I recently mentioned in a Facebook post this project that I worked on with film maker Tim Pierce. This was a passion project, filmed while he was travelling through Thailand. Early discussions led to the goal of creating a really textural, detailed sound mix that would give the whole piece an extra dimension, so my first approach was to work through each scene, creating atmos tracks and foley sounds for all the pictures.
Now... sometimes our initial ideas seem great at the time, but down the line things just don't feel right when we step back and look at the big picture. It's a brutal thing to turn around and look at the piece objectively, and truly realise that the approach was just wrong for the feel of the piece. In all productions, the emotion has to come first, and the truth was that the constant bombardment of sounds was actually distracting from the images and feel!
Dang! (bangs head on desk)
So there were 2 options - strip it all out and just go with images and music, or find some way to incorporate the effects without standing on the emotion's toes. I wanted to try the second option (over killing my babies) so came up with some ideas...
The first was to try and push the effects BACK in the mix. A good way to do this is using EQ to adjust frequency content. Because in the real world things get more muffled, or lose high frequency content as they move further away from us (as well as losing low frequency content) we can roll off the highs to push things back in the mix. I often do this to push things back, and bring things forward, kind of like a pan knob for depth. Of course I didn't want all the effects to be far away, I wanted some to come out to the foreground (like the bird flaps and effects at 0:30) so I automated the frequency cutoff to give the effects that movement.
In general the EQ rolls off everything above about 2KHz, with some dips going down to 1KHz, and some peaks going up to about 5Khz.
Here's a screen shot of the FX bus EQ automation, showing how the frequency cut off moves around to push and pull effects.
I also used a big ol' reverb over the whole SFX bus to make the effects seem more dreamy, which is something I've never done before!
This is probably not the most exciting thing to read about, because it's not a case where sound jumps out and amazes you, but I found it a real challenge to come up with ways of making the effects LESS outstanding, yet still be there to add some value and depth to the images. It just shows that it's not only about choosing the right effects and getting everything to sound perfect - sometimes you have to think outside the box to make the sound work well with the pictures.
Thanks Tim for challenging me on this one!
