Sound Editing

So, for the past week, my movie has been being edited.

I was really worried about it, since my whole directing experience was a disaster, and I didn't get a lot of coverage. But after my great editor finished the first cut, I loved my movie!

And I still do love my movie! I'm super excited about it! It looks great and the acting is good, and I have a movie, albeit a short one. But still, a movie!

For the past couple of days, I've been sound editing. When we were editing, my editor and I chose music that we wanted in the movie, and some sound effects, so when it came time for me to do sound design, it was really simple.

I really just had to adjust levels, fill in any holes with missing sound, and add a couple more sound effects. We had two and a half days to do it, and I finished mine today, so it only took me a day, really.

Sound is interesting, because you need to put room tone in where there's any noise missing. For example, if you cut out a line, you need to put room tone in to fill it up, so it's not an awkward moment of nothingness. So room tone is just what it sounds like: the sound of the room from the day you shot, in the location you shot. Sometimes it sounds like nothing, but it still sounds like more something than the nothing that happened when you cut out the clip.

The funny thing about sound is that you spend a lot of time on set making sure you get clear sound, and you secure a location that will give you clear sound, and then you spend two days making the movie sound louder and "natural."

Another part of sound editing is making sure the noise floor is the same in each clip. This just means that in every line of dialogue, the background noise is the same. If one piece of dialogue has some sort of glaring, loud noise, then you need to tone down the levels so that it sounds the same as another piece of dialogue.

I was really lucky and got really clear dialogue. I still don't know how, since the day of filming, every acorn in the world decided to fall down on the tin roof of my location. But I'm not complaining.

So I did my sound editing and put in all of my sound effects and put in this extremely awesome end song that sounds like it's straight out of a Nolan Batman movie. And now I'm done.

I may put in a few little noises tomorrow, but I don't want to do too much. It's kind of scary, because the wrong sounds can really ruin your entire movie. Sound is so important!

Oh, another fun thing I learned today is how to set where the sound plays out of. So you want all of your dialogue tracks to come out of the middle speaker in the theater, and you want your music  to play out of the left and right speakers. This opens the sound up, and makes it so that all the sound will play across the entire screen. Usually sound effects come through the middle speaker, but if you have, say, an elephant in the left side of the frame, you want the elephant's noises coming out of the left speaker.

If you have a car driving across the screen from left to right, you want the sound of the car coming from the left speaker and panning over to the right. It all seems pretty obvious, but I find it so cool and fascinating.

So that's all for sound. Tomorrow I get to do color correction, which is basically done, thanks to my amazing editor! And then my movie will be locked and ready to go for the big premiere on Friday!

We started getting the info together for the programs for the screening today, and I got so excited! I'll make sure I'll take a lot of extra programs to bring home, especially for you, Mom!

The end of the semester is so close! I'm beyond excited to see everybody's movie. It's going to be so much fun. And then, in less than a month, I'll be living in London. Film school is crazy!!