Sound Replacement: Reflection After Completion

Its Complete! James Reynolds, Lachy Gleeson and myself have completed our first Project of the Trimester, a complete sound replacement of the Lego Movie's Spaceship Scene. Below is the final upload of our sound replacement, enjoy!

It was a lot of fun creating this project with my group, something I wasn’t expecting to enjoy as much as I did. There was this amazing hour long moment, in the last session for the project (click here for more information) where James, Lachy and Myself all sat back in amazement at the piece of work we just created, a feeling that doesn’t come often but man was it rewarding. The project didn’t go without its hick-ups and our final product was not perfect, which is where this blog comes into play. I want to dissect a few key elements within the project and reflect upon them. I will be covering team work, communication, workflow / process, feedback and overall reflection.

Team Work:

James, Lachy and Myself have a great work ethic when together, which I think it comes from a mutual respect we have for each other and our craft. Working in a group together was a great experience, though not perfect, it was one of the best team work projects I have been a part of. Each of us have our own independent styled work flow which can clash when in a studio sense. I have mentioned before that a sort of controlling side comes out of me when I work with others that don’t understand the task at hand or know how to go about certain problems. This was apparent in all studio sessions our group had but it also exposed flaws from each of us. James and Lachy are both respectively quiet people which had its downfalls, I will get into more detail in the Communication section but where it affected team work was when one would sit back in the session and not interact with the project. Though this never became an issue as such, I felt as though it held back some of the sessions from being as productive as they could have been. I guess this leads onto the communication between our group.

Communication:

This was usually quite spot on to be honest, I don’t think the communication between us affected our outcome. I might be forgetting an instance where it was detrimental but for the most part it was just right, not too much said and not too little. Each and everyone of us was aware of the task at hand and was able to prepare for session's in advance. One thing I found was when it came down to our individual styled work flows, there would be spaces of time without any communication. I feel as though because of this there were spaces where one of us would feel as though they were out of the loop. I for one felt as though I wasn’t aware of a certain task to do or couldn’t think of what to do in these periods, which in turn narrowed our time frame to complete the project.

Workflow / Process:

Due to all three members being very individually orientated when it came to our own personal work flows, we naturally gravitated towards working as such. We would each work away from our project and come together to piece all our parts together, though the outcome was favorable by us, I feel as though this style of working held us back a bit. E.g. One big aspect I feel like we missed the mark with our project was the music, it didn’t feel as tailored to the scene the way that the original did. I think that could have been fixed if we had weekly session's working of crafting one big score for the whole project. Another aspect is that we are all Ableton Live users, so the fact we all working in protools made our sessions a bit more time consuming, not knowing our way around the program.

Feedback:

Below are the two pieces of feