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Parents.

I was pleased with how well this spot turned out. It was a beautiful culmination of casting, art, location and direction. The carpet in this room was incredibly thick and fluffy which absorbed a lot of reflections. When I was recording, I could tell that I had some strong material to work with. I wouldn’t know exactly how strong until I got back to the studio and pulled up the tracks. A lot of it sounds like it has been recorded in a VO booth. Location sound is a bit like that though, you can do the same thing and on one day you’ll look like a genius, the other, not so much.

The plan for the design was:
– scour the location audio to find the loot;
– build the sound of the room by stacking short reverbs & delays (early reflections are money);
– pan heavily into said verbs/delays
– fill in the gaps (foley, sfx, music)

I used a new approach in the mix that I was very happy with. To illustrate, consider the mother’s humming.

During the shot of the disgruntled father turning his newspaper, the mother is off-stage to the left, and not the focus. It then cuts to her, tight in the middle of the frame and in-focus.

To tell this story, I…
1) duplicated her tracks (boom and lav), making four in total;
2) mixed each pair separately, so that one sounded off-stage and roomy, and the other centered and in-focus;
3) use fades to transition between.

By using duplicate tracks, I could change the length and position of the audio and retain all automation. And the use of fades meant that I could instantly audition new timings. So, if I decide that the mother’s humming feels too abrupt on the cut, I simply extend the length of the fades and listen again.

This is a seamless process that avoids momentary volume spikes, and reduces the chance creation of rogue automation nodes (those nasties cause all sorts of issues under the hood).

The downside to this method is it doubles the track count (a non-issue in this case with so few to begin with).

https://acr.work/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/fhb_pt-walkthru-h264_OriginDimensions.mp4[/vc_column_text][/vc_column]