Beginning of a Sound Replacement
A new project that I will be undertaking is to do a full sound replacement for a short clip from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest (see clip below).
The sound replacement will be from 0:26 to 1:30 with the aim to recreate the audio as accurately as possible whilst still having some original creative input as well. For this project I will be working with a fellow audio engineer Dustin Gartner, we shall being sharing the role of producer equally for the purpose utilising our combined knowledge and experience to create a final product that would be better than what we could do individually. It will also be good to see how someone else would approach a project like this giving me a better insight into different workflows and audio engineering practises that I could incorporate myself.
We chose this clip because it is sonically very dense which will require our full effort to achieve a good end result, due to this we believe it will only push our skills in a positive way making us better audio engineers. It will also mean that we will not be bored throughout the process as there will always be something interesting to work on. The original sound is done so well that it really gives us a good idea of what is needed to make it work and in comparing it to our finished product will highlight what we did well and what we still need to work on to become better engineers.
All of the sounds will be recorded by us as well and not using anything from online sound libraries adding to the creativity and complexity of the project. The sound replacement itself does appear like it could be relatively challenging, there are multiple sounds going on at once and having them all blend together probably isn't going to be easy. For the Foley aspects (I will discuss what Foley is in an upcoming blog) there are a lot of sounds that will require a good amount of research to work out the best way to reproduce them, for example:
Gunshots- We will not be able to fire and record real guns.
Glass breaking- Breaking glass always has a risk to it and we won't be able to do it in the studios we have available to us.
Crowd/Group fight- This is an important aspect to the overall atmosphere of the scene so getting this to feel right is paramount.
Music track- This is probably just as important as the crowd fight sounds as it is a big part of the atmosphere as well.
These are just a few examples of the Foley sounds but you get the idea of what we are dealing with. For the ADR aspects (again will discuss what ADR is in a following blog) they will be a little easier than the Foley seeing as there isn't as much of it going on, some examples of what we need to do are:
Dialogue- There are only a few lines of actual dialogue in the section we have chosen to do but if time permits we could reproduce more of the clip and do more spoken lines.
Individual fighting grunts- These will be used to add more emphasis on certain people throughout the scene making the sound more relevant to whats actually happening in the forefront.
Even though the production of all these aspects will be challenging I believe it will truly be a very funny and enjoyable project to work on.
The only aspect of this project that is of real concern to me is the music track, composing and original piece that can replicate the upbeat pirate fight vibe is a very daunting task especially seeing as Dustin and I have never composed anything like this before. With discussing this with Dustin it has been decided that I will focus more on researching how to compose the music track and he will focus more on the Foley aspects. As this task falls more onto me there is some pressure to get it right but for the most part as long as I don't leave the task too late I'm confident that I can produce something that will work well. Below is the music track from the scene which will obviously act as my main source of reference.
I will be posting a more in depth blog about the production of the track when I come to do it, with my next step now being to conduct some extensive research on just how the hell I'm going to tackle this task.
All up this is going to be a great project for me due to the fact that not only will I be working on post production aspects such as Foley and ADR but I will also be doing musical composition meaning I'll be getting experience in multiple areas of the audio production.