Excellent Featurette on Sound Design

[Alex H.]

I'm a big fan of the Soundworks Collection channel on Vimeo. This recently popped up (if you haven't seen "Argo" yet, go see it) and caught my attention, no only because the film is incredible but because there's been lots of discussion here in recent weeks about recording FX in the field.

Enjoy.

 

[ryanjf]

Loving the doppler on that siren.

 

[Noiz2]

It's interesting not much on design and a lot of the same kind of puff that gets put out there. Half is about how great it is working with XYZ etc.

The part that kind of goes to my complaint and why I think these BTS shorts are great for the public and a disservice to new filmmakers is all the "real" talk.

When Hollywood says "real" and "natural" and "Organic", they don't mean what most people mean. "Real" in this case was a loop-group in a Hollywood backlot and some fun siren recording on the back lot. It's a lot like Colbert's "truthiness".

I know what the guy is saying and what he means is that the worldizing of the sounds makes them fit in better and "seem" more real. But a lot of folks hear his words and will think he actually means real rather than "realiness".

The sirens for instance. There are tons of european siren recordings they could have used. Many are actually real (as in recordings of actual european sirens traveling through old world small streets with a lot of hard brick and stone surfaces. They built the sirens and recorded them because then they would be using "new" recordings, they could talk about "authenticity", there was some time and money in the budget (this is often a big factor - there is a lot of time in most films where you are waiting for something from the picture department etc. You have a crew so in "spare time" you do a lot of these kinds of things), it's fun (never discount the fun factor), you can get exactly the perspectives you want (and go back and get more if needed), it's fun (did I mention that?), and it builds the editors/ recordists library.

What they probably didn't do in the quest for "real" was send a crew over to that part of the world to pick up real ambiences. Maybe they brought an FX recordist along with the production crew, if they actually shot in that part of the world, but probably not.

Anyway didn't mean to rain on the short but it related to some things that a new filmmaker was asking.

The good points were their talking and showing the value of getting "coverage". Recording lots of perspectives and distances when recording FX.

 

[Alex H.]

The good points were their talking and showing the value of getting "coverage". Recording lots of perspectives and distances when recording FX.

That's exactly why I posted it.

Yeah, there's fluff in there, but it's always good to see FX recording in the works, rather than just being pulled from an existing library. I'd rather see folks - even (especially) beginners - take the time to go out and record their own FX. It forces a little more thought in the creative process, and opens up a very educational playground as well. And thinking through aural perspective in the recording process can help think through the visual perspective as well.

 

[qwerty123]

That was good! BTS stuff is almost never shot for aspiring filmmakers, and so you usually only have these brief moments in which you can see something worthwhile (e.g., how they recorded the crowds). It might be nice to start a thread with good BTS for sound stuff.

 

[Noiz2]

I completely agree. My gripe was that half of the new filmmaker questions on this list seem to come from the fluff part being paid attention to more than the good bits. But then maybe that is what the BTS thread should be, the better BTS with comments about what IS the part to pay attention to?

My preference is always to record as much new specific to the film sound as you can. That was sort of the norther California sound ethic, back when the Bay Area was doing a lot of sound, that I was trained into.

For the low budget filmmaker it does two important things. You learn what things actually sound like, as opposed to what you think they should sound like, and you build up a library of sounds you know really well.