Like I had written here, I had completed the edit for my Malayalam short film Inganeyum Oru Katha, along with my editor, when we were in Dhaka. Now that the edit is done, it was time for fixing the sound.
I had invested in a boom mic and pole during the shoot of IOK and was hoping that the sound would be mostly fine and no dubbing would be required for this film.
But the way the edit was, it looked like the sound was indeed very much all over the place and unless I go through every single take again, and choose and extract the right audio clips from them, and try and sync them with the current edit, we will have to dub. But I am completely against dubbing because not only is it a lot of work, without excellent sound design for the background ambience, it does sound very unreal.
Which brought me to the first option - which is to go through every single take, extract suitable clips and try and fit all of them to the current edit. This was easier said than done. This means doing some extreme detailing work. For example, there could be a place where there is excellent audio of the dialogue but there is some background disturbance such as a bird cooing or some construction drilling. So I need to look at every single take of that exact dialogue, choose one where the actor might have given the same modulation and pacing, and then try and fit it in the edit. And when I say dialogue, I actually mean a word by word copy past from different videos!
But I sat down for about 12 hours and finally had a workable audio file for three of the most problematic scenes!
It was back breaking work and meant being unaware of the passing of a holiday (it's Chinese New Year eve) but was extremely satisfying! The work's far from being over but I felt like a real sound designer for a while!
205 more to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment