Post-production stage of sound – Other parts

The part after the title of the film, Mike and Jake are on the phone. This part was difficult for me. The script hadn’t Jake’s lines in the first half of the call. The director think a full dialogue would be too much of a waste of time, as there wasn’t any important information in the first half either. But it was strange. It was obvious that the first half of the call was also a conversation, but there was no Jake’s voice. And then Jake’s voice came out of nowhere in the second half. So, the question came back to me. The director asked me if I could take the second half of Jake’s voice and put it into the first half, and then let this voice become blurred. I tried some familiar plug-ins in Protools at first and failed. So I asked Jose, who told me to try Cecilia. But I wasn’t familiar with the software, I got a half-finished product. I failed again, but I got inspired. I found a similar plug-in in Protools and got the sound I wanted. It’s not quite what I had in mind at first, but the result is actually ok.

There is a sound effect I used three times in this film. The first time I used it to bring out the name of the film. The second time was the transition between the two lenses of Mike before he smashes the printer. The third time was seeing the ghost in the toilet. I think a spooky wind is standard in horror films.

Next, Mike comes out of the toilet and walks downstairs to see the printer he smashed up earlier appear intact. This is the high point of the film’s mood and pace. I didn’t contribute much to this section, the main sound of this section is given to the composer. I just added a light flashing sound and a processed microwave sound. But I adjust the speed of the light flash to make it more in tune with the rhythm of the light flash in the picture. After the speaker image, I make the original music transfer to speaker music within the screen. This way can make the emergence of this music reasonable.

Next come to the exterior section. As mentioned in the previous blog, we had to option for post compositing here due to a number of factors. The actor didn’t have the extra time to go into the studio to record ADR, so they finished recording the vocals in the quiet of the room the night they finished shooting on location. They also recorded the ambient sound for me on location. There is a bit difference between the sound of people talking outdoors and people talking indoors, and here I chose to add reverb to change the spatiality of the vocals. At first, the director didn’t want to give the sounds for the two victims, because this was a memory section. But after the first version was done, we felt too strange. And then the voices of the victim’s side were added.

At the end of the scene, it’s dawn. I didn’t want to add too much to this part. Two bird calls and an ending music would have been enough. Everything goes back to normal, back to peace.