Category: Production Posts

 

 

The atmospheric sounds within the film are very obvious, and in my opinion, they set the scene really well. I used logic pro 9 to compile these sounds together. As with the Foley sound, I watched through each scene and noted down what was needed in terms of the background atmospheres.

 

So for the start, the Bar scene, I had a number of different audio files already saved into my computer that would be good to use as the atmospheres. The file I had was the sound of people talking in a bar, but lots of them so it gave the audience a perception of space. This worked well with having extras in the scene sat down and conversing, and simply added to the realism of the scene.

 

The outside scene where the main actress ‘Stephanie’ runs out to be sick, the atmosphere of the people in the bar talking filters out the cutoff, to give the impression that they are outside the same bar. The same happens with the music that is playing in the background and in that case, the music in essence becomes the atmosphere.

 

In the garage scene, the sounds of birds, chickens and crows at a low level add to the perception that they are outside. The involvement of the chicken sound gives the impression that it is a different era (1960’s) so sets the scene really well because more people had chickens in their garden back then.

 

The nighttime scenes within the film all have crickets in them. Although this may appear to be cheesy somewhat, the film has an apparent cheesiness to it, so it fits quite well. This is something that the director enjoyed upon contact with them and showcasing the work at that point.

 

All of the atmospheres in the end were bounced down to a 1 track WAV for Jack to mix down in the final session.

 

 

 

The foley production role within the film petal child was assigned to me. I worked with Yuan to create the foley for the film and we had to wait for the final version of the visual edit to be able to begin our job. To start the process, we watched the entire visual edit, scene by scene and noted down each point in which foley sound was needed. This process took about two hours for the 40 min film.

 

Once we had the sounds written down on paper, we began to record them. My role for this was to be the recordist, whilst Yuan was the “walker”. Scene by scene, we went through and recorded the sounds. The first scene consisted of a bar, so we produced sounds that imitated the sounds of glasses being put down, drinking, change being given to the bar man, the actresses sitting down etc.

 

In doing this for our first time, it took a lot of takes and practice to get the right sounds and aesthetics for each recording that fit the film. It took Yuan and I about 5 or 6 hours to fully finish the foley for it ready for Jack to mix in the final session.

 

The areas in which we struggled most were the timings of the footsteps. For example, in the end scene where all the actresses walk outside, the footsteps were way to many to be able to make sound professional, with the equipment and time that we had been set to do the job, and also, the footsteps were in fact audible on the film itself, so adding more began to seem nonsensical. The actresses were also talking over the footstep noise, and so changing the sound too much would have a negative impact on the quality of the dialogue.

 

 

My first job as the music composer was to make the track for the music video. I had begun by using the approach of using real instruments, as this is what would have been available at the time and the only way to make music. As a group, Jack and I booked out the multitrack recording studio, and through Jane, we had found a Sitar player called ‘Neil’ from Leicester. On this day, he came up to Lincoln and we had a jam with Jack and Josh Andrusiak, a bass player and student. We had recorded some of these jams; as there wasn’t much time to write something. We had also recorded a solo of the sitar being played.

 

After much experimentation with the sounds, and speaking to the director, I found it best to make the track myself on Logic. I felt that the music we had made in the studio was out of time and didn’t sound too much like it was from the 1960s, even though we had used similar techniques for recording the instruments as they would have back then.

 

I had used the sitar solo, chopped it up into about 50 equal sized sections using the scissor tool and placed them into a monophonic exs24 sampler, using the sounds as one shots. I placed an arrangement of the sampler notes over some drum productions. This creative process of arranging the track didn’t seem to take too long, and I sent the early mixdown to Jane, the director. She was happy with where I was going with the track, and this progressed to later in the year where the actresses were coming in for shoots. We recorded Stephanie (The main Actress, called Holly in real life) singing over the track. This took minimal mixing down, except for adding tape saturation and using some of the production techniques in the music that they would have done back in the 1960’s but instead in a digital music way. The authenticity of the film as being produced with modern filming techniques has meant that the electronic recreational aest

 

The music I had made in Logic , I had more creative control over, and feel like I could have done a better job of that in a sound way than with the real instruments. Because we were Jamming with real instruments and the time constraints, this too was another reason I had decided to make a fully structured track

 

As for the tracks in the rest of the film, I had created songs for each diegetic atmospheric part of the film. For example, there are a few scenes in the bar, so I had decided to make up music that sounded Jazzy and Bluesy, to convey the sound of being in a social atmosphere. This music had a slight filter on it and was layered with the atmos of people talking in a bar to add to the realism of the scene and boost its aesthetic.

