Sound Replacement for Way of the Dragon Bruce Lee vs Chuck Norris Scene Session 1

For my first sound replacement project, I decided to team up with my classmate, Simon Nguyen, (Blog site: https://snguyen93blog.wordpress.com) as he had an interesting idea for what he wanted to do for the sound replacement project. Soon after, Sujahn Shankar, (Blog site: https://sujahn.wordpress.com) approached us and we happily had him joined the team, being a new student in our cohort we decided to help him along and get familiar with our studio module and was a great addition to the team for us to help and teach some things we had picked up to a new student and see him progress. We also learnt a couple of interesting things about SAE in Singapore.

Simon discussed with me that he wanted to replace the sounds in the 1972 Bruce Lee film, Way of the Dragon, specifically, the famous fight scene between Lee and Chuck Norris and do a sort of remastered version. For this remaster, Simon decided we should use a modern day fight scene example as our reference track for sounds, the 2015 film Ip Man 3, specifically the fight scene between Donnie Yen and Mike Tyson. Donnie Yen, being a martial-arts master was our reference for Bruce Lee as they both have a similar build and would give us our reference for footsteps, kicking, punching and blocking sounds that someone his build would reproduce. Mike Tyson’s heavy build and heavy footsteps would give us some reference on how Chuck Norris would sound with the more modern and semi-realistic Foley. After discussing how we would modernise the basic 1970’s fight scene, we decided to get straight into the C24 Post Production studio and lay down some sounds while watching the fight scene on screen.

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I was in charge of Pro Tools and the desk while Simon and Sujahn set up the live room for recording Foley. Simon also played the role of Bruce Lee, performing his signature Lee fighting cries while Sujahn played Chuck’s role, doing his grunts and other actions such as clothing movement and Chuck’s heavier footsteps. Initially, we had to set up the studio for our recording session and it went fairly smoothly. The desk was mainly used for sending a headphone mix to the Foley artist to hear the original sounds and record their own vocals over the top. The preamp used was the Fireface 800 which as to be soft patched within the computer when enabling and disabling phantom power and other settings. The microphone used was the Rode NT1-A large diaphragm condenser with a pop filter, as this mic is well suited for recording basic vocal samples, the NT2-A could’ve also been used however we didn’t need to change the polar pattern or use a pad as most of the processing was going to be done in the DAW and it sounded great when layered with the video. Things we had to look out for when using this mic is the proximity effect which occurs in Cardioid mics when placed too close to the sound source and picks up more low-frequency content. Scenes where we captured breathing, we had to EQ out some low-end because of the proximity effect making it sound unnatural and boomy.

What affected out workflow was the fact that we didn’t have the video prepared in Pro Tools so when watched the clip on YouTube as we recorded each asset. Our asset list had specific time stamps on where the new samples had to be placed within the scene however because we didn’t have the video in Pro Tools, each recording was placed on the start of the new track and nothing was in time. We decided we could drag and drop everything in time with the video clip once we downloaded and converted the file to match the FPS of the Pro Tools session.

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As for the Foley, we recorded some of them in the Post Pro live room using the same mic, these included simple sounds like hands rubbing together, clothing movement, and some novelty sounds like hair being ripped off skin using Simon’s Velcro boots and impact sounds which were done by Simon and Sujahn where Sujahn repeatedly punched Simon in the back while he was wearing his armoured bike jacket and Sujahn had Simon protective bike gloves which resulted in some impressively realistic body impact shots. Layered with these where more assets which we recorded in the fire escape stairwell which is a very reverb-heavy area. We decided to record more body impact sounds as the low frequencies rang out nicely through the stairwell and would suit the location in the film as the environment Lee and Chuck are fighting in seems to be a stoned walled hall which would have similar reverb characteristics. We recorded these sounds using a Zoom H4n and had Simon and Sujahn kick the wall while I captured it on the Zoom.

After these assets were recorded, we went back into the Post Pro room and placed all the samples into Pro Tools and saved the session on all of our hard drives as well as uploading the session to Google Drive as another backup, day 1 was complete.

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Resources:

Ip Man 3 Image: Imdbcom. (2017). IMDb. Retrieved 21 March, 2017, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2888046/

Way of the Dragon Image: Imdbcom. (2017). IMDb. Retrieved 21 March, 2017, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068935/