Sound design workflow tutorial

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Polaroid22

Well-known member
Hello,

I am looking to learn some sound design for commercials. Does anybody know some good tutorials. I am looking for something like where a whole commercial gets dissected and to see how the workflow should be. Why to do this kind of thing and that, and if you do this you could mix this. Like a high level workflow overview. I want to learn that first.

After I get what the best workflow is, I would like to learn about the tools they are using. But I feel I should first get the bigger picture(how everything firts togheter nicely) then start learning a specific tool and not knowing how to implement it into a project.

Thanks!
 
I doubt there are any tutorials, but I did this for a fair number of years what do you want to know?

BTW sound is the last rung on the ladder. Picture is shot and often edited etc. before sound even gets a look at it. You are following a lot of creative choices and at least big picture wise you don't get to make many.

In the stickies section there is one on sound info and in that is a subsection on post. For big budget ads the flow and thinking is very close to a big budget film. Low budget ads are often really bad, or at least not very interesting/
 
Yeah, amazing work right there! I would love to get some info/training/tips from you, I am looking to edit something quite fast paced, like for example https://vimeo.com/168430786
I already shot 90% of the video, but when I got back home I realised I did not record any sound. So I have to foley everything and also record a Voice Over. And I do find sometimes some useable free clips on freesound.org But I always have trouble of mixing and blending it togheter, especially when I have 3 shots after each other, each in a different location(different soundset). How do you mix it togheter, just by reducing/increasing volume? I already know about merging layers of foley to make it sound better, but the mixing/FX part I am completely noob in.

At the moment I am just editing sound in a Resolve(not the best choice). So I might need to get a copy of Protools. But it sure will take time to learn protools. But I usually act a one man band, and do everything myself (I am a hobbyist with a full time job, and I do want to do this kind of stuff full time at some point). And Audio and editing are not my strongest points right now, so I need to upgrade those skills asap.
 
Well first thanks everyone.

Interesting ad choice. In years of doing car ads we never did an american car. Ironic since I'm now living in Detroit but american car companies have basically no sense of sound. You NEVER hear the car in an american car ad. The Buick one is typical. Lots of music slathered over everything, very slight car like sounds way in the back and maybe something for the graphics. They also often have some macho male VO. Now compare that to the BMW ad in my reels (one of the last videos). No music, lots of car sounds and no VO at all.
Then realize that the Buick is being sold basically as a muscle car and the BMW is a family SUV... Which one would you expect sound on? It always puzzled me. Here you have a bunch of cars that actually sound pretty good but the companies don't want you to hear them?

Anyway an ad like the Buick probably only had maybe 10 tracks of sound, maybe less. The sounds were probably all out of commercial libraries and they used some production sound. And odds are that the picture editor did most/ all of the SFX editing and there was no Foley.

FWI Foley is not the same as SFX. Foley (always capitalized - it's a proper name) are sounds recorded in sync to picture, sort of ADR for sounds. If you record it or find it and then put it in sync it's SFX, even if you recorded it as Foley on another show.

So the BMW ad.

We got a model of the car, sometimes you have to get the closest available but often big dealers get advanced show room models they can give test drives in and take orders. We spent most of a day recording the car. Micing for the various shots. We were probably working off of the story board so you need to cover everything because you never know what will change when they shoot. We typically cover doors engine, shifting and glove box and all the beeps etc. Everything that can make a sound we will try to cover. Then you do road work. Pass by's and doppler bys, wheel chirps and skids, big rev bys etc.

The trick to doing the road work is that engine RPM and strain is what sells "speed" so you can do all of the above on actual roads with out getting dangerous or breaking any laws.
So for this ad we were probably never going over 35mph. You need to find a quiet stretch of road with little or no traffic, ideally straight for a mile or so (so you can see if any cars are coming - not so much for safety as keeping your tracks free of other car sounds) and you need it do be at an incline, not too steep. Going up you can get high reves with some engine strain by keeping the gear low and over reving. In an automatic stick it in one of the lower numbers.

