Mixing
As the deadline for the hand in of this project is approaching I have decided to focus on mixing from now on. I am missing certain elements in the sound design, namely the dragging of the coffin, the donkey footsteps and the sound of the character rubbing the bloody fur of the donkey as it dies.
Firstly I created a bus channel for atmosphere reverb, I then applied a convolution reverb to this channel with a ‘soccer field’ preset as I thought this was most appropriate for the mountainside. I then adjusted the levels to make it sound realistic, I also made the output of this channel 5.1 and placed the sounds slightly towards the rear, this was to give the atmosphere a sense of space.
The first time I mixed the foley, I mixed it way too loud. I think I was just trying to make sure it was in sync with the picture, but the result was that it sounded like the footsteps were right next to the camera. I fixed the levels and identified different locations so I could make bus channels with correct reverb, I then sent the foley tracks through the right channels.
I had fun mixing 01:01:51:16 to 01:02:16:05 as it allowed the most room for creativity. The scene follows our main character directly after his donkey, which he had been using to transport the coffin, dies leaving him to carry it himself. I feel as though the imagery of him dragging the coffin behind him and particularly carrying it on his back, is reminiscent of the myth of Sisyphus. An endless tremendously difficult task that has no value to anyone other than to him, the character remains focused against barrages from the outside world as he slowly slips into exhaustion. I wanted to reflect this in the sound, in particular I wanted to highlight the breath as a means to cope, similar to how people focus on breath in meditation. I did this by sending all environmental tracks (the footsteps, the coffin creaking, the wind and the atmos) to an aux channel, here I could manipulate all of them as one. I used reverb as a means to express exhaustion, giving the effect of hallucination and disassociation from reality. I automated this to start as a realistic reverb for the space, and gradually increased the wet output to more of an abstract effect. The second and most important thing I did was apply a compressor to the aux track and side chain it with the breath track as the input. I also automated the mix of the compression from 0 to 100%, this gave the effect of the environment gradually becoming more blurred, and this blurred soundscape would dip in volume when the breath comes in, mirroring the idea of focus. I think this worked well but I did have a couple of problems, I found that the environmental sound was too loud and compressed at the start (where its supposed to be realistic, I fixed this through volume automation and the automation of the mix helped. The main problem I encountered was that breath was quite a weak input, the finished effect didn’t have the contrast I was hoping for. If I were to try this again I would research side chaining a bit to see if there was a solution to this, or I would possibly just automate the volume myself.
I think that overall this project has been a successful investigation into sound design, I have worked with lots of elements of sound for film. I worked through problems and found methods to achieve synchresis, experimenting with reverb to place sounds in a space. If I were to redo the process I would prepare the session slightly differently, I think I would section out the session into locations as well as different elements. I would also create separate bus channels for the reverb at the start of the process.