Sound for picture; Sound Dub

---

For my first assignment of Sound for picture I, along with Sophia Ellen-O’Driscoll as my partner, was told to re-dub a scene of our choosing from a film of our choice.

Upon being told to do this we immediately settled on the Defibrillator scene of the classic 1982 sci-fi horror film; ‘The Thing’

Our first hurdle was, of course, putting together a list of sounds and ambience within each shot and how they reacted with the room of the scene. Sophia lead the charge with this, creating a listing of sounds and their timings for us to recreate in ProTools after creating the described sounds for use.

Thankfully, the entirety of our chosen scene takes place in an empty common area of a arctic research base that eventually catches fire, meaning enviromental sound effecting factors are at a minimum, as compared to a large or empty room which would have lots of reverb, otherwise known as echo, whereas our area is instead very cozy and filled, with both dense plastics, fabrics and metals, meaning very little noise effectively bounces around, leaving little post processesing for us to do in ProTools or enviroment matching for us to do in our sound recording.

On the subject of sound recording, me and Sophia booked out a mini-boom microphone, boom pole, and a Fostex FR-2LE Audio Recorder. And made our way to the quietest, but most reliably object filled room we could book out: The StopMotion Studio! [Sound production studio’s were locked from us measly animation plebians.]
With our newfound equipment we started to knock-off the sounds on our list that could be recreated to our [low] standards.

We chose the Mini-Boom as it was a dynamic microphone which allowed for us to account for the sourcing of sounds in the scenes physical space [An example of this working would be the sound of footsteps]. This however, worked against us as we soon realised that most of our sounds were static, not dynamic. Furthermore, we also found that most of our sounds needed to be made via our mouths [Eg; The Thing’s Alien Screeching and groaning or the scream of Dr. Cooper as he loses his arms to the Alien]
Had we realised this sooner we would have brought out a Sennheiser Condenser microphone from the media store due to it being easier to use and maintain audio quality in spoken dialogue.

After this we decided on what sounds we simply couldn’t recreate, such as a winter storm wind and blazing fire, which we then accounted for by picking stock sounds from freesound.org [These sounds are marked within the USB of our sound-dubbing work]

After this began the long task of dubbing the video in ProTools.
Fun.

ProTools, as a tool, is extremely useful and diverse in its functions, with a video view which plays along an imported video file as you move along the audio timeline, the ability to change the volume and pitch of any imported sound with ease, and the ability to manipulate the waveforms of said sounds via cutting.
I’m certain that there’s even more to ProTools than I’ve discovered, but have yet to find out everything there is to it. So we occasionally had to resort to Sophia’s prior experience in Audacity to edit sounds to better fit the scene.

Majoritively, we used fade-ins and fade-outs to create an effect of sound becoming more distant, [shown best in the shot of the thing scuttling away from the group of survivors] with fast fade-ins also being used for the sound of ramping up things such as a creatures screeching or groaning.

A big issue for us was the use of proper ambient sound. This is likely apparent through the way an electrical buzz is audible throughout the very begining, it’s a little too loud in my opinion, but wouldn’t be noticable if we had lowered it at all. Meanwhile, we couldn’t decide on a proper time to impliment the ambience of crackling fire or the winter storm outside of the building, leading to it being used in moments of silence to avoid awkwardness of a lack of sound, while also being turned down as other, more important sounds play to ensure there is not audio clashing that would ruin the clarity of the sound.

Furthermore, me and Sophia found ourselves cutting up and reassembling sounds to create new sounds or to extend sounds that were longer than we anticipated [Eg, the fire extinguishers ‘fwooshing’ sound being repeated 6 times with slight pitch shifting and the start and ends cut off, as our recording for it was far too short. Or the constant changing and reassembling of the flamethrower noise] and even layering certain sounds atop each other to make a better sound. [I can’t remember if we did this one, but I wanted to put our geyser sound over our extinguisher sound to make it sound less like Co2 extinguishers and more like foam ones]

Finally, me and Sophia finished the dub with a cut to black [Actually our shot just ended on a still but our sound kept going so it ended black] with the ambience of crackling fire and the wind outside slowly fading out at the scenes end, which wasn’t necessary to our project, but we felt that the slow fade in darkness allowed our projects end to feel more conclusive as a short rather than a sudden end to one disjointed scene.