Even though it wasn’t requested to students to do dialogue editing to their projects, it would be complicated to deny that factor in my project. I recognize the time implications it takes in others to perform a good session of precise noise cleaning and room tone fluidity, however, this project is also a good way to practice and to make mistakes. Another mistake I took was selecting a film of 8 minutes to edit instead of 3-4 minutes. By the time that I’m writing this post, I already edited dialogues, and I’m organizing and spotting my backgrounds and hard effects. Nevertheless, and as I referred previously, learning is a process of irregular successes and failures, and again, today (18/11) I fell into another of my mistakes: I forgot to update my Pro Tools Ultimate subscription and now I have to wait 48 hours for AVID to accept my academic version request. I’ll use this time to write my process in the project so far and explain my intentions.
Last Tuesday I had a tutorial with Tim Harrison. He told him about all my ideas and discussed my projections for the whisper. We discussed the idea of making a non-humanized sound so it maintains its ambiguous and hermetic language. If I use recognisable sounds, the spectator will try to visualise its form and ways of being. The sound must be unrecognisable for us, but not the characters – because they are the only ones who know what to expect. I also told me about other examples of sound design that uses the opposite technique to trick the spectator. One of them was the bear scene on Annihilation by Robert Eggers – the film gives the spectator the information that one of the characters didn’t die through sound, but then it’s struck by the surreal alternative of a bear-like creature adopting the missing character’s voice. It expresses antagonistically the idea that I want to produce: I don’t have a plot twist nor a surprising sound that might trigger the viewer’s imagination. I want total confusion and no sense of understanding. However, the characters perfectly know what to expect. They are the only ones who know how it sounds and how it behaves and even if it has a form. They are the only ones who possess knowledge.
My way of editing dialogues, and other groups in general, starts with the premise “Story Drives Every Decision” and I keep asking myself throughout the editorial whether the decision helps or hurts the story. So, mostly, my decisions consider the plot and concept. After, preparing my session with all the tracks I needed, I started arranging the clips for continuity purposes. This short film doesn’t have many extra possibilities in case it lacks something specific. In this case, the film was recorded with only one boom, and even though it is very well recorded, some things must be overedited in order to reach a decent result, which is the case when some strange production sound steps dialogue. In that situation, my only option is to go through all takes and see which one is “cleaned”, but the problem of having only one boom means that for each take there’s only one recording – actors don’t do the exact same acting 5 times in a row unless they are really professional (the actors used were amateurs and non-actors because that’s the way the director likes to work). When there’s no way of fixing audio, my very very last option is Izotope Rx. This program doesn’t do miracles but one can take advantage in order to have decent results. If RX is not sufficient then there’s nothing else I could do (unless I had time to do ADR and money to pay tickets for the Ecuadorian actors fly all the way to London).
RX saved me from saving the story. The film atmosphere is “almost” dead, so I proceeded to delete all the bird and dog sounds existing in most of the scenes, even though there are cows in one of the shots (the film suffered many alterations due to post-production problems; many scenes were deleted as well as many ideas I had back in March when we were on pre-production). It took me at least 4 hours to arrange everything without accessing the studio at any of those times. I’m also reconsidering mixing the film in 5.1 for the assignment. I don’t see myself having the time to do everything I want for this film. I have to be more conscious of it in the future so I don’t have any surprises. Hopefully, backgrounds and effects will only need one session to edit.