The Creation of the "Plunge" (Me as the sound manager)

18/02/09
When our roles were distributed, I was very happy to be the sound manager because it is an area I have experience in (from my Year 9 computer music classes and our last year's sound project where I did almost everything). It was very convenient to already have a script and once Julien corrected it, I already had a global idea of all the sounds I should make. Jeff who already prepared himself for this film sent me several Dystopian sound samples that he mixed using Audacity, a free software. Whilst the others were working on their parts, I made a list of all the sounds needed for our film. Jeff who is a very dedicated director gave me homework and asked me to investigate different types of mikes(microphones) and how to minimize ambience pick-up. I found though my research that the mike we should use for our outdoor shootings was the school's shotgun mike (jeff had already decided our locations which were Julien's appartment and the docks at cyberport). I found out through my research that shotgun mikes were especially used to shoot industrial videos or more film-like productions.

23/02/09 - 10/03/09
However even though it was the school's best Shotgun mike, we were still unhappy because it picked a lot of backround noises which made it sometimes difficult for the shooting outside as we had to sometimes wait for an airplane to pass or sometimes hold the mike further from the actors but at the same time block the wind from disturbing the sounds. (for example) which in the end made us loose a lot of time. Unfortunatly like I said earlier it was the school's best shotgunn mike and we had to deal with it in our own ways. It was also really annoying because it meant that I'd have to edit the sounds a lot later at school which is an area where I'm not particularly good. The shooting and Julien's house was pretty smooth. No real problems were imposed to me as a sound guy as there were almost no background noises that disturbed. As the sound guy, I did everything I could to save Jeff time and helped him in any way I could. By that I mean that I tried not to waste time and tried to do things in the right way before he asked. That way his job as a director was less tiring.

Later without even asking me, Jeff generously brought in some sound effects which he found on websites that offer free sound clips. It was very kind of him and saved me a lot of time, however I still would've prefered to have found those sounds myself. I know Jeff prefers to do a lot of things himself as he likes perfection and puts film before anything else as his priorities, but I think he should've let me at least find those sounds myself and later then agree on whether we should use those sounds or not.
In class I recorded Julien's opening narration and recorded some more "phone" sound effects. Jeff even created two ambient tracks - one for interior scenes and one for exterior scenes by tampering with various sounds and compiling them together in the free program Audacity. Because of the lack of time, Jeff wasn't able to teach me how to use this program making me rather useless for the last part of the project. Going over the film in Final Cut Pro, We noticed the background noise in scenes with conversations was different between cuts. This was very distracting (and disorienting: when checking for continuity errors, we would mute the sound); it wasn't surprising and we knew this would happen before we even shot the film because the shotgun mike picks up background noise which would be different because noise varies in between shots as footage was shot at different times. Because of this, Jeff exported the audio of the last scene and went home to edit the sound using Audacity. He made sure the dialogue audio levels stayed the same as the shotgun mike's distance from the actors varied in different shots. He minimized the background noises and added in an exterior ambient track to run in the background so that the overall audio would sound seamless in between cuts to different shots. Jeff did a great job and the sounds were really good. In the end I realized that Jeff had been more useful in my own area than me as he had already planned and prepared sounds before the project even started and did most of the complicated sound editing.

Overall I amreally disapointed with myself as the sound manager during the project and I feel like I haven't done enough. I am right now preparing myself for the future by learning by myself how to use Audicaty on the internet so that next time I will be able to edit sounds myself. In the future, I will also make sure that someone else doesn't do what I'm supposed to do before I even had the chance to do something. I know we had very little time but I think Jeff exagerated a bit by not trusting my sound manager skills and doing almost everything instead without telling me. I have now even prepared a list of website with free sound effects I could use in the future to save research time.