Sound Editing

The overall process of editing the sound for this project was an extremely challenging one and an extremely rewarding one. I certainly enjoyed myself for the most part and feel that I learned a lot about Soundtrack Pro and how to edit sound in general. I learnt how to implement sound effects and make very subtle changes to the mix in order to make it flow and sound more natural.

The biggest challenge of the project was the argument scene. One section in particular taught me a lot about dialogue editing. Since during the visual edit me and Joeley decided to use a lot of cuts in this scene in order to make it look more fragmented and increase the pace and tension. This meant that I was editing phrases that go over 3 or 4 takes to different shots where the dialogue is not the same. The part where James says "and it's been going cold while you've been fuckin' about with your mates" was extremely difficult as I actually had to remove words from the dialogue to make it fit the images. He originally said "and it's probably going cold" for example. Removing "probably" brought the dialogue forward so it would match when we cut back to that same take. I cut out the right section in order to make it sound like he was saying "been" instead of "probably" when his words slurred together. This was painstaking, but worthwhile in my opinion.

Getting good atmos tracks was surprisingly difficult. Especially as the house itself doesn't have all that much background noise. I managed to anchor the sound using a ticking clock quite often (which I increased the volume of throughout the piece to represent him slowly getting worse), but for some scenes there isn't an appropriate atmosphere.

If I had had another day to edit the sound I probably could have gone back to it and just finely tuned a few more elements to perfect it more, but overall I'm pretty happy with what I did. Considering it's the first time I've edited sound for a project like that I think I did a good job.