Sound Editing: Behind Closed Doors

For the past several months I've been engaged in a critical part of the filmmaking process: sound editing. For me the process is somewhat familiar. I have done sound editing work on past projects to varying degrees but never quite to the extent that was necessary for this one.

When we started to make Behind Closed Doors I had a number of ideas and goals for what I wanted to accomplish with the sound. My philosophy has been that sound brings the picture to life and music gives it a soul, injecting it with emotion. That may not be entirely true, but it has been my general approach. However, I have learned a variety of "creative" uses for sound in the making of this picture, beyond the obvious practical uses.

Having done only primitive sound editing in the past, I knew I would need a more sophisticated program to do the job on this movie. There would be a lot more detail going into the sound this time than in any previous project I had made, and I also had a lot of ideas to do things that couldn't be done using the same methods by which I had done sound editing in the past (which had always been in the main film editing program). Since I have been working in the Adobe Creative Suite to edit the film and do the compositing I decided I would learn to use Audition.

Using the Adobe suite is truly a joy because all the programs function so well together. It meant, however, that I had another learning curve to overcome, and of course with every learning curve also comes a delay. I always try to think of these delays though as a long term investment. The next time I set out to edit sound on a movie the process should go a lot faster because I'll already have some experience. Anyway, it's been an interesting challenge but certainly liberating as well. When you start working in a more complex program like Audition, it opens up a world of possibilities to accomlish things that I'd never tried before.

There have been a lot of things different for me with this movie. For starters, I took the original location audio, isolated the dialogue, and scrapped just about everything else. This is so that I can control every aspect of the background sound and also get a clean, noise free dialogue track that can be manipulated and enhanced for maximum flexibility. What that means is I had to replace all the background audio... ALL of it. This is actually a common practice in professional film audio production but it was a first time thing for me.

To give an idea of what is involved in that process... Every footstep had to be replaced, and it wasn't just a "one size fits all" sort of deal. You have to consider what kind of ground the character is walking on (carpet? wet pavement? marshy grass?). And then you have to acquire a whole bunch of samples of "footfall" foley. I used sounds from the AudioBlocks library (audioblocks.com) which thankfully has a wealth of resources. I was then able to adjust the EQ on different sounds of "footfall on wood" for example, to alter it depending whether the character is walking on the wood porch or going up the wood steps. It is pretty involving for an amateur like myself, but after a lengthy investment of time it got the job done. Another sound one might not think of which is really quite necessary is the rustling of clothing. This is really important because it makes the scene more real. If it's not there... something just seems oddly absent, and the average movie goer won't know why. They'll just know that something is off. For Behind Closed Doors I made a point of wearing different articles of wardrobe and recording myself moving around in a quiet environment, so as to only capture the sound of the clothes rustling. This can again be time consuming when trying to match up certain soundbites to fit the movement of a character on screen.

In one scene of the movie the characters are sitting at a table, eating. I had to get some sound of cluttlery scraping and tapping on plates, so I tried recording just that but immediately discovered it didn't sound right. It didn't sound like there was any food on the plates! It was all metal and porcelain sounding. So I was hanging out at home cooking some dinner and I decided, "What a great opportunity! I'll boil these potatoes, and then I can mash them up using a fork and knife on a plate, record myself doing so, and kill two birds with one stone!" So I did that and it made all the difference. It's hilarious to me that having food on the plate even mattered. But low and behold, that's the joy of sound; our ears pick up on so much subconsciously that we hardly notice, but if it isn't right, it really stands out.

Other sounds that were necessary were things like room tone or ambient noise, wind and night time crickets. Everytime a character places some object on a table or turns a door knob or basically inflicts an action of any kind upon an object, this all had to be added in post-production by the method I was using. Even for just a 20 minute short film it is very time consuming, but the amount of control it gives you over every tiny detail of the final product makes it well worth it. Being a kind of supernatural horror film (Oh crap! Did I give that away?.. Spoiler!) meant that I also got to experiment with adding "sound effects". I'm not EXACTLY sure what qualifies something to be a sound "effect" but I think it has something to do with being a sound which was not recorded on location... or a sound that is being used for something other than what it is actually in real life? Oh hell, I don't know. But in my case, I sort of define it as a sound used to characterize something that doesn't really exist, like a ray gun or a teleporter or a ghost. I haven't really had to do too much of this before and to be honest, when I review the result of what I achieved, I'm not that impressed with myself. I tried to be creative and use existing sounds and edit them to turn them into something that would suitably characterize the supernatural elements, but I sort of failed in this department. I think I presently lack the imagination and 'know-how' to create unique sound effects, and so I resorted to AudioBlocks once more to find something that had already been "pre-fabricated" by someone with the intention of it being used as a supernatural sound element. It worked fine, but it made my individual limitations apparent.

I did learn and achieve other creative uses for sound though in this project. For starters, I determine that when a visual element is not present, a sound element can be used in its stead to trigger a visual que in the audience's imagination. So for instance, the story called for emergency vehicles (police and ambulance). The best I could come up with on my meager budget was a spinning blue beacon light taped to the roof of a car... By adding sirens in the background though, it really helped to sell the effect, as well as suggest that an ambulance was present as well in the way that I used it. In another scene, two characters come across a stinking corpse. The visual for this scene sucks, frankly. But I at least had the bright idea to add the sound of flies buzzing around (even though I have no flies in the scene) and it adds to the effect as well in reinforcing to the audience that this is a dead body, and it stinks... I didn't say it FIXES the effect, I just said it helps... Oh brother, well anyway, it was an eye opening observation for me.

Other revelations to me were discovering how heavily sound can influence the tone and atmosphere of a scene. This is really critical for me because something that I care about greatly in the films I watch is the atmosphere. Something like ambient noise can play a great part in this, but also things like the hooting of an owl, or in my case I used the barking of a neighborhood dog to add a sense of danger at specific moments. Using sound to help create that creepy atmosphere, or even a very pleasant atmosphere, or cold or gloomy or euphoric or whatever... You might add the chirping of birds, or the sound of seawash, a distant street artist playing the accordian, church bells clanging away, whatever it may be. The other layer to this though is how you manipulate that sound. Few sounds please me more than the natural reverb of a spacious shopping mall after closing hours. It's just beautiful. Reverb and echoey effects are very pleasing to my ear. I'm sure it's not that way for everyone, but this is just an example of how you can apply effects to enrich the atmosphere of a sound to suit the mood you're aiming for with the scene. As an example, in my movie I made the barking dogs sound quite distant as opposed to right up close. Why? Well, I guess because I wanted the audience to hear it sort of like the character would: almost absent-mindedly, as background noise. I wanted it to be a subtle indicator that something is amiss.

Alright, so those were some of my big takeaways from this whole process. It's been fun, AND educational! But man... the power of sound... And now, here is a link to a Pixar featurette which showcases the fucking unbelievable genius of real sound artistry. Highly, HIGHLY recommended viewing for anyone interested in the sound design process... in fact, even if you're not, it is still fucking fascinating (jump to 3:20 where it starts to get really fucking good): http://www.pixar.com/features_films/WALLE#WALLE-title/video/3780