Project 1 Sound Replacement Reflection

Here is the final product that was produced.

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Overall all I am quite pleased with the result as I have never down a sound replacement to this degree of detail and length by myself. This was an extremely challenging task for me as there were many elements that needed proper placement within the video to seem like one cohesive piece of work. The composition was also something that I struggled with, trying to get Maschine and Pro Tools to work together. My lectures suggested, instead of having one big project with all the sounds, dialogue and music, I should separate the composition session then add it to the master session later. Another great piece of advice I received from my classmate, Callum Hicks (Blog Site: https://callumsaudioblog.wordpress.com) was that he had noticed I had left time-stretching modes on my samples, instead I should consolidate the clips then turn them off to save processing power on my laptop and could’ve helped with the latency between Maschine and Pro Tools.

Apart from that, everyone seemed to be quite happy with the ad, I also was extremely proud that the 6 weeks of work I put in to try to perfect the sounds paid off. This project was something that I knew from the begging was going to really push me creatively and technically, but the added pressure, I feel, is what gave me that drive to prove to myself and my lectures that despite having very minimal experience in this field, I can still try and create decent piece of work.

In relation to my processes and aesthetic choices, I wanted to produce an immersive ad to industry standard. To achieve this, I spent a lot of time researching Hans Zimmer’s productions and in particular the reference track that was giving in the brief which was the Dark Knight Theme. The use of Taiko Drums and layered strings is something that I decided to implement in my composition for this track however, obviously my composition wasn’t as complex and consisted of a Taiko track with some reverb, programmed in the style of Dark Night, five violin tracks, playing either staccato notes or long chorded notes, bass/cello track, three atoms piano synth patches from Massive and a tremolo violin track. I performed each track myself on my midi keyboard, a Casio CDP-120, and did some quantization and performance correction in Maschine.

For all the other sounds, I took some samples from a sample pack provided by my lecture and processed them individually to have a particular sound for each vehicle in the clip. There were around four layers for the Chevrolet Cruze and a separate channel for each SUV. The way I processed the samples were in a way that would suit the style of the vehicle on screen. For the SUVs, I added an enhancer to bring up the low-end frequency to make the samples suit the larger cars. The Cruze had similar processing done too. Each of the sounds was then run through their own auxiliary track which was automated to increase in volume when the sounds were played back during the scenes where they were in a large reverb environment. Another thing I also took into consideration was the scenes that were inside the vehicle. To make it sound like the audience was in the car, I EQed the highs out of samples to make it fit the scenes that were in the car.

As for the voice actors, I used Simon’s voice (Blog Site: https://snguyen93blog.wordpress.com) for the main FBI/CIA agent, Keely (Blog Site: https://swedishslowpoke2017.wordpress.com), for the voice on the phone, my brother, Abhishek Mehta (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7651406/) and Jolon, (Blog Site: https://officialintensityjs.wordpress.com) for the voice over at the end. To make the characters’ sound as authentic as possible, I played around with pitch and tried coaching the artists to do an American accent to achieve a standard set by the original ad. I decided to record Simon, Keely and Jolon in a quick session in the Audient 4816 studio with an AKG C414. The processing of the telephone effect and distortion on Jolon’s voice was done after in Pro Tools using the simple Pro Tools EQ and Air Distortion that comes with Pro Tools. At first, I had recorded Jolon as a backup for Miller’s voice however it didn’t suit so I got Abhishek during a session I was waiting for my artist to show up. for that session, I used a Neumann u87 which I believe really gave the artist a smooth low-end similar to the original Miller voice in the ad. The results were great in the end as the feedback I received by the lecturers suggested that all the voices in the ad could’ve been played off as the original voices in the ad. Abhishek is an actor and has experience doing an American accent and also we have watched a lot of Prison Break so we are familiar with Miller’s expressions and voice.

That was pretty much the whole process of what I did to get this sound replacement done. If you want to learn more about what I did, you can contact me on Facebook, SoundCloud or Instagram.

Now we move onto the second project of the trimester which is underway. Progress on that will be uploaded soon.