement (ADR), is the process of re-recording dialogue after the filming process to improve audio quality or reflect dialogue changes
Foley
The Foley technique is a sound effects technique for synchronous effects or live effects. It's named for Jack Foley, a sound editor at Universal Studios
LECTURE 2: Sound Shaping with EQ
Frequency Range – Hertz (Hz)
Human hearing has a frequency range from 20Hz to 20,000Hz. 7 subsets of frequencies are used to help define the ranges.
Fig 1.2.1: Frequency Range
Dynamic Range – Decibels (dB)
The threshold of human hearing is measured as 0dB SPL (sound pressure level) and the threshold of pain as 130dB SPL.
Fig 1.2.2: Dynamic Range
Space (Mono v.s Stereo) Mono sounds are recorded using a single audio channel, while stereo sounds are recorded using two audio channels.
Fig 1.2.3: Mono v.s Stereo Audio
Sound Effects 1. Muffled Muffle sound usually by wrapping it with something. For example, to speak with a scarf over your mouth.
Fig 1.2.4: Creating muffled sound effects
2. Reverb
Reverb is a sound in SPACE. Echo is caused by the reflection of sound waves from a surface.
- Decay Time
Specifies how many milliseconds the reverb takes to decay 60 dB. Longer values give longer reverb tails.
- Pre‑Delay Time
Specifies how many milliseconds the reverb takes to build to its maximum amplitude.
- Perception
Simulates irregularities in the environment.
- Dry
To add subtle spaciousness, set the Dry percentage higher; to achieve a special effect, set the Dry percentage lower.
- Wet
To add subtle spaciousness to a track, keep the Wet percentage lower than the Dry percentage.
Fig 1.2.5: Reverb Sound Effects
LECTURE 3: Sound Design
4 Important Sound Design Techniques
1. Time Stretching/CompressionTime stretching or compression changes the length of audio without altering its pitch.
Fig 1.3.1: Time Stretching
2. Pitch Shifting
Process of adjusting the pitch of an audio signal upwards or downwards, for both corrective (getting a vocal perfectly in tune, for example) and purely creative (changing the character of a drum loop, say) purposes.
3. Reversing
The end of the audio will be heard first and the beginning last. Reverse audio changes the whole feeling and rhythm of the sound.
Fig 1.3.2: Reversing audio
4. Layering
Arranging several separate sounds together, in such a way the overall effect is of a single complete sound.
Fig 1.3.3: Layering Audio
INSTRUCTIONS
Exercise 1: Audio Dubbing
For the first assignment of audio editing, students are given a task to sync the required audios in Adobe Premiere Pro. The audio dubbing only consists of speech and sound effects, without background music. The movie cut that we need to dub is a Disney Pixar movie named "Soul". The conversation between the cat and Joe, and also the original clip without audio is already provided by the lecturer, students only need to record their speech from their phone and add sound effects from online websites. Click here to get the original files.
This is actually my very first time doing an audio dubbing. I'm kinda nervous doing it because I'm afraid my voice and intonation are out of sync. After recording the speech, I started to add my voice to the clip and arrange them. I also went to some websites to get some sound effects and ambience. Below is my working progress on dubbing a movie.
Fig 2.1.1: Importing Audio
Since I don't feel confident showcasing my original voice, so I changed it a bit. I can't produce a cat and old guy's voice, that's why I played with the pitch shifter. I also added some effects to the audio to produce a better audio dubbing.
Fig 2.1.2: Editing Audio
Fig 2.1.3: Adding audio effects
Finally, this is the final outcome of my audio dubbing exercise.
Fig 2.1.4: Audio Dubbing Final Outcome
Exercise 2: Sound Shaping
For the second exercise of audio editing, students were given a task to do sound shaping. The assignment is to edit audio into five different situations (same audio for all situations). Five of them are voice of a phone call, voice coming from inside of closet, voice coming from big stadium, voice coming from the toilet/bathroom, and voice coming from an underground cave. Here are some of my editing processes.
Fig 2.2.1: Voice coming from an underground cave
Fig 2.2.2: Voice coming from the toilet/bathroom
Fig 2.2.3: Voice coming from inside of closet
Below is the Google Drive link to my sound shaping exercise.
For the third audio editing exercise, we were assigned to design a sound. From the three given audio, students have to design each of them. The first audio is explosion sound. Students will have to play with the reverse, layering, pitching, reverb, and the EQ option. The second audio is a sound of a single punch. We need to edit and design it into three punch instead. For this punch editing, I layered 3 punching audio and make the second layer reversed. I also added some modifications to its EQ and reverb. Last but not least, the alien sound which came from what we picked from the sample audio. I really did a lot of things here, however, I didn't screenshot all of them and only managed to capture one of them. Here's my editing process.
Fig 2.3.1: Making the sound of alien
Below is the Google Drive link to my sound design exercise.
This is actually my very first time doing audio editing and operating Adobe Audition software. I haven't ever tried on editing or designing audio before this. At first, I was a bit pessimistic about these exercises because I really have zero experience in this field. However, after watching some tutorial videos from the lecturer, I followed what he was doing and even did more modifications to it. I realized that audio editing is not that difficult to do, at least for now. The only problem that I faced came from the last exercise which is the alien sound designing. I was a bit worried about my editing because I have no idea on how to create an alien sound, so I just modified everything that I think will be suitable. It was a really fun experience and I think this project is the project that I like the most. I get to learn audio and sound editing for the first time and it's not that bad.