I may have mentioned skids and chirps on another thread. I'm not going to go into detail but we have NEVER done them going fast. Fast is going to get someone hurt or dead. Most skids I have recorded I was probably going under 15MPH maybe up to 20-25. You NEED a big space to practice till you know the car and how to drive in a skid. When I was growing up it was something my parents thought was important so I spent a fair amount of time in a big empty gravel parking lot practicing driving through skids. It's not rocket science but it's not something you want to learn on the road. So the guy I worked with on almost all of this had been driving as long as I but I always did the skid/ chirp passes.

Back to the BMW ad. With all the field recordings and some other stuff we had in the library, for the other cars, backgrounds etc. we built the tracks.

Probably eight or so on backgrounds, the birds and wind, church bell in the distance...

The hero car would be build from the tracks we recorded mostly. The tire bumps may have been from something else? Or we might have recorded it? Other cars and the motorcycle were from other recordings we have done, or maybe some were from libraries. About 90% of our library is recordings we or friends have done. The commercial stuff is mostly things like guns and weapons or vehicles we couldn't record.

The hard FX tracks as above are generally a lot of tracks, anywhere from 50-60 to well over a hundred. It depends on how much detail is in the shot. plus almost every "sound" is a bunch of sounds cut to fit the shot.
ie A close up of the tire on the road has all the engine sound, from a different perspective, plus tire on pavement sounds that we record. The bump sounds were either recorded or possibly we recorded a series of tire hits and then cut them to match the bumps, i don't remember. Probably some tire wind and? What ever added to the picture.

So the track count adds up because you don't want to pack it really tight because mixing becomes a nightmare. If we used 60 tracks there are probably not more than 15-30 that have sounds on them playing at the same time.

Then we would do Foley and Loop group. Foley to cover things like the footsteps, mostly here but we would also cover hand grips and such if they had been in the shot. Also if it's visible we may do some key jingles when they are visible.
Loop Group to cover the voices, mainly because it was shot in Germany and this was for an american audience so we need more "american" sounding voices.

Then we premix down to 24 tracks usually and those tracks go off to the mix facility.

Producers like to get a LOT of perks so the final mix almost always happens in a facility that can get them their expresso drinks and sushi at odd hours and basically treat them like heads of state. designers and editors generally have little or no say at the mixes so often we are back at the studio working on something else at mix time, with one DAW set up for the show so we can do "fixes" for that shot they added with out mentioning it or some other sound something that someone decided they really needed. more often it's some sound they want louder or softer that is baked into a premix so we will send that premix track with the sound pulled out so they can mess with the level.

We have been sending temp mixes and doing revisions and alternate versions all along so it's rare there is a big thing because in theory they already know what it sounds like and have signed off. Problems if they happen are usually because the who-ha at the mix has not bothered to listen to anything and is hearing it for the first time and wants changes OR the who-ha at the mix just got assigned to be there and has had nothing to do with the show up to now. Usually everything has been signed off on and the Who-ha is just there to punch the time card and get a lot of free sushi.

For a 30 second spot we were usually on from two to three weeks, flat rate. Ideally we would do the main spot say a 90 and then also do cut downs at 60 and 30 and sometimes 15.
 
In all fairness I was just one of the sound editors on these. The ads would mostly have two editors and the FedEx ad also had some Foley work by one of the Foley artists at Skywalker. So it's not like we were sole creators and of course we didn't shoot them or come up with the idea.

The Mountain Dew ad we actually did the Foley at Skywalker. They had some budget and we did 90,60, & 30's. None of which have ever played. When you heavily copy a major release film while it's still showing you should probably get your permissions in line Before you shoot and edit it. Needles to say they got slapped with a cease and desist before it was ever on the air.

The midnight spank (they are monkeys... get it?) thing was one of about 80 bits and pieces we did for the rollout of the segment. Kind of fun in that they were the most adolescent, the grosser the better things I have ever done. The one posted is one of the more PG13 of them.

A sound note on the MD spot. At the end when it's pouring into their mouths. We tried poring into cups and other containers but it just didn't sound right so we decided to actually record pouring into a mouth. Well there are just two of us so ones working the board and the other is lying on their back in the Foley room trying to pour water and hit their mouth. FYI it's really hard to do. So after my partner finishes basically self waterboarding I gave it a shot. It's very funny for the one doing the recording, less so for the one trying to hit your mouth and missing. It took a lot of tries to get what we ended up using.
 
