“Heart of the City” – audio edit day 5

“What did you think of that scene?”
“There needs to be a door sound.”
“There already is one.”
“Yeah, but there needs to be another one.”
“Huh?”
“There’s two doors.”
“There is?”
“Yeah, one outer door, a small staircase, then an interior door. It happens off camera so you don’t see it all, but it’s there and it’s necessary for the geography of the space, the timing of the scenes and the transition from the exterior to the interior.”
“Oh, okay. So we’ll need footsteps on the stairs as well?”
“Exactly.”
“Cool, alright, do we have a good door sound?”
“Yeah, there’s that one from scene 17 at the beginning.”
“That was a wooden door. We need a metal sounding door here.”
“Oh, okay. Do we have any foley metal doors?”
“I don’t think so. Check the Juice disk.”
“Alright, there’s fifty door sounds, let me know which ones you like.”
---scrolling through sounds—-
“Wow, none of them are good metal door sounds.”
“That’s okay, get a good solid door and we can adjust the pitch and tone and make it sound more metallic.”
---many knob tweaks and some magic pixie dust—-
“Sweet, that sounds great. Drop it into the scene and see how it plays.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, cool. Drop the volume about 10db and I think it’ll work.”
“Great, now how about the stairs?”
“Yeah, we had stairs in scene two.”
---scrolling to scene two to isolate and listen to the stair sounds—-
“Perfect, but he’s running up the stairs and for this scene he’s supposed to be walking down the stairs.”
“No problem,”
--more knob tweaks, time adjustment, sound spacing and a little more pixie dust—
“How’s that?”
“Peeeeerrrrfect.”

So that, 8 hours a day, over the last five days. Not really since this is an example of the foley and EFX work that we did today and a bit yesterday, but this type of interaction ran all week. Very cool process. Very cool couple of guys to work with. Excellent results.

So Jeff is leaving tomorrow, first thing, and we’re close to being done. Not completely done, but close. So Matt and I are charged with bringing this one across the finish line, or the goal line, or home plate. Whatever. We’ve got about 17 minutes of mixing, an additional pass through the movie to find any missing EFX and the great opportunity to wrangle two of our actors to come in studio and do some much needed ADR. Sixty seconds total screen time on the ADR stuff. Shouldn’t be a problem. Maybe another 4 hours total studio time, but whatever time it will take Matt to make all of his stem bounces to fly back into Jeff’s Premiere.

We’re almost there.

Mad props to Jeff for writing and directing and producing a great movie. Mad props to Matt for being a freak on the ProTools rig and for having the huge bag of pixie dust for creating, changing and removing bits of sound when they need to be created, changed or removed. Yes, I believe in magic.