Minor Project: Ghostbusters 2 ADR

Even after turning in this ADR project in during Sound in Media, I knew there was still a lot to be done to the sound mix. It is just amazing how after a year and my knoweldge, not to mention better headphones, I have picked up on a lot of things that needed to be taken care of in re-mixing this project. The biggest issue I knew to fix was the lack of ambiance. This usually is where I get the most stressed in trying to create the best sense of space. I did have some alright city ambiance going on, but decided to follow the advice and replace them with a louder ambiance track. I didn't want to go too overbearing, and still put a few horns for the city sounds. It is improved in that respect and there is more presence of a city that is alive with my new sounds found.

The ambiance for the party was probably my biggest struggle to figure out for this project. It may of been due to the large number of kids that are on screen or just trying to remember what a children's party like that sounded like. I added a new party horn sound along with various children laughing and balloon sounds. This didn't seem like enough so I found the best ambient recording of children laughing and playing. The one thing I don't like about this recording is the amount of reverb that is already on the track which was a little distracting and tough for me to figure out a decent solution to remove. I did put some reverb on the track to try to blend it better, and kept the volume low enough before it became to inaudible. While I'm not particularly sold on it working for this piece, it does so in parts and most of all it sounds more natural with it on then if I removed it for the other recordings I found.

One of the changes I made which I really felt improved the piece was my music choice for the beginning scene in New York. As much as I loved the E.S. Posthumus track I used, I looked for another one just to create a different feeling. First I looked at another E.S. Posthumus track that was used in the rough cut, but the more I listened I realized in terms of the mix it was too bombastic and overpowerered my ohter sounds. Moving on from them, I went to my next favortie epic instrumental band of Two Steps from Hell for their track "Hearts of Courage." It just worked a lot better then any of the previous music selections and really created the exciting mood I was hoping for.

My use of Reason for this project came in the form of adding some musical texture to the hallway portion before the party is revealed. I really was trying to over-dramatize the scene before the joke kicks in that the Ghostbusters are essentially a party clown. Reason had a bunch of nice impact sounds that really worked for what I wanted. All of my patches were found under the NN-XT instrument. Not only in the impacts, but also this new engine sound that I played under the other one I had to create a noisier car. Also Reason was used for the Foley on the Ecto-1 doors that I used the sequencer in Pro Tools to match up.

Other improvements I made was to place some EQ on the ADR tracks, sync up some of the more noticebale lines that were off. There were a few that I feel like I should of gotten recorded better when I first did this project. But I made the best I could without getting back in the labs. When I did get stuck on this project I would reference back to the scene in Ghostbusters 2, where ironically I found that I actually have more ambient sounds then the actual film. And to the cherry on top of all this re-mixing was sampling the actual Ecto-1 siren into my project, which really adds more legitimacy to what I did. I feel like I could spend many more hours and days mixing this project, but overall I am pleased with the improvements made. It sounds a lot better then it has prior and maybe this will be accepted more by the Ghostbusters community.