can music replace ambience/room tone?

rayortiz313

rayortiz313

Active member
Hey guys,

I know I can figure this out by studying films, and I will be, but maybe someone with post sound experience can help:


Im in the process of finishing up this short (pickup shots and sound), and found that when I added an "ambience" track, namely some low volume traffic noise, it just sounded like white noise. I'm pretty sure I can find a traffic bed that has more character, but....


If you score a film end to end, can you/should you remove the ambience/room tone track? ie can music replace the ambience track or will the audience notice something is missing?


Im also considering using record crackle for ambience since I may do an old-film grindhouse look for this (yes I know its old hat by now, but its how I planned on going with this since the beggining and I want to follow thru- Im going to not-overdo it)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOhZ_1w9jCA

any thoughts welcome


Thanks in advance
 
It depends on the scene. There are scenes that are more music montage in nature, where music takes over.

However, there is also subtle underscore that works better with some ambience provided by room tone, foley, BG, etc.
 
I just checked out your link.

yes, that needs some ambience through room tone. But, it also needs foley that fits the scene. The reverb on the footsteps and sound fx are way to dry to believable for the space that the actors are occupying.
 
Ambient backgrounds are not just "plug and play" - just picking a BG and mixing it in. Good BGs are constructed. I usually start with an "empty street" "canvas" (or whichever "empty" BG is required) and build on it, adding sound effects of cars, pedestrians, birds, dogs, etc. It always helps if there are visual cues to help the ambient BG along. When rerecording (mixing) the ambient BGs are mixed as well; perhaps one car passes by loudly, or the birds getting more excited to enhance the tension of the scene.
 
Foley Police.gif
Time to call in the Foley police!

Foley is always capitalized because it's a proper name.

Second it is very unlikely that you are actually talking about Foley, probably SFX. Foley is a process and requires recording live performed sound in sync with picture. If you are editing sounds into the track that is Sound FX. You are probably talking about hard FX, as opposed to BG's and ambiences.

OP,

The answer varies. For a film that you want to sound and feel like a big screen film the answer is Yes. A film that has gone through a real sound post can play with no production or music tracks playing and sound good (and you will know much of what is going on).

There is a thread in the stickies that talks about sound post.

The short version is big budget films spend a lot of time and tracks on the "sound" (music is not considered "sound"). No budget films tend to spend hardly any time or tracks on sound and they suffer from that. You probably want to aim someplace in between.

I highly recommend you find someone local who really wants to do sound for film (not music) and see if you can get them to work with you.

If you can't find anyone who will do it for your budget then see if someone will at least lend a hand/ advice. You can ask away on line but you will learn more in a couple of hours one on one than weeks on line. If you let people know where you are there may even be someone on this list near you.


In a film with a real sound post you will likely never have a spot where there is just music that isn't a dream sequence or some big romantic highlight.
When you get to a point where you do want it to be heavy music, then what one usually does is kill most of the backgrounds (BG's) and ambiences and keep the "hard FX" (specific sounds made by specific things the audience can see). So door opens and closes, gun shots, foot steps (if you do real Foley FS would be done in Foley), car sounds, etc.

It is VERY rare to have a film with a budget be scored end to end. For one thing it starts feeling like a music video. It also get tiresome. The music tends to loose it's impact if it's always there. Take a listen to some films you like and note when there is score and when there is music and when there is just sound.

The solution to your "white noise" problem is tracks. A "proper" sound post will have somewhere between 30 and 300 tracks of sound. 300 is big action battle scene kind of epic stuff, 30 would be a very low budget film with a really small crew. On no budget films I have done I would put the number between 60 and 100 mostly with a few down to the 30's. There are exceptions, we did a 30 second ad that had over 200 tracks and a short once with about 20.

Most ambience and really all "room tone" largely is white noise. Better ones have more interesting things in them but sounds professionals use are recorded/ designed to be "layered up" so you don't want an ambience with too much detail. Or rather you want some specific detail and or feeling.

A "city scape" would have the "city roar" and some specific cars, maybe a train, some dogs barking, crickets, maybe a street light buzz, maybe some distant music from a home, a mother calling the kids to dinner,... etc. all on different tracks. You build up the world of the film, what you need and where depends on your story and the world it takes place in.
 
you guys are awesome and theres some great tips here but Im not convinced every movie needs to be mixed like a hollywood epic. Theres probably different styles of mixdown the same ways theres styles of everything else. I'm going to take what little I know about eq and compression from my music making days and study films like el mariachi and seek out other low budget films that may have a relatively open or simple or minimalist mix. That'll be my first step in wrapping my head around all this.

