Inception
What happens when you take ALL the sound out of a movie and put it all back in from scratch? Dialogue, sound effects, music, environments, everything...
I recently had the extreme privilege to work with the most solid class of audio engineers in the history of Shoreline Community College. I may be biased, but there was enough crazy talent there that we were assigned Inception for our final project. Each year the capstone for those graduating is like a doctorate thesis in Post Production; the instruction is mostly hands-off, and it's practically all you work on for 2 months. The original audio is completely removed and the students are responsible for every single sound heard during the final product. We found and cast the vocal talent, re-recorded all the dialogue using industry-standard and cutting-edge ADR techniques, created an entirely new score based on a new "kick" (in the movie, much of the score is created around an Edith Piaf recording used prominently in the plot), and re-did all the environments, Walla, ambience, Foley and sound effects.
My role was "Foley Lead". I was in charge of the Foley team, which was a core group of about 7 artists and engineers, and of course coordinating a few more because the goal was to have everyone in the class work a little with each team and learn the various processes and disciplines for everything involved in sound for film. But most of my time was spent on Foley, which traditionally is the live recreation of sound effects by an artist on a special sound stage for the purpose of recording and syncing to film. What that meant for this project was not only the traditional Foley areas such as footsteps, clothing, movement, impacts, squeaky chairs, and breaking glass, but a huge range of other sounds as well. Normally on a film there is also a "Hard FX" sound team that does things like explosions, gunshots, cars, machines... big things that must be recorded and then placed, usually layered, often done in the field and then manipulated later. We also had a Hard FX team, who handled the big sounds that could be found from an existing sound effects library. They did an amazing job with all the gunshots, with explosions and automobiles, and a variety of other items (the film has to be seen to be believed). But it was also the job of my team to record many extra things that couldn't be found in the library, and to sweeten some of the sounds placed by other teams.
The fact that we were able to show a fabulous finished product that didn't look like a school project is a source of great pride that will carry me through any dark, unemployed days ahead. But the real learning experience was in figuring out how to work with such a large group of people on such an enormous, complex project. Maximizing studio resources, cross-team communication, spotting and planning, defining roles and learning processes, defining and creating standards, project management, group scheduling, large-scale mixing, inter-disciplinary and team communication, organization. The quality of the finished product speaks for our audio skills but the fact that we finished it at all speaks volumes for the kind of people that you will be working with if you hire one of us.
And the fact that I still want to do Audio Post-Prodution at all after such an experience means that I am 100% serious about this. We get it done. I want to do it some more. Let's make a movie!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167582879968678
Examples to be posted soon:
Pink Panther
Commercial Work
Sam
Original SFX Library
Animation project
LifeAsArt copyright 2011 Tamara Weikel
