After the sound for screen lecture today, I had already booked out the foley room and composition studio for the evening and invited Raul and Harry to practice foley with me before working on our own videos. I feel it’s important to practice as when doing my video for the assignment submission I want it to be streamlined which allows me more time to concentrate more on the artistic decisions than figuring out how to work pro tools and the studio.
I had the We Need To Talk About Kevin film clip from last weeks foley session and I wanted to reflect and learn of the mistakes from last week.
We started by tidying up the project as last week I didn’t organise it too well. I deleted some of the markers and streamlined them into numbers as it was easy to know what number was what rather than long text. We created some more tracks for the feet as we wanted to repeat the exercise again and just get more comfortable with the gains structure and mic positions. I got rid of most of the sounds recorded last week and deactivated the track and hide them to keep the clips but so they are not on the screen.
We started by doing the movement sounds of the clothing. With the first shot being of the mother on the sofa. I and Raul were in the control room with Harry in the foley room.
We were speaking through the talkback function which worked really well. We accidentally got the inputs mixed around and had a little issue with trying to get the gain structure perfect. Note for next time is to when there is an issue. start the signal flow from the source and make sure everything is correct before asking the technicians! Raul taught me some other pro tools shortcuts that helped with time and efficiency. I also studied the keyboard as it has all the pro tools shortcuts on it. We got Harry doing the foley and we communicated to him about what it sounded like and perhaps too aggressive at first. So we got him to do minimalistic movements with Raul’s jacket for the clothing sounds. We quickly realised that less is more. We also used the Neumann TLM 103 to experiment with the different mics. We placed the mic about 10cm from the audio source and felt it sounded well as before that it was too close and the performer was hitting the mic when trying to do foley.
We then swapped to Raul doing the footsteps for the wood flooring. We made him take his socks off as in the movie she is barefoot and we wanted that skin connection subtle noises that create when walking on wood barefoot. We decided to use the shotgun Sennheiser 416. I felt the Sennheiser 416 is more directed and had a lot less room tone in the recordings due to its super-cardioid polar pattern. Which personally I felt it was much better for those close small intimate sounds like walking on wood. We also discussed walking and how Raul was doing it. The noise of his jeans was also an issue which we got around by him rolling them up.
It then came to my turn being the foley artist and I had the job of clothing and footsteps. I did the same procedure and had Harry play the clip a few times for me to practice it before we get going. I actually ended up turning the lights off in the room as it allowed me to get more immersed in the video that was playing. I sat down and moved the tv closer to me which I felt gave me a more relaxed approach and allowed me to do the sounds based on intuition more than thinking too much bout it. We also used the 416 microphone and it worked perfectly. I found that once I thought less about what was needed and acted it actually worked better. I also felt like at times we were worrying too much about getting the perfect sound instead of being more vigilant with the time and getting more ideas across. Overall I felt I improved my knowledge of mic positions, gain structure and a huge level up on my Pro Tools abilities.
Here is a short video outcome filmed on my phone of our exercise. I’m really happy with the learning I did and feel I’m ready to tackle the proper video now. I’m going to finalise my video clip which at the moment is the quiet place and do some background research and then create the Pro Tools template with blank regions and foley marker cues. I’m happy we focused more on the things we needed to learn rather than trying to get everything with foley sounds as it was a perfect excercise.