Im going to start watch-listening to movies with no picture, particularly low budget action-horror films like john carpenters, dawn of the dead, etc.

wish me luck. I totally see the crux of what y'all are saying though, which is that its a discipline like every other in fimmaking and theres ****-tons to learn.

thanks a bunch
 
Music can sometimes 'mask' the lack of room tone. Most folks (with ears) add it in the dialog editing stage regardless.
 
rayortiz313 said:
you guys are awesome and theres some great tips here but Im not convinced every movie needs to be mixed like a hollywood epic. Theres probably different styles of mixdown the same ways theres styles of everything else. I'm going to take what little I know about eq and compression from my music making days and study films like el mariachi and seek out other low budget films that may have a relatively open or simple or minimalist mix. That'll be my first step in wrapping my head around all this.

Im going to start watch-listening to movies with no picture, particularly low budget action-horror films like john carpenters, dawn of the dead, etc.

wish me luck. I totally see the crux of what y'all are saying though, which is that its a discipline like every other in fimmaking and theres s*%t-tons to learn.

thanks a bunch
Click to expand...

Yes and No. El Mariachi, at least the version you will be able to see, went through two full sound posts, the last a very full and $$$ one. Yes it started with a smaller mix (8 tracks for a mono mix in analog) but that was just to get into a few festivals and get a distributor. At that point they redid the post sound to get it to a decent "big screen" level and then later when it got a wider distribution it went in for a full crew sound post.

A few points that you should keep in mind.

You do not have to (and probably shouldn't try to) do it the way a big budget film would. Big budget films are notoriously wasteful in workflow. But you should also avoid the "I can do it all" no-budget film model. It's main benefit is that you don't have to deal with anybody else, but film is a team sport and you really put the handcuffs on if you don't work with a team. Music editing and mixing are not the same as film editing and mixing. There is a certain amount of cross over but they are fundamentally different beasts.

To have a big screen sound does not require a big screen budget or a big screen crew. I worked on the rereleases of a couple of Jackie Chan films. For a major release they had tiny budgets and needed complete sound track replacements. Most of the $ went to ADRing the entire film, but that won't be your issue so I won't count that. So two of us did all the SFX work. They did a few days (maybe a week tops) on a Foley stage, we did most of what would have been Foley in SFX. And they mixed for a week or so.

So that is a pretty minimal post for a film released for the big screen.
Those would be Legend of Drunken Master and Twin Dragons.

I also worked on the first completed feature done on the DVX100 American Yearbook. That was clearly in the no budget film category. I chatted with one of the producers (who at the time was still in high school), liked the script and agreed to do the film for points. A much better carrot BTW than "deferred" since you actually stand some chance of seeing a dime, though still a lotto ticket.

There was a composer and me. I had some connections so we mixed on an actual mix stage. We premixed really to a finished mix so that we could do a 90 min mix in two eight hour days on the real stage. The total cost for sound post was about $300. Parts of the film are posted on YouTube. Sony has blocked the first section for some reason, probably because of some RF classical music that got misidentified since rights to everything were secured by the producers.

And maybe closer to your project a film by a member of this board Chris Ripper Resurrection Man. It's a short with some great production values, really good acting and solid sound track.

Chris did a lot of the foundation work on the sound track and I ended up adding and polishing. This may be a good way for you to work. For one thing if you put in some of the sound track then when you hand it off to the sound post person there is a template to build off of. Of course this is assuming you are the filmmaker/ editor.

The point is at the low/ no budget end of things you CAN have a really good sound track with out a huge budget.

If you want an example of how not to do it take a look at most/ all Alan Jacobs films, say Nina Takes a Lover. Big obvious things are missing all over the place. I'm not sure how much to blame the post team since I worked on a later one American Gun that we did a really good job on and then he hauled it down to a place that did ads to do the mix and the sound track was just trashed. There are some parts that are still OK but it was MUCH better at the premix stage than it was in the final mix.

But Nina is a good example of a film with a budget (small) that tried to get by leaving out a lot of stuff to save money and it is distracting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top