Blog Archive

Friday 25 January 2013

Background Noise Replacement

Seeming as we have replaced all the dialogue in the sequence using ADR, we also have to replace all of the background noise and sound effects in the scene, which is quite annoying. Basically all the sound which you will hear in the final piece has been replaced apart from the occassional line. We now regret not filming some background ambience at Trafalgar Square while we were there, as that would have seriously helped with replacing it. We only thought of it afterwards, and now if I were to do it again I would definately go around the square and just record sound in the various places. To replace the sound, however, we came up with a list of sounds which you should be able to hear around the square:

- Fountains
- People talking
- People walking
- Children laughing
- Traffic

All these sounds had to be replaced in order for it to sound convincing. Admittedly we did add in the sound of children laughing, purely because we thought that it would add to the atmosphere and slightly put the audience on edge if they could here that children were in danger of getting in the way of the danger. We managed to find some royalty free sound effects of city bustle, which covered people talking, walking and the sound of traffic, which was handy as it meant we wouldn't have to go through the painful process of mixing everything together and trying to make it sound convincing. We added in the sounds of the fountains and of children playing, the fountains because they were there and the children playing I mentioned above. The annoying thing about the fountain sound effect is that every time that the camera goes back and forth between Yung and Davidson we have to fade the sound of the fountains in and out. Hopefully the music will cover this up a lot better, but I don't think it's too noticeable anyway.
We also had to add in a few sounds that weren't there originally to make it more realistic. Here is our list of sounds that were not there on the day but were added in as they needed to be for realism and for our storytelling:

- Punches and hits
- Gun hit

If the film didn't have any of these sound effects then it would seem absolutely terrible. Without them it is very obvious that the whole thing is fake, and that is what we most certinaly do not want to do! A lot of fights look bad purely because they don't have decent sound effects. We downloaded a royalty free package which included a variety of fighting sound effects, which we had used previously on the Preliminary Task. By mixing and matching these sound effects we were able to construct very realistic sound for the fight. The gun hit was difficult to work out. We didn't want there to be a loud gun sound effect, otherwise everyone in Trafalgar Square would have heard it and it would have looked wierd with no one running away. We also thought that it would probably be a silenced sniper rifle anyway, so instead we just included one of the hitting sound effects, so it doesn't look as if he just had a heart attack.
In the station we needed a very different group of sound effects. We didn't want a noisy station full of people as that would be distracting, so instead we just added the sounds of the train and the announcer and just a few people. The sound of the train coming into the station was recorded live with the clip and if one of the few sounds actually done live!
Overall I think that the sound mixing went very well and it sounds very good! It should sound even better when we have the fully recorded soundtrack to go behind it, and I am very excited about the final result!
Here is our rough edit without music and only the new sound replacement:


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