The sound design this time around was a lot more subdued than in my first piece. everything was a little more muted yet, still fully engaging. I again used Adobe Audition to create the mix as it is really easy to use and I can edit to picture which is great. This is my workspace:
As you can see I can have the finished video sitting up in the top left whilst I edit and mix the sound assets in the editor section. I did some subtle and really interesting things with this mix and experimented with perspective. I wanted to just add texture and interest to every aspect of the piece and so instead of having the sound effects sit front and centre they all sort of reside behind the sound of the kettle boiling which is slightly muffled to create more of a wash rather than the actual realistic sound.
As you can see there aren't actually that many sound effects used, that was intentional to let the music and imagery really breathe and speak for themselves. One thing I did use this time was a soft "whoosh" sound effect. I noticed that the transition effect of my body wiping the frame seemed to be lacking something. Initially I thought that it was lacking footsteps and realistic tones to match the action. That helped but wasn't quite right and after some experimentation I found that a whoosh was perfect.
I needed to exaggerate the truth somewhat and extend past the image to really bring it to life. I have a sound effects pack downloaded from Video Copilot and I combined two of the whoosh sound effects that reside within it to create a breathy, airy and bassy whoosh sound that accompanies me wiping the frame. The result works magnificently and is very Edgar Wright which is perfect.
I also played around with panning which I really enjoyed and was the cherry on top of the cake. This is a closer view of the editor to help explain:
The blue lines that are keyframes in the actual green boxes for the sound represent the panning for the layer. How far left or right the sound is panned in stereo space. The kettle begins panned to right and the guitar to the left but when I pass through the frame the anatomy and composition of the shots flips. This was another subtle cue to suggest change and evolution on the visual front but I noticed an opportunity to expand upon that idea on the audial front too.
As I pass through frame and I introduce the whooshes I also pan all the effects to the opposite side. All the physical sounds (the whooshes, kettle and tea pouring), pan from left to right and the music track pans from right to left. This is all to subtly reenforce the feeling of confusion and mystery by flipping the world into the opposite direction. I think this effect really pulls the whole video together and the sound in general really finishes everything off really nicely.
The next post will be the finished product so you can hear it all there.
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