Ambience

What are the three main types of sound?

• Music
• sound effects 
• dialogue 

What is mono and stereo sound?

Mono means 'one'. So when sound is being recorded there is only one recording of sound. This can sometimes work well depending on what you're trying do with the sound. Stereo usually works well when recording ambience (background noise). Because the sound is being recorded multiple times resulting in it being played in both ear pieces for headphones. When noise is panning in a recording it is noticeable with headphones. This can make experiences more immersive. Because mono records audio once it is mostly used for dialogue. It's common though for a lot of movies and music to be recorded as a stereo.  

Ambience

I recorded ambience noises in multiple locations to compare the different sound each place has to offer in the college. I recorded these ambience's near the road, on the college stairs and in the gym.

There was quite a bit of reverb when recording on the stairs. This is something you may notice, these stairs travel to all the floors in the college so that's why.  

Along with the stairs when we recording in the gym there was a bit of reverb (a lot of reverb), you may notice that in this short clip.When filming for ambience in a gym you may want to keep this reverb. 

The things you may hear in this track are: cars, ATM beeping sounds, phone rings, construction (digging) and random beeping sounds. When trying to think of what ambience sounds would appear in the background of a city these were the things that came up in my head. SFX artists do this as a job, putting together digital sounds to make a convincing atmosphere.. 

Here I used these sound effects along with some other sounds to make it feel like you're in a city. I used stereo for these recordings so you can hear sounds differently on each ear. I'm very happy with how I made this. Download the file to try out my ambience of a city. 

Mortal Kombat - Foley artists

Foley artists create sound effects fro movies using everyday objects.They do this because sometimes the real sound feels underwhelming for what the scene is trying to offer and is substituted with a different sound. This video will better describe what a foley artist does. 

The class and I became Foley artists for the day and tried to equip the fatality scene from the game franchise Mortal Kombat with some sound effects. For the bone breaking we snapped leeks, for the goo sound when the character takes her legs out of Alien we used a watermelon. It's these funny objects that create the perfect sounds to go with the scene.  

Using sounds made from different vegetables and various other objects we created sound effects for a Mortal Kombat fatality scene. People who do this as a job for movies and tv shows are known as Foley artists. These people create sounds out of different objects. Sometimes when filming you may not get the sound you want to get, making some serious scenes seem almost laughable. These artists record their sounds in a studio to get a more suitable sound to go with the scene. 

Here me and my class did just that. For the bone breaking we snapped some celery. I used this for the scene, check it out by clicking on the video, it works really well. I'm very pleased with how the sound turned out, I think it matches the video quite well. 

When making this I layered quite a few sound effects over each other to get a more impactful punch or kick sound to go with the video.

Here as you can see I've used multiple sound effects on top of each other. I think it works quite well. I think it makes the ambience sound quite realistic to what you'd hear if you were in a similar environment. Instead of the sounds just stopping and waiting for another sound to come in, one by one. I'm very happy with the outcome and I learnt a lot about how can create different ambiences for future scenes I'll be filming in the future.   

ADR

How many ways can voices be heard:

• single voice dialogue 
• multiple voice
• crowd
• voiceover/narrator
• ADR...

Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) is a voiceover
which has been re-recorded in the studio after the film
shoot. These studio recordings are used and placed over the audio of the shots.

Automated dialogue sound replacement - This is when sound is taken away and replaced. This often happens in musical movies when an actor hasn't got a good enough singing voice. In this scenario the studio get's a singer to record a track and they use it over the actors mouths in the scene so it looks like they're singing. 

The process of ADR editing involves the ADR editor to review the scene and find what section needs to be recorded again in the studio so that nothing is wrong with the scene. If the viewers can't tell there was a sound that was recorded then the editors have done their job right. 

This is an example of ADR fixing I had to do in class. Because their voices weren’t clear and the sound in general was poor I had to put their voices over one another and introduce other sounds in to the scene. This includes footsteps and bashes against the wall. This task helped me learn a lot when using ADR and fixing this scene. I know that sound is a crucial factor to consider when filming a scene but maybe if I were to mess up with the sound and I didn't have time to re-shoot I could always record lines of dialogue in the studio. But now I know if I ever need to do add dialogue if anything happened to the original line maybe if it wasn't heard or if any file was corrupted etc. I found this task quite enjoyable in doing. I was able to add movement sounds boosting the atmosphere and quality of the film.