Major Project - Welcome Home

After deciding to attempt music mixing for this final project versus doing a sound design, I was looking forward to seeing how well I could do at a new area of skill for myself. That will have to wait sadly for summer to play around with, thanks to the life of an EMF student. In helping recording sound for a Film 3 group, as well as being the second editor and sound mixer, I had a long week of staring at a student film. I knew this film so much, that by the time it came to trying to music mix, my mind literally was drained of creativity.

This made me decide at crunch time to just submit this film "Welcome Home" as my final project. The initial challenge right off the bat was the fact that I had to essentially re-mix what was already mixed. Since my group was the last to film, our post production time was very streamlined, and as much as it pained me I did my mixing in Final Cut Pro. This just allowed the other editor and I to make changes as the director would give us her feedback and not effecting my Pro Tools Session.

The process I took from recreating my mix, was I wrote down all the time code for all my sounds and tracks that I had in place. In my Final Cut sequence, I stripped everything but the production dialog, as well as some extra production audio sounds. Each other sound to help this workflow out faster, I exported out as a wav file. Essentially my Pro Tools session was becoming a puzzle to recreate. This experience was fun considering the fact for some reason some of my time code marks were off by a second or two, causing me to match some things by hand. In this translation I forgot to export out two lines of dialog. This was not the end of the world since I had all the production audio on my hard drive from my recorder. I'm just happy that I was able to sync them up without the aide of any slate within Pro Tools.

It was nice getting a little extra time to mix this project, since I had a chance to get a few foley sound created. The time on the set didn't allow this to occur as much as I wanted, and in the editing process I was rushed too much to spend the time with foley. I feel the few sounds I added in, do help the film more so then the one that will be screened at the Film 3 screenings. I would however want to go back and add a bunch of footsteps sounds throughout the piece.

The hardest scene that I had to mix, and one that I was surprised turned out better then I thought it would, is the exterior pharmacy scene at the end. We unfortunately were on a main street of Bel Air, and could not get the road blocked off. Putting this on the top that we were filming at rush hour time, created a lot of car noise. People being people of course would love to scream out loud while filming as well as honk horns. The production audio amb behind the dialog is very noisy, and with shot changes, is almost inconsistent. I recall doing a little noise reduction on the noisier shots in Soundtrack Pro. The amb I recorded on set did help out the dialog a little bit, but there is still some work to be done, even if it has to be ADR. The initial wide shot is also one that I had to replace the audio with. I was not given a chance to get close enough for their audio, and the way the other shots were done, was in consistent with the wide shot so we couldn't use a closer medium wide shot, which had better audio. Luckily the girl Caroline had her face turned so you couldn't see your lips. The line from James I had play with his head turn, his lips move very slightly. I notice that it doesn't match up, but it seems to pass for people until I tell them.

Effects that I used on this project in Pro Tools included some EQ'ing for the cell phone ringing, and voice mail as well as making the parents sound muffled coming in from the front door. The effect I was most proud of is my use of delay at the conclusion of the film. This was originally to be a line from the main character, but with the advice of Plow we changed it to his girlfriend's, which also worked out better because her delivery was a lot nicer. Our final shot of the film was very anti climatic looking, and I always had the idea to make it end with the line over black. Now that I had a creepier line, I decided to play with some delay and it really adds a ghostly tone to her voice. As mentioned earlier I also did some noise reduction within Soundtrack Pro since my Pro Tools does not have that plugin. It really did help clean up some of the audio that was recorded.

I think my favorite part of the whole mix is the whole end sequence with James coming to the realization that his parents and girlfriend are dead. I always thought this scene would be best with bare minimum sound. Of course the heartbeat was attempted, but was too cheesy. I found a really cool LFE rumble that really effected and made the scene work for me. My second editor wanted a ear ringing sound, and that is a sound I thought of before. I just felt it would be too much for that long duration. We came to a compromise that I think works better where it rumbles with a ear ringing fading in slightly, and that pierces the ears at the end until the final cut to black. These textures complement each other nicely and I feel is the strongest moment of the film.

This was a great experience overall, I do want to get back in and add more AMB to the interior scenes, as they are still too quiet even with the room tone. The music choices really do help out the films emotion, yes I realize they are a little cheeseball at times, but this overly cheesy works for this film at least for myself. Maybe its the fact I accepted that this is not a great film, that I don't mind this factor. I was trying to push for the Benny Hill theme for the final sequence, and it scarily works, but sadly that is not the tone of the film. Maybe in a future remix, I will turn this into a comedy.