Over the last couple of months I've worked on some really great video projects, one of the highlights being creating the sounds of a yeti ferociously devouring an old lady! That was fun!
Here's a more recent project I mixed for Simon Waterhouse. It's a video for Ground Effect clothing who organised a team of volunteer workers to build the 'missing link' mountain bike track near Castle Hill in the Southern Alps. Simon went along and beautifully documented the project, and then the riding of the new track. Gotta say he did a fantastic job, as you can see in the video, and this just inspired me all the more to do a great job with the mix.
Mix Notes:
First job was to get all the dialogue cleaned up, compressed and EQ'd so that we had a nice even volume and tone across the whole video. Once again, Simon did a great job recording too - all the dialogue nicely captured on lapel mics - so that made my job a bit easier.
Next I added atmospheres to the backgrounds, including rivers, hillsides, and bush scenes.
Then the bike scenes! Only a couple of the mountain bike shots actually had bike sounds, so every bike sound you hear was placed in time and adjusted so it looks and sounds real. Simon had recorded various stereo bike sounds, which I went through, labelled and categorised so that I could drop in the appropriate sounds when needed. Of course, a lot of them needed to be edited, time stretched and beefed up to work well.
I wanted to emphasise some of the great slow motion shots, so created different sound design elements to enhance the speed, grit and power of the bike movement. Here are just a couple of examples of things I did:
The roaring wind blow effect that follows the bike in it's dust cloud.
This was created with two different wind noises. One was a classic whispy polar kind of wind, and the other was a low frequency rumble noise. By simply automating the volume to swell at the right point it gave the impression of a gust of wind. I also distorted the higher wind noise a little to give it a bit more grit.
Flying gravel shots.
Some of the shots such as the one below showed gravel being thrown out by the bike's tyres, but the bike recordings I had just didn't quite have the close up gravelly sound I needed. So I had to create it. The image below shows the 3 tracks I used - the bike recording in blue, then the 2 effects above it. First a nice 'whoosh' effect gave the shot more movement, but I was still missing the gravel. I had to think outside the square because I didn't have any 'mountain bike throwing gravel' effects!
My solution was to take a 'leather shoes on gravel' footstep effect and with a bit of editing and time stretching I made it long enough to give me the gravel I needed to add to the other effects. I also used this effect on some of the other close up gravelly shots. Worked out pretty good in the end!
Graphics.
I also added sound design to all the graphics, by making a really close recording of a pencil scribbling on paper. This was quite heavily compressed, noise reduced and the distorted to give the effect you hear on the video.
Lots of fun and opportunity to be creative on this project, and I've only touched on some of the things I did to enhance the sound, and in turn, over all impact of the video. Thanks again to Simon Waterhouse from Resonate, check out more of his work over at his company's website!