Post Mortem - Coraline sound replacement

We finished! Yay! what a good feeling to finish my freest post project and also one of the first major projects for the year. It was nice to get back in to a bust year with a challenge. This project has also sparked a new interest for me working with post production. I am planning on working on another post project in the coming weeks.

So, How did it go? I'd say quite well considering a huge learning experience was had. This process implemented a totally different style of work flow that I was used to. Working with another person to make sounds and edit them according to our sonic vision. This worked well for us through most of the process. However, there was a few times that we had sounds we needed to create and disagreed on how they sounded. This is a fair point to consider as there are any variations of a lot of sounds. For instance a door closing can sound different in so many situations. You have to consider the environment, weight of the door material of the door, etc. Sometimes these things can be hard to see in the scene you are replacing the sound for especially starting the sound from scratch for an animation. So we had to play a round with a few sounds in this regard. As creative directors we had to refer back to the original production as well as come to decisions together about sounds like these. Apart from these sounds taking up more time to create we stuck to our plan very well.

We planned our time line so we would have the projected in the mixing stage two weeks before it was due in case there were things we needed to re do. We ended up having to fix some ADR as there was bleed from the original in the first few takes we took. This was a fair bit of a set back for us as the initial session took 4 hours to capture the ADR. We decided to juts give it a go. We took to a studio the afternoon we discovered the problem and got it re done! This was a big achievement for us as we were very stressed. This pushed the mixing stage back a week so we only had a week to finish the mixing. Apart from this set back the rest of the time line was as well planned. We added one extra recording session to perfect the foley and FX in the second week of production but this was the only other change. Just over a week was enough time however for mixing. Something I wish we had done was seek more opinions on the project. After spending 5 weeks on a project it is sometimes hard to make decisions about what could be improved over all. This is inclusive of music projects also.

The feed back we received was mostly to do with the ADR. It was mostly to do with the delivery of the 'Other Mothers' laugh at the start. After trying to replicate the laugh in the original and failing, we decided to take a different approach on the delivery of this line. Instead of delivering the line as loud and evil we decided to try and make it more calm and subtly evil. This is what we went with in the final cut however most of the feed back we got was about how it didn't quite fit. We decided to add some processing on to this line to make it fit into the environment more. We added a little bit of distortion and a lot of reverb in this environment. Instead of making the laugh prominent we pushed it back in the mix more to try and adapt it into the environment. I thin that the reverb helped a lot and we also added a delay to make the space seem bigger in this section of the animation. I think after making these adjustments to this line we were able to convey what we were trying to achieve a little better. However, I think this line could have been delivered more effectively and we should have taken the time to re- record it. Apart from this set back with the ADR having bleed in it and this line not being delivered effectively we stuck to our time line well!

Our plan was very helpful when it came to doing a new section of the project as we had never worked on a process like this and it was a new work flow to how I'd usually work. For instance just having some guide to how we should be panning our weeks and how the foley and ADR recording sessions would be run was a very helpful tool. As you would have read in my previous bogs on the project we ran the sessions as producers and as artists. Usually if I were recording a band or playing a session set I would always be engineer and producer. However for this project having to be directed and think about directing the project was a new skill we had to work on as a team.

This was something else interesting I learnt about foley and post production work flows. You need at least two people to pull it off successfully. Even with two of us both having a vision for the out come but also having to be actors was at times difficult. It really made me appreciate this style of production and now every time I'm watching a movie or an animation I can really think about how much work has gone on in the back ground. It's a really cool skill I'd like to improve in the future.

Some key creative process that we used in this project include foley production, voice acting and of course re creating a space in post production. I think that making creative choices about our voice acting was the most difficult part of this whole production. For instance I had to replicate a more mature woman voice than my own. We used a pitch shorter to pitch the voice down a semi tone to give it a slightly deeper tone than my voice. We also used distortion to distress the sound. This was effective but not as effective as if we had have got someone the right age to play this role. To create the space of the 'Other Mother' voice we used a lot of revere this made the voice sound more distant. We used a short delay in the spider web scene to also help create a large environment.

In some of my previous blogs I have touched on specific sounds and how we created the space and environment sounds fro them. For example the foot steps on the spider web we layered two sounds one for impact and one for the metal tone of the web. We then layered a long reverb and short delay to create some space and depth to the sound. Another sound when editing the foley was the body thumps and door slams. We got this sound pretty correct in the foley studio with the right depth and impact so all we needed was the reverb of the tunnel. We used a similar one to the spider web only due to the frequency of this sound being much lower than the tinnier sound of the web the reverb is much lower and duller.

We used reverb and delay to achieve the space on most aspects of the foley as the space is quite large that we were recreating. It was a cool thing to learn how to use bigger sounding reverbs to create ambience rather then for musical purposes. We were able to use more of the crazy sounding verbs such as the 'infinite verb' in Space. It gave us a lot of room for experimentation.

Positive things that happened while working on this production were mostly to do with Carissa and I working really closely at every session. We worked on everything together bar two aspects of the project. This was great as we could then discuss our ideas about how certain techniques for recording, editing and delivering performance would work; while in each others company. Rather than giving each other roles we decided we should put our heads together for all aspects. The only two things we did separately were the score and editing ADR. I have had a lot more composition experience than Carissa so we discussed out vision for the sound scape then I tried my best to produce it. While I was doing this Carissa was editing the ADR from the previous nights session as she is very quick at editing in protools. While we worked on these things separately we were working side by side so we could each ask the other persons opinion at each stage.

Something that we need to work on for next time would be our foley recording as I mentioned previously we has some issues with bleed from the head phones playing back to the person recording in the live room of the original track. This was due to lack of attention to detail in both the live room and console room. As we were working really fast through the relocation of the ADR it was very hard to hear the bleed during the studio session. However once we listened in head phones it was very obvious the bleed of the foley and ADR playing in the back ground. We quickly rouble shooted this and re- record as we needed. Next time working on a project where the artist is listening to a scratch track or a clip like ours I am going to double and triple check in the console room that there is no bleed. I feel like we learnt a lot from making this mistake as we then were able to work quickly to resolve it and really learnt how to play to one of both our strengths which is time management. Another thing that isn't so much negative but something we need to work on in future was the realistic editing of the ADR. I feel like we didn't quite nail the environment sound and the space and distance between the characters and the camera. This could be improved by capturing the ADR with some natural distance. For instance using a shot gun mic in a location that might replicate the environment. I had this idea that we could have recorded the ADR in the spider web section in a stair well to replicate the reverb tone. This will all come with practice of sound replacement and post production. I hope that next time I do a project like this I can think out side the box a little bit when it comes to replicating environments and space.

Over all I am happy with the out come of this project and I am keen to progress my knowledge in post production techniques. I have an up coming project for a drag queen documentary where I will be able to practice post production in a different way compared to animation. Stay tuned for my progression on this cool piece of media!

I hope you enjoy the final cut of this project!