Sound for Screen Week 5 – Up 1

This week, Jessica said it was best to choose clips without lines, I decided to switch a film. I settled on the 2009 Pixar film Up, an animated film directed by Peter Hans Docter. 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen travels to Paradise Falls in his house equipped with balloons, inadvertently taking a young stowaway.

I chose a clip that I really liked, a four minute clip that depicts Carl and Ellie’s life after their marriage until Ellie’s death with images and music. I was curious to see what this clip would sound like with ambient sounds and sound effects, and I believe it would be a good clip for a Foley exercise. Because I really like the music, I decided to keep it.

Jiachen and I booked Foley Studio for this Thursday night and we decided that one of us would record in Foley Studio while the other would operate Pro Tools in Composition Studio.

Given the amount of Foley needed for this clip, I also rented some equipment from the Kit Room to take home, with the intention of trying to set up an extremely simple recording environment at home.

I did my best to Foley the sounds that appeared in the picture, but there were a few sounds that I couldn’t Foley. The sound of the parrot on Ellie’s shoulder in the park, the sound of a flat tyre, and the sound of a tree breaking down a house. I used sounds from the sound library to create these parts.

I also went outside to record some sounds for this production, as I needed footsteps on the grass. I also recorded some outdoor ambient sounds in the park, but unfortunately there are no birds call. I added bird calls to some scenes separately, because these scenes were in summer.

One thing about the equipment, I’m not sure if it was the ESI U46 XL USB Recording Interface that was the problem. I borrowed the Sennheiser MKH 416 microphone and I could only connect it to my computer via the Recording Interface. When I turned on Pro Tools I found that I could only record in 44.1khz session, but I usually use 48khz to work. So I had to open a separate 44.1khz project to record Foley, then bounce separately those tracks into 48khz and import them into my original session to continue production.

I marked all the sounds I needed to record in the session. In addition to this, I wrote them all down, the first column with the time scale when the sound appeared, followed by the sound that needed to be recorded and the props needed.