Teaspills - Sound Design

By Giovanni Peresson 06/07/2023

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What was Teaspils?:

Teaspills was a short film created for my second year semester 2 Dramatic short module which was a group project my roles in the creation of this film were editing, sound design/recording as well I have done graphic design work for example posters and for an id card prop. Throughout production, there were countless setbacks including data losses and issues with actors which led to a full rewrite of the original script in order to complete it within the deadline.

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What was our goal for the sound design?:

For Teaspills the main goal for the sound design was to create a realistic yet immersive atmosphere to draw the viewer into the setting of the film. for the majority of the film, we kept a realistic sound design being diegetic sounds mainly vocals, room tones, and background sounds, and also other sounds in the scenes such as footsteps, phones ringing door handles, etc. The final scene was the only place throughout the film where I created an exaggerated sound design where john gallon begins shooting a weapon upstairs using a variety of multilayer effects.

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Sound Recording:

When it comes to the sound recording it was both kept simple yet was quite complex to say. Throughout the film mainly close yet wide-angled shots were used we made the decision to use a shotgun microphone mounted to the camera to record the vocal audio as the distance it was from the subject was appropriate in this particular situation which meant we would be able to have fewer people on set which was a benefit as we had quite a large crew of around 9 people which with the location we where using was quite crowded.

On the shoot of the original script we used a pair of Sennheiser Lavalier microphones and a Zoom to capture dialogue audio but with this, there were a number of issues I encountered during this that led us to not use them for the final shoot, first of all, would be having to rebook them and with other students and final projects there was a chance we wouldn't be able to so we avoided that. Other reasons were first of all the clothing we used for John Gallon there was a lot of rubbing off the shirt and no windscreen to prevent this. A lot of what I have learned about using lav mics has been from this video here which has a solid breakdown of different scenarios and use cases for different types of microphones and goes into depth about lavaliers: https://youtu.be/V9DYqLo6c38

For scenes with no faces visible such as in the car at the beginning when Courteous is on the phone the camera sees him from the back seat of the car and also in the kitchen scene when there is a sort of montage of documents being signed where there are no faces shown we used a film sound technique called ADR (additional dialog replacement) where we recorded dialogue standalone from the actors and then it is placed over the original vocal audio in post almost like a dub. With adr there are pros and cons, it's something you really only do if it's completely necessary as it can be quite difficult to get it perfect but in our situation with no faces it worked fine with some eq in post-to-match tones. A big benefit from adr when working on large-scale productions it can be much cheaper than reshooting scenes and in some cases, a reshoot might not be possible at all.

As for pretty much every other diegetic sound throughout the film that wasn't vocal audio sounds were recreated after filming using the Foley method where I used my zoom h8 and the xy microphone after the filming was completed. Over a period of a couple of days with my Zoom I created a sound library of sounds that I mind need. I used the rough version of the edit basis playing it on my phone while doing the sound effects to get the timing as accurate as possible for example footsteps, I used similar floor materials and simply walked making sure I was stepping at the same time as the subject was stepping in the rough edit. For older versions of the script I recorded many other sounds including kettles, car sounds both interior and exterior as well as drive-bys and engine startups. For the shooting scene, a wide library of sounds was used some were recorded by me and some were outsourced as they were unrealistic for us to recreate such as the gunshots and dentist drills, etc. One sound I had to create in particular which was a challenge for us to create or source was the sound of someone sort of clawing on a window with a squeak as the hand goes down. In the end, the method I ended up using to create this sound was to hit a damp towel firmly against a window and slide it down at the pace I wanted. It took some trial and error trying out different objects and surfaces to use but in the end, that is what we ended up using.

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Post Production/Editing:

It was during this part of the production all the previous work done had been sown together to create the final piece. This was also when most of the foley sounds were created using the rough edit. For the majority of the sound editing as well as the edit itself Blackmagic Davinci Resolve is mainly for its collaborative and color grading tools, for individual sounds that had to be edited I used Adobe Audition purely for the fact that it was a sound editing software I was more comfortable with and I don't have as much experience with Resolve's Fairlight tools.

The Car door

For our room tones and background sounds

I used a combination of sounds I had recorded myself and premade assets from both the youtube audio library and epidemic sounds which Carlo conveniently had a subscription for at the time for his sound module. One of the main things I was trying to achieve in the sound design of this film that would make it stand out from other groups was attention to detail, and throughout the entirety of the film, this is my favorite part, the car door at 3.34. For this part were going to focus on the background noise, Courteous comes and opens the car door and John steps out and closes the door behind him. Here what I did was I spliced the track where the door is open and just slightly increased the level by around 7db then added a crossfade on either side, this done is it made the outside noise louder when the door was open (same level as the outside scenes, when in the car it was a lower level). Another way I could've done this was with keyframes but truth be told you would get the exact same result but this method was a little faster to do which is an important factor when working with tight deadlines and not making sacrifices.

Car Scene ADR

In the car scene around 2.17, the camera's pov is from the back seat and we see the top of John's face, for this scene, we made use of ADR for the reason of we had the microphone mounted to the camera itself so before the scene was even shot it was what we where going to do because as noted before for the second shoot we didn't have the lav mics. So the camera was able to pick up both the dialogue from John and also the phone and this was what we used for our syncing, now when it was time for the adr to be recorded for this scene our actor was not available so whilst editing this scene Carlo and I decided we would record using Carlo's voice but to literally make it sound as bad and barely comprehendible. For this what we done is first of all record the raw audio on a phone and then in adobe audition I added the phone call pre-set and then maxed out the gain and rendered it and then when I brought it into the Resolve timeline I brought the levels back down to -12db which did exactly what we where looking for... destroy the sound quality.

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My Reflection:

Now due to unprecedented amount of setbacks we had throughout the entire production of the short film it almost taken for granted that the final result wasn't what any of us had anticipated the story to go but that being said the final outcome was a relative success especially when it came to the cinematography and the aesthetic we where trying to achieve trying to almost mimic the Aesthetic of the show "Atlanta." (2016- ). Glover, D. (Executive Producer), Atlanta. Los Angeles: FX Productions. also when it comes to the edit as said in the grading of the project the beginning is too slow which I have to agree with myself but of course the original beginning we had was a faster pace and we would've gotten into the climax of the plot sooner.

With the sound design process I was very limited in time and there where alot of things I would like to have got done although not vital to the project but really would have just polished it more. First off all in the shooting scene I would've liked to have properly synced each gunshot with the flash but that was of course a time limitation and secondly what I would have loved to do was to go through each track and create surround sound for the entire film but in the end the soundtrack was limited to just mono audio.

As a final summery I believe there was a alot to improve on various aspects of the film but for myself personally it was a great learning experience in working collaboratively. This film was the first collaborative film I have worked on and what I really enjoyed about it was being able to specialise in my skills being editing and sound and the stuff I have no skills with like writing and camera all that stuff other people where able to do it. This does two things, 1 you don't have the pressure of filling all these roles and being a one man band and 2 having people who specialise in certain areas means those areas are going to have alot more attention and because those roles are going to filled by people who have a greater understanding of that area of filmmaking it leads to a much better end result as long as there is good communication and strong leadership is present like a conductor at an orchestra making sure everyone is at there que when needed.