From the course: Video Post Production for Low-Budget Films

Recording FX

From the course: Video Post Production for Low-Budget Films

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Recording FX

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- As visual storytellers, we always have to think about how can we bring a story to life, and sound design is one of the most important but often overlooked ways we can do just that. In the same way that you can establish the mood of a scene through images, the same can be said for sound. (clanging) (grunts) (panting) (groans) (rattling) - (mumbling) I'm losing control, stick. - A rich, layered soundscape is essential to immerse the viewer in a scene. To be a little technical for a second, in a film, there are two types of sound. The sounds that seem to occur naturally within the film. (crashing) - Hey. - Like they happen on screen or are implied to exist just out of the frame. (breaking) The other type are the sounds that don't naturally occur on set like narration or dramatic sound effects. A great example is the shrieking sound that goes with the knife in Psycho. (suspenseful music) (screaming) As you begin to create the soundscape for your film, a great place to start is with a stock sound effects library. (water splashing) (motor running) They generally can offer great results and shortcuts. (glass breaking) (footfalls) - What's great about sound effect libraries is you can have access to so many different types of sounds that you would just never have the resources. - Right. - But a limitation for that is it's not a sound that you've recorded, so it may not necessarily match up exactly the length of the action in your film, like it may need to be modified slightly to work. - Sometimes, to accurately and convincingly complement your project, you might need foley. Foley is the art of recording that creates sounds to complement or replace the sound recorded on set. Foleying is an excellent means of supplying the subtle sounds that productions often miss. - The first thing you have to do is identify where there should be sound. Like if you see the character interacting with some type of object, there should be a sound there because there's usually a sound there in real life. So you wanna try to identify all of those, and then get us close to realism if that's your goal. - For our film, we relied heavily on sound effects to create an ominous atmosphere. (creaking) We were extremely fortunate to have a very talented audio engineer on our crew from the onset on the project. So that made a word of difference for us. (creaking) Rather than creating the sounds after the fact in a studio, we actually spent a lot of time on location capturing the natural sounds of the environment and staging certain moments. (glass ringing) (metal clanging) - [Voiceover] Cheers. (glass tinkling) - After we finished taking care of those big sound effects, we started adding environmental sounds beneath the film's action. We often refer to these as sound bits. Unless you're spending time in a soundproof room, we almost never experience absolute silence. So our films should reflect that to make them believable. Be obsessive about creating a super rich acoustic world with individual effects for everything. This is production value for your film that can cost very little or close to nothing more than your time and effort, and is absolutely worth it.

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