Point & Click:Week 1

Week 1

Monday Session 12-3-18 (8 Hours)

Today we received the final edit of the short film titled "The Point & Click of No Return" which will be taking up my time for the next few weeks. The director provided us with a protools session containing all the location recordings synched up with the video that will become the final version of the film.

This session is a great resource however, upon transferring to our HDDs and launching we found the session was improperly created. This lead to us having unlinked audio files and missing dialogue.

To rectify this problem we copied all audio files from the directors HDD onto a fresh hard drive and saved a copy of the session as well. Then when we open the new session we took the time to re-link every audio file manually to ensure that all files where correctly registered in the DAW session.

In doing this we also found some limitations of protools not being able to extract audio from certain file types the way the directors editing software was. To compensate for this meant finding the offending files and converting the audio to WAV files then re-importing these audio files into the session.

By the end of our session we had a working DAW session and began work on creating out asset list. During this session we decided that the location sound was unusable and that we were to create a comped session with an audio file for each person as a reference for the ADR before next weeks sessions (recording ADR). We also meticulously went through the reference video and created our complete audio asset list. This was split into categories of ADR, Foley, Atmos, Sound Design and backing track.

Lastly we discussed to our project plan regarding session bookings and made sure the whole team was on board regarding the timely booking or sessions to secure our sessions and keep the project on track.

Wednesday Session 14-3-18 (4 hours)

Today was a shorter session as bookings were limited and we were a few members down as they were recording another project. So it was the director and myself. We discussed the theme and intentions of the film as well as putting the required backing tracks in place. The pieces chosen for this film by the director were really great all be it in mp3 format. These pieces were by Kai Engel and are free for use in our project. I was eager to get into this as this is something I feel will be where my career heads in the future as I love putting songs to visuals.

While placing the tracks I was very careful to choose parts of the song with big impact to sync up with important moments in the story. This was a fun process however, it lead to some unique problems. The main problem was one of the songs wasn't long enough for its use. I had to find a way to extend the length of the song without being noticeable by the audience.

After lining up the main drop with an important frame in the piece I found during the breakdown a natural repeat point and thats where I added the cross fade. This worked perfectly and Jamie (the director) was very impressed and we could really see the possibilities for this film and decided I needed to compose some synth lines to tie the backing tracks together into a seamless piece of audio.

At the end of this session I created 3 versions of the session Master, Foley and ADR. This will allow us to work on seperate sessions at the same time and as they are all created from the original we can import all finalised work into the master session to reduce clutter and size of the final master session.

Reflection

This week was great. We had a really productive week and stuck to our production plan to the letter. Having received the final edit of the film on time everyones motivation stepped up a notch. This is a great audio team we all have out own individual roles and are on the same page with this project.

Communication will be key for this project as well as session management. We put our heads together and decided on a naming convention on year, month, date, followed by the title. For example:

180316 P&C Foley

This is the naming convention we will maintain throughout the project and I think this tactic will be very beneficial as the project progresses.