The LSD trip scenes are the most interesting pieces of sound/music in my opinion. There is no dialogue in these scenes so the viewer is concentrating purely on just the visual and sound elements of the movie. For these scenes I used my Reaktor 6 instruments and Absynth 5, as well as FM8. The sequential movement of the journey through the trips are reflected in the sound, and the vibe of each trip is driven by the sound mainly. The sound follows the animations within the LSD trip one (The good trip). And Slowly gets more minimal as the characters come out of the trip. Having not experienced LSD first hand, I left this to interpretation and tried as best as I could to get sounds that would fit the animation and fit the overall feeling of the scene.

 

Similarly, the bad trip that Stephanie has portrays an amplification of the emotion that she is going through in the film. The sounds present in this trip aims to give the viewer an intense feeling of shock/ goose bumps. Having a sound that fits the trip should make up the minimal effect on screen; otherwise it would be empty in my opinion.

 

We had used a track by Barney and Jack Martin, (who are Jack Webber’s housemates) in the film also. The music present is cued in at the bar and is used as a piece of non-diegetic music, as opposed to the other music. This music is reminiscent of the emotion of a kind of melancholy and perhaps a bit of loneliness within the film. It only appears for a few seconds, as the scene begins, but is effective in my opinion for portraying the thoughts of the actresses, that are sat there at the bar with their heads in their hands. It almost is a window into their emotions, so the communication aspect here with the music is extremely important.

 

The ending music has a similar theme too, with the sad sounds of the aftermath of when the actresses had been shouting at each other and are crying. The music communicates this even further, and aims to help the viewer to empathize with the characters. This is a very relatable part of the film to a lot of people, based on the feedback given to the film group.

 

The music of the montage sequence is quite fast paced and a bit more rhythmic than the other music, and this reflects on the actress’ emotion of regret, in a sense. She is trying to get a hold of one of the actresses that previously in the film she kissed , and the reaction wasn’t great as she walked off.

 

“Jefferson Airplane- White Rabbit” was one of the main tracks that I was using reference wise for the mixdown and sound of the tracks I had been producing. I really enjoy its sound and I feel as though it is one of the main tracks of the psychedelic culture in England of that Era.

 

My roles for the production of Petal Child are as follows:

 

Foley Artist

Sound Design

Music Composer

 

My group member Jack Webber has the role of chief location sound recordist and sound engineer/ mixer. In conjunction with Jacks role, I have to provide all of the music cues, on one music track in the form of a WAV, all of the atmospheric sounds for each scene on one track, and all of the Foley sound on a third track. These processes will be explained to a fuller extent on separate posts within this blog. In terms of the processes used to do this, my main equipment to perform this will be on Logic pro 9 and Pro Tools 10/11. I have decided to use logic pro 9 because it’s a software DAW I am used to and comfortable with making sounds, as well as its ability to accommodate my vast software add ons, including Native Instruments Komplete 10, as well as Native instruments Reaktor 6. These are the most useful plugins in terms of effects for the sound within the film. For example, the LSD trip scenes will be including an array of effects within these add on software’s, which will encapsulate to a greater creative extent the good and bad trips. The randomization/ mutation tool in Absynth 5 is a great place to start with the creation of these creative types of atmospheres. Jane, Hearst, the director of the film, has said to make the trip scenes “Sid”, which basically means to make them sound like music/sound I am used to creating (Experimental/ dark, strange).

 

My official roles consist of mainly postproduction, but I did get involved with the pre production and planning of the film as well as the recording of the dialogue on set. Also, our skills were put to the test with our other group member, Yuan Ding (Aka Shaun), who is an international student. He is an FTV student, but his role in the film is also sound, but his specialism didn’t lie in sound, so we had to talk him through each job we were doing and explain it a number of times due to the language barrier. We managed to build up a rapport with Shaun and he has begun to understand our concepts of sound through teaching and practice.