5.1 Mixing stage for final assignment

This week I booked the Composition Studio to start the 5.1 mix.

There won’t be much difference in sound elements between the 5.1 version and the stereo version, but the orientation of each sound in the 5.1 version will be clearer than in the stereo version. As I mentioned in my proposal, one of the main reasons for choosing to make the 5.1 version was because of a clip in the middle of the film. I drew that idea down. The clip starts with the man running, and before the man stops there are four snippets of memories, which are interspersed in a disorderly and rapid fashion. As shown, the sound of the first memory picture is in the left channel and the second in the right channel, rotating clockwise. After the man stops and stands to catch his breath, more fragments of memories emerge, a time when the images keep switching rapidly between reality and memory. All the voices rotate clockwise to converge in the middle. 

In addition to this clip, there is also a long reminiscence. When I was working on this section, I discussed it with the director and he said that he wanted the man to be wrapped up in the environment, and that he was trying to move forward, but someone was always going to walk past him. When I made the stereo version I treated this section by amplifying the volume of the crowd and adding reverb. Then with version 5.1, this part of the wrap could be more pronounced. At the time of filming I recorded a lot of ambient material on location. My current idea is to pick out four ambient tracks and put them in the four directions (L,R,RS,LS).

I knew I could change the stereo session directly to a 5.1 session, but I was worried that there were some plug-ins that were not available on the Composition Studio mac, so I chose another method to create a 5.1 session. First I bounced the sound tracks from the stereo version one by one into mono format audio, then built a 5.1 session and finally started the 5.1 mix using the plug-in GRM spaces 5.1.

The parts at the beginning all went well. For the ambient sounds in the space, I’ll put a track of ambient sounds on all five channels. The sound of an object in the space, I will decide which channel to put it on depending on where it is located.

The first part went well when we got to the part of clip 1. The ambient sounds that appear in each section are preserved, going from mono to five channels and slowly getting louder until the second part starts. 

While working on the second part, I had some problems, should only the music rotate clockwise or should the ambient sounds rotate with it? I tried both. Once all the sounds were spinning, I felt it was too chaotic. Although the feeling was consistent with the mood of the main character, I wasn’t going to go for this option. The music and a few ambient sounds are flat in the clip, except for the progressively louder buzzing sound. This spot is the climactic part of the short film and I should have let the sound reach a peak in this spot as well and then come back down. So I was thinking that I could speed up the sound of that part or change the composition of the music. I tried speeding up the sound first, whether it was speeding up the music alone or speeding up the music and the ambience together, it didn’t achieve the effect I wanted. It was too weird, the ambience and mood from before was gone.

By the time I had done this, it was almost one o’clock and I had to save the project and try again next time.