So I threw all my footage in a clip that I shot in Tokyo. It was unscripted and all narrative is shot on a evening. First I was planning on cutting everything down to make a video of 1 minute or less and inlcude a Voice Over.
So I started editing and threw all my footage in there, and happened to throw some jazz in there on the soundtrack. (not final edited, not graded yet). I still need to create a voice over. (But first want to nail the edit somewhat in either this tempo or either a faster tempo).

So I got 2 main questions:
- Is this too slow for the online video crowd?
- What shots would you cut(as I am still in the out of vacation fase, and everything is great, until some months later it would hit me, why did I include those shots).

https://vimeo.com/171134552 pass: tokyo

thanks for all feedback!
 
Well the last two minutes of black are "slow".

It seems like a moody music video. There is no "sound", just music so it seems you should be posting this in the picture forum but?

Other than no sound, which for me doesn't work in anything but a music video, I'm just not sure what the "story" is. A lot of a guy hanging out late at night. You don't have to action hero or anything but why am I going to stay watching after a minute or so? It very much feels like the set up to a Tokyo "noir" film, but then no film...

I have a hard time seeing how VO would do much positive except maybe as one of those classic noir opening VO's, that might work.

What I was left with was why did someone make this? Not as a negative comment but really the question why?

So if it's a test shot and you are going for a modern take on a noir opening I think the VO etc will help and that would answer the "why".

If it's supposed to stand on it's own? Then for me you need to give me something. It's not so avant-garde visually that it works for me that way. It's not tied to the music so much that it feels like a real music video. And it doesn't have enough story for a narrative film.

If it's not a noir intro test then it seems like an extended camera test.

Personally I have shot some stuff like this and I learned a lot from doing them but I seriously doubt anyone else would spend the time to watch them, or be happy they did.

The "online crowd" I suspect has a much shorter attention span than an old fart like me so my best guess is it would be way too slow for them, but?

Side note, you do know you can't use music you haven't gotten the rights to? If this isn't royalty free you may get a takedown notice if you post it publicly. If this is RF then I would love to know who's it is because i know of things I could use it for.
 
haha, thanks for you reply! I was in a bit of a hurry earlyer on, I should have stated that I want to create some foley/sounds for this piece. As I want to think of the edit first, if I want it fast paced or slow paced, which also has a big impact on the audio that I will need.

Well why did I make this video?
1: I was on vacation and wanted to shoot a vacation video, but was trying to do something different, as most vacation video's show the same highlights of a city. So I tried to something more narrative (but it was mostly unplanned, and just shooting one evening and trying to find cool locations).
2: Testing out my new camera the 5D III (ML RAW, why is there no sound, cause I forgot to enable it in the ML settings apparantly, only found that out when I got home, but heck the more of a challenge it is for me)

So I got this model @ last minute and I just pulled some idea's out of my hat. So thats why there isnt a real big story going on. So I thought I could fix that by doing a Noir Voice Over, good you picked that up. (Inspiration is Cowboy Bebop and Sin City for this video, him beeing a bounty hunter on a day off, but he gets a invitation to this place, where he gets an assignment). So at this point I arranged the footage in a way I could do a voice over, but I feel that some parts are too long and I need to cut a lot of footage to make it more snappyer. + this is my first video on Resolve so on the meantime I am learning resolve studio on the go as I am editing this video. I was also thinking about shooting some extra footage back at home, with a female model which I could use for some flashbacks(love of his life kinda thing).

So thanks for all your input :)
 
Um, so this clip is now 10 sec long? I would say too short ;~)

Seriously though there isn't anything anyone can say about something this short, by the time your listening it's over. And you run the risk of people just ignoring further posts. If you get a minute or more done and want some feedback that is a useful length, much less and you are wasting peoples time.

Since you are going for the noir opening style you should look at a few. They actually don't use a lot of sound often. Partly because they were done at a time when it was all cut on mag (time consuming) and they all had very low budgets.

They would always cover backgrounds because with optical tracks you can never go silent or bad things happen. So even "silence" was a sound. The classic "silence" sound is "Yellow Sky". It is a bunch of room tone from a sound stage (I think a Goldwyn one) that was recorded for the film of the same name. There are a few others but loops of those room tones were put anyplace there was "silence" so the optical reader wouldn't freak out.
 
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