Project Reflection
PlayStation Store
On this project, I teamed up with Magic (his name, not forces from Hogwarts) to attempt some sound replacement. The project brief instructed us to pick a piece of visual media and fully replace the sounds; including music, dialogue Foley etc.
I had bookmarked some excellent Sound Design studios in a previous life and went directly to their websites to hunt down an advert or short film we could use.
I settled on some work done by Jeff Malen of Lime Studios in Santa Monica, USA.
The video was perfect. It has a great mix of dialogue, music and SFX/Foley to dig into. The length fits the brief too at around 30 seconds per group member and after Magic gave it his stamp of approval, we were set to begin.
We compiled quite a thorough pre production plan which set out our key tasks and overall schedule.
We started instantly with capturing the Foley sounds though, in particular ambience. Magic and I loaned out some location recording gear (shotgun mics, mic stands, boom poles, the works) hopped into my car Ric Viers style and went searching for a nice suburban street to record.
We drove around for a few minutes too long before finally settling on a location which wasn’t overly prone to intrusion.
Amidst intrigue and smiles from passers by, we set up our microphones thus:

In between a reversing garbage truck, the occasional aeroplane and sporadicly howling wind, we managed to get some suitable recordings. The icing on our sound cake was a dog barking further up the street which we had marked on our asset list as of critical importance. With our street ambience and dog howl we set off back to Uni to cause havoc there.
We scoured the university grounds and surrounding streets banging, prodding and ellicting all sorts of sounds out of what we could, building up a nice palette of sounds. The best sound of this day was surely the recording of the Neve airlock doors engaging and disengaging. We would use this in our final cut.
I took the gear home with me, transfered the files onto my computer and begun labellelling them. I had been reading The Location Sound Bible and was inspired to micromanage these files and make them as well organised as possible for future use.
The following day Magic and I had studio time in the C24 recording room with attached Foley space. I had with me literally a bag of tricks and a long list of things to record. Most notable where a bicycle pump and a pitching wedge (that’s golf for those unacquainted).
After recording what we could, we begun ADR or dialogue replacement. I volunteered my vocal chords for the job and gave it my best shot. I genuinely think I have a career in this field so if other things don’t go to plan, there’s always that.
After capturing some final room tone we were set to move on to the next phase of proceedings.
Magic was tasked with compiling the Foley (including designing that which we could not record), ambiance and build up our bed of assets, while I switched focus to the dialogue and music.
The dialogue was frustrating, illuminating and satisfying all together and at different times. I have new knowledge and appreciation for the process involved in making dialogue believable in ANY audio/visual media. Even the slightest mis-sync, and the believe-ability of the piece is shattered.
After doing the easy stuff like removing noise, my major issue other than incorrect timing was making the dialogue sound less like it was recorded a few inches away from a microphone in a small room, and more like it was recorded inside the world of the video. I consulted various online guides and the help of Mel Bertram from Tri 6 fame to get some ideas. I tried messing around with the polarity of duplicate copies, using a transient shaper to decrease the attack and added creative use of reverb to try make the dialogue sound further away. Upon reflection, what I will try next time round is a process called worldizing which would basically involve playing the dialogue through a speaker in the type of environment I want and then re-recording it, creating the illusion that the sound was recorded in that space originally. Sounds fun to do and will definitely give this a shot in the future.

Finally, I also needed to try change the character of my own voice to more closely match the voice of the original actor (brilliant voice if ever I heard one) but there is only so much that pitch shifting and unsuccessfully adding distortion can do. Ultimately as Akshay pointed out in his review, at this point what we really needed was a professional voice actor who’s own voice already better matched the original than mine.
The Music
This was the part I was probably most excited for. I liked the original music but wanted to create my own stamp.
I tapped out a rough tempo and settled on around 110 bpm. This would help inform the style of music I would create.
I picked up my microphone and into which I beatboxed and harmonized until I had some workable ideas down. I wanted to split up the music into two parts.
The first was a playful, Sherlock Homes/Pink Panther inspired short.
Besides the classic finger snaps, I loaded up Kontakt, and built an instrument. It was originally a combination of a kora, and a clarinet to which I than added a string ensemble which you hear for the opening stanza. Once the drums join, a bassoon is layered in to add some weight.
The second part was where I wanted to veer off completely from the original and create something dubstep/glitch hop inspired. I employed the same microphone/beatbox process to create the sketch until I had an idea worth pursuing.
This part is actually two layers, the longer, stalking notes and the shorter stuttering notes which add the movement.

The longer notes sit in the lower octave (C1 band) whilst the shorter notes sit in the higher octave (C3). Both layers have their own distinct sound creating the contrast I wanted.

Once I had the right blend of volume between the layers, I applied some blanket processing to tie them both together. Other than some reverb, EQ and side-chain compression, I added one final element which moved the sound from cool, to bonafide cool.

Manipulator is a plug-in designed by Psy-Trance legends Infected Mushroom.
There are a whole host of creative uses for this guy, but I originally bought it to use with my voice. However, here, I applied Manipulator to a sound I was already happy with and it transformed it, giving it some extra character, making it nice and glitchy. I used a preset called “drun can dance” whatever that means, and tweaked with the settings. It is slightly detuned and the “smear” setting is set to near extreme values which creates the lagging sound which fills in the spaces. In the final cut I only applied a smidge of it as the results can be quite sci-fi, but I’ve applied a far more liberal amount in the example below to help illustrate. The first 5 seconds are the sound without Manipulator and the rest are it with.
With the music finished, the dialogue finished and the Foley finished, Magic and I booked more studio time and begun the process of mixing it all together.
The end result was a project that I feel both Magic and I were happy with, feeling that we did some good work with obvious room for improvement.
Please enjoy.
