Editing the Sound | Development

Over the Easter holiday, myself and Nisserin transferred all of the files onto my hard drive so I could edit the sound throughout the two weeks. By having the zoom sound in every scene,  cleaning up the dialogue, and having all of the sound effects needed, it will help bring the whole video to life. It'll also be easier to add clips into the sequence and adjust certain things in the edit, and the rough cut viewings will be more effective by having clean audio.

I started with editing the audio of scene 1. The zoom audio for this wasn't too complicated to edit together due to us shooting it in a multi-cam set up. We used the same take for every shot, so it meant the zoom had all three characters dialogue and you could hear everyone clearly. When this was edited together it made the shot reverse shot between Marie and Annie & Dean really smooth and clean, which in turn made the whole scene feel a lot more professional and interesting. There were some shots that had it's own audio, so I had to the constant power transition a few times, and adjust the audio to make the sound seem like one piece of audio.
There weren't too many problems that occurred during this scene in terms of audio, I just had to adjust the volume of all the audio tracks to make it sound smooth. When adjusting the volume I made sure to keep the peak level under -6, and the dialogue around -12, however some tracks where less then that due to the dialogue being quiet. I did raise the volume as much as I could without it sounding too edited. I struggled with finding a good balance of the dialogue and the music track underneath. You need to be able to hear the dialogue clearly over the music and atmos, but you also need to hear the music otherwise there isn't any point in having it. I had the volume to a point that I thought worked well, but when the other two watch it they can give me opinions on whether the music should be louder.

Once I was happy with this scene, I moved onto scenes 2 & 3. Much like the shot reverse shot in scene 1, scene 2 stayed on the same shot. This meant the dialogue was easy to work with, however there were moments were Dean moves around in the car a bit too much and it had picked up on the zoom. I have tried to edit the volume of these bits so they aren't quite as loud, but I don't think they will be too distracting. When in the location, we recorded some atmos of the outside so I used a fair amount in order to keep the scene running smoothly, and hiding any moments where the audio sounds separate.
When I started editing the sound of scene 3, I realised we needed a sound effect of Marie shutting her door, as the audio we have for this shot is really quiet due to the positioning of the zoom. This isn't too much of a problem as we can record this sound effect separately, we just need to remember to do it. Another thing I noticed was, in the shot of Annie & Dean after Marie walks away, you can't hear Marie's footsteps. Instead of recording that later, I cut and pasted the previous audio of her walking over to her parents, and adjusted the volume so it fades away. This works really well, and it brings the scene to life. It's such a simple addition but it does make a big difference to the realism of the scene.
Again I adjusted the volume of the audio tracks in this scene, keeping an eye on the audio meters. I found that the audio from this scene wasn't too problematic and it all flows smoothly together.

After this scene, I went on to adjust some of the sound of scene 6, 7 & 8. For the shots where we see Dean pacing but can hear Annie in the living room, I wanted to add an effect on her audio to make it sound like she is in a different room. I struggled quite a lot with this as you had to be able to hear it, but also it shouldn't sound the same as when she is in her living room. I thought adding an echo type sound effect would be effective, so I added the studio reverb effect. I changed the impulse to small room to keep the echo realistic and effective. When the effect was added onto the audio clip, there was a difference but I wasn't too keen on it, I didn't think it was as realistic as it could've been. Later on I revisited the audio clip and did some research into how this could be done differently. In the research I did, I found an effect called Lowpass that makes the audio sound muffled, almost like the character is in a different room. When I added this filter onto the audio clip I thought it sounded a lot better, and more realistic. I then used this same effect for an audio clip that needed the same effect in the same scene, and it both worked really well.
The same thing happened with the Last Dish advert - which we had previously shot and edited together - which was on the TV screen. I needed it to sound like it was on the TV screen and I tried several different effects to try and create this, but I finally found something that worked. Liked the Lowpass effect, there was an effect called Highpass which gave it the effect that it was coming the TV. I added this onto the audio clip and it worked really well, and out of the different experiments I tried this was definitely the best.

When editing scene 9 & 10, I remembered that we recorded the sound on a camera due to the zoom not working. This didn't make much difference to the process of adding the sound tracks into the sequence, but it did have a background hissing noise which I had to get rid of on audition. I adjusted this with the Hiss Reduction effect and tried multiple times to get it to a point that I was happy with.

The transition between scene 9 and 10 was quite difficult to edit as Dean is talking in both takes, but I played around with the two tracks and experimented with different ways in which it could. Eventually I found a good balance of audio from scene 9 and 10, and it created a good transition between the two scenes.

I edited scene 11 with the zoom audio, and adjusted the volume levels like I had done for the other scenes. It was fairly easy to link the baking audio tracks together, so it sounds really smooth and clean. When editing the audio for scene 12 & 13, I remembered to add the Highpass  effect on the TV screen in Marie's house, and this was really effective when bringing this scene to life. It sounded like it was coming from her TV, and it was a good difference from Marie's dialogue, making it seem realistic.

Scene's 15, 16 & 17 weren't too complicated to edit either, as the dialogue worked well together, and we had shot in the multi-cam set up, meaning I didn't have to find a lot of different audio tracks. I made sure all of the tracks sounded smooth and if I had any problems I experimented with the constant power effect and the exponential effect. I also added any other sound effects that needed to be added, such as the knocking on the door which we decided worked a lot better then the door bell. Any other sound effects that I thought we need like the car sound effects, I wrote down ready to tell the others.
With all of the audio clean, edited together and synced, it made the whole video look really clean and it was a smooth watch. It definitely bought a lot of the scenes to life, and it made watching a lot more bearable without all of the over lapping dialogue we had before.
Overall, I'm really happy with how the edit of the audio has turned out, and I feel as if I have used my knowledge from previous work to help me, along with extra research I have done. The effects I have experimented with and chosen to use have worked really well, and I'm happy with the end result.
I will get the opinions of the other two and Simon, and see if anything else needs to change in terms of audio.