FINAL STAGES OF SOUND REPLACEMENT PROJECT (BLADERUNNER)

At this point, all ADR and Foley sounds are complete. A little mixing and tweaking had been done here and there along the way, but a final edit and mix will be done after sound design is completed for the hum of the blimp, the neon sign and the background TV static. Working with Quinn has been wonderful since she is a mastermind when it comes to Ableton and creating synth sounds. We met up at her house to create these sounds together but once we got into it, it was clear that she is much more advanced than I am when it comes to creating synth sounds. I worked alongside her and learned a number of things while she took the reins for this part of the project. What impressed me the most was her idea to use a Shepard Tone layered in with a low rumbling synth sound to mimic the sound of a futuristic ship of sorts.

“The tone is a sound that comprises multiple sine waves separated by an octave and layered on top of each other. In essence, there is a high-pitched tone, a middle-pitched tone, and a low-pitched tone that all rise in pitch until they loop back to the start. By the end of the track, the highest-pitched tone has become quiet, the middle-pitched tone stays loud, and the low-pitched tone has become louder. Because you can always hear two tones rising in pitch, your brain skips the loop and believes the tone is infinitely ascending.” (McGregor, 2017)

Video of Quinn explaining the process of creating the synth sound layered with the Shepard Tone:

(Please refer to Quinn’s blog on how these synths were designed)

The following videos are walkthroughs of Quinn explaining how the sound for the neon sign and the TV static were created. I won’t talk too much about this since it’s already well documented in her blog and she did most of the work here anyway.

The next stage of this project is to tidy up the session, and begin applying effects, EQ and compression etc... Before we got into the studio to work on finalising the overall mix, we decided to look over the feedback we received from our presentation amongst some notes that our friends had given us after their viewing of where we were up too. One of the main points was the timing of the hum of the ship taking place. It was suggested that we bring it back and start the sound earlier in the frame before you actually see the ship to make it more realistic. When replacing audio for film or any other post production project I think this is something that needs to be on your mind a lot while lining up sounds and mixing in general. I noticed some feedback being given to other students in the same vein. It’s easy to get trapped when working on something for a long time as your ears can trick you or you are simply too focused on other aspects of the mix that errors in judgement can be made. A way around this is to work give yourself and your ears a break perhaps every hour, so that when you come back your ears are fresh and can pick up on these mistakes. This would also save time in the long run. Anyway, back to reflecting on our feedback, we were also advised to pay attention to the levelling of the ADR in general and to take a look at the footsteps in regard to EQing as to try and take away some of the higher register harshness.

Updated Sound Replacement thus far taking in to account constructive criticisms:

We’re now in the absolute final stages of mixing. After listening to it over and over again we’ve made some adjustments. First of all, we noticed that the sound of the crowd ambience had been drastically altered in an attempt to create distance from scene to scene. We realized that we’d clearly overdone it here and brought these clips back up to a suitable level and applied creative fades to make this sound realistic. I noticed that the sound of Deckard’s finger tapping on the bench was too low and ‘boomy’ so we applied a high pass filter to notch out rumble and leveled up the gain to sit nicely in the mix.

Ending our session in the studio we bounced out the mp4. And finally submitted! It’s being a very fun project to work on especially with Quinn and I can’t wait to get into the S6 in trimester 4 to work on the ‘Arctic ‘scene.

Below is a walkthrough video of the steps taken to create this sound replacement project followed by the final asset:

References:

McGregor, L. (2017). The Power of Sound: Using the Shepard Tone In Filmmaking. Retrieved from https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/shepard-tone-sound-design-filmmaking/