Atmospheres
Ive almost finished editing my atmospheres for the project. The process has been slightly different form how I expected it to be, I assumed that one of the main functions of atmospheres was to differentiate between cuts in time or changes of environment, although this can be true its used much less than I thought it would be. I originally edited the atmospheres differently for each cut, varying volume or pitch to show a change in time or location. The result of this was a very ‘jumpy’ mix, the film lacked any sort of grounding, especially as I hadn’t recorded any foley or breath for the protagonist. The whole process of making 60 different atmospheres was very tedious, I also tried to pair each atmosphere with a wind track and made a point of differing any wind tracks that were next to each other.
I later reworked these atmospheres, making the contrasts in volume less pronounced and extending audio files over multiple shots in the same scene. I also extended the wind tracks over a lot of shots and multiple scenes. I think that this has brought a better sense of continuity throughout the piece. I realise now that atmosphere is more of a subtle bed to lay other elements on. It has the very important function of setting\grounding an environment, but if they are too pronounced you will throw the listener around too much, and it will be difficult for the audience to follow the subject of the film.
Another thing I have learned through experimenting with atmospheres is that I could sometimes get away with not having any. Im not sure if this is good practice but there are times where the FX are so pronounced they inform the audience of the environment, so much so where the atmosphere is not needed. A specific example would scene 13, where the subject walks through a narrow stone hallway with no roof, while birds fly overhead. I was unable to find a good atmosphere track for this so I left it for later. Since this I have added the sound of the birds, to which I applied a reverb mimicking the stone walls, and later I will be adding footsteps and breath with this same reverb. I believe that in this stone corridor environment, the reverb would be so prominent, an atmosphere track is probably not needed.