How we managed some of the steps of post-production

Foley

Sound Design & F/X

Maybe it's time to get your updated version of Microsoft's MediaPlayer that can play a lot of formats, including MPEG.

Foley

Doing "Foley" could be a very funny job. Named after a man who actually invented it, this sort of postproduction job soon become very important and irreplaceable. In fact when we are talking about "Foley" we are talking about men that we call "walkers". Why? Because the most often sound (on the movie) you'll have to correct or record from scratch are footsteps. So, as footsteps must be preformed in time and synchronous with the picture, we have a special branch of artist, "walkers", that walk on the pavement, leaves, gravel, wood or any other surface in the studio recording a new sound. But just walking as we said is not their only job. They must "slap" people, "kill", they must "drink" and "eat & swallow" they must destroy a kitchen.... They must do every single thing in the movie that is not recorded or that seek for a new dimension for a sound. Very often Foley artists collaborate with another branch of sound reinforcement people - the sound designers.

Anyway, these short clips from a movie will provide you with an idea of what a man can do to picture a sound. These clips came from editing room MOS (that is a short from "without-sound" or Mit-Out-Sound, how the German directors used to say in Hollywood's early days on their well known catastrophic English). The director, Hrvoje Hribar, said that he wants to picture a policeman guarding a Russian Embassy, on a very cold and rainy night. To prevent himself from dullness, he brought his radio with him. Unfortunately his radio at the end of the scene, drops into the water. Although the sequence is not very long we have extracted just the fall of the radio and you can see it by clicking the right icon. This is not the final version, as it lacks of the other F/Xs, but you'll get the picture.

Walking on the gravel is not performed by walking on the gravel in the studio, but on a simplest way you can imagine. We put a few kilos of beans into a plastic dish and did the walking by moving hands threw the beans. It sounds very realistic, so who cares if it is beans. Another channel was taken for the water. We cooked beans for another recording of special effects - gunfire! No, no.... Just kidding! After that, we put the water into dish and did the smashing radio again with the hands. Who can tell the difference? For a smashed loudspeaker we used another technology. Studio prerecorded FVO and MVO (Female Voice Over and Male Voice Over) were mixed with filters and noises to give impression that they were coming from radio loudspeakers. That sound was passed through the Eventide 3500 harmonizer on a program called Ripped woofer to give impression of a ripped woofer, of course. We added a little noise from a program Pig noise from the same processor, and there you are. Mixed at the proper time - it looks pretty real.

Oh yeah, that tuning before the fall itself, that you can hear by clicking the left icon... On a F/X CD there's a recording of a station tuning. Our stations in Europe as well as in Croatia are FM, which doesn't provide very nice noise when tuning. So we put a good old AM tuning instead. When the actor turned his radio's tuning knob, we blended the noise in the "broadcasting program" and reduced the "program" itself. And vice-versa. So, we got very realistic tuning. There was no need to make several mixes to perform precise mix, because we told our computer to do the job for us. And there you are.

As you can notice, there are pnly few of the sounds on inserts. You can't hear banging on the street light for example. This is the nice example of team work. The other guy in the other studio did the editing of the background noise, while we we were doing the design. The heavy rain you can hear is pro forma only, just to control the quality of the designed sound and how it fits the overall sound. But as you can see in the first clip, the film is a working copy as well. You can see a black lines that editor put on the film to mark a superimposition of the movie title or fade in of the picture. Wave line marks a superimposition for example.

So, play our inserts without and then with sound and see the difference. The sound that was in your head, manufactured and than recorded, to look as real.

Sound design & F/X

Oh yeah. That old human seek for improvement. As you can hear, the "raw" sound is a very raw sound indeed. Because of the compression used in MPEG files, the sound is not technically "hi-end" in fidelity, but never the less - it is stereo and it will serve its goal. Unfortunatelly you can't hear the hiss coming from the magnetic stock (sprocket tape) and the background noise coming from the set itself. Also, there is a certain amount of the noise built during transfer of the nagra tapes on the sprocket tape and classic editing itself. Anyway, as first we get rid of that with de-noise module of the Sonic Solutions system. As the movie clip contains a lot of high powered noise - a gun shots and small explosions of the so called "flat packs", we must remove them from the original sound track and replace them with manufactured effects that will sound great and realistic. Original gunfire sounds very pathetic and weak, but it really in-fact is original. Such sound is very difficult to record on the set, because there's no close-up mike. And even if it can be arranged to record a close up during acting, the volume or better said - the space, is too big to amplify the sound pressure coming from the gun explosion and the explosion is lost, really lost in space. That's why we must remove the originals and replace them with manufactured sound. Replaced sound came from the special F/X CDs of the Sound Ideas Library. And of course they were a little pumped up. Well. You know. Our characters are no sissies. Let's return ourselves to a term "flat pack". It is a small black powder fill, a flat one in it's look therefore the name. The purpose of them, when fired, is to get the impression of the bullet hit. You can put them and musk them in the wall, under your shirt and things. But they have a very nasty characteristic - they are way to loud, when they shouldn't be. So, if you're hit by a bullet, there's no explosion. You must hear a flash wound. Or nothing. OK, you can hear something when the bullet hits the wall, but this is another type of the sound called ricochet. You know - those whistling sounds. So, with a help of a computer you can cut out any existing lousy sound and replace it with a full working one. There's youre reality. OK, in this particular clip there's a rough mix going on, so the shots are too loud. In the final mix they tend to jump out of the screen and they turned to be really funny. So the re-recording mixer had to put the sound down a bit to level the overall sound of the film.

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