Avid Editing Studio Shoot Task - Extra Evening 5

I came back to Avid editing again as I needed to finish the sound before I handed in my finished edit. However I encountered a number of problems when trying to add the sound:

The first problem was that during the actually filming of our studio shoot we had a sound designer in our team who myself and Logan had been directing in making a abstract sound scape for our piece. We booked him time in the Sound Studio and he recorded a lot of Folly for this along with many different voices saying 'you can not control us'. He made a track with this over christmas yet when we got back after Christmas ready to edit we fund out he had lost all the files and the final sound scape. We ask him to re-do this as this was his job and even offered to help yet he did not. This meant as an editor I could not edit to the track we had planned. Instead I decided to focus very heavily on the visuals while editing.

Then I came in this evening with a plan which was to use all the sound files recorded externally on set by him and just cut out particular sounds from these to make a sound track. I began listening to all these sounds and found that the quality was really not that good. I have figured out this is because he had the recording level set far to low and this meant you couldn't hear enough detail on many of the clips so there simply wasn't enough sounds for me to put together a sound track.

I then thought maybe I could link the sound files to the video anyway as this would hopefully work better than just the camera sound. However when I tried this with one of my clips firstly I didn't know which clips were which because there must have been a problem on set with the sound recorder and it hd cut one take into multiple clips so there was no way of using the clapper to sync it up. However I persisted and tried but realised after playing it through on the clip I tried linking the sound to that in my opinion because the sound had so many level issues etc that the quality was no better than that from the camera.

Rapidly running out of time to edit I took it upon myself to make the executive decision with my edit that the original sound from the camera (even though not the best quality) was actually the best sound we had due to all these problems out of my control so I left the original sound files with the video. I then decided to go through and clean the sound up a bit by playing with the levels on the Audio Mixer:

I then went through and listening carefully and focused on improving the transitions between some of the sound clips in different shots as it was a little bit jared at times. The best way I found to do this was to add a sound dissolve:

This was particularly important for me to do on sections where I had lots of sound and video layers on top of one another like you can see above. I wanted it to smoothly flow as best as it could in and out of the overlays so the smoother sound traditions helped this.

I then decided once I had to the best of my ability fixed the sound on my sequence (as Im not usually a sound person) that it was a bit too quite. I liked the natural noises you hear as the actors struggle and the moments of stillness are accompanied well with the quietness of it yet especially in the intro and outro I felt like i needed something. I then had this idea to add a heartbeat sound effect which I got off a royalty free sound effect website to my piece. I originally tried putting it through out the length of the piece and playing with the levels etc but this did not work as the pace of the heartbeat was so constant that it stopped the quick cut moments of the piece being as effective because the rhythm was all wrong. Instead I simply decided to use it for the titles and the credits like so:

It worked so well on the titles so I then put it on the credits as well. As I was putting it on the credits I realised that this heartbeat could really help add to the dramatic build up at the end of my piece. I tried putting it on this sections where I cut the ending to flash between lots of different clips and it actually work really well to add tensions:

I really liked the way it helped build up a good atmosphere at the end of the piece so I resisted my whole sequence and looked for other areas that would maybe be enhanced by this heartbeat. I feel like the heartbeat worked in the piece because it is giving us the conceptual link to the human body therefore the human mind and builds up the conceptual aspects of this. I found another area where I had the areas of black to show passing of time to be another place this fitted well. I had it beat quickly when you see the Actors flash up on the screen after this time has passed which again build the tension back up before we go into the final action.

I was very sceptical about the sound for our piece after all the problems we had faced and the fact that we didn't really get much sound to use however I have done the best with what I had. If I had much more time on this I would of maybe considered making my own abstract soundscape however I simply ran out of time to go recording all the folly and speech we lost and also I have no sound editing experience on Adobe Auditon etc so there was no time for me to master this. I am happy though with my use of Avid to try and rectify the problems we did have. Here is my final sequence all finished ready to be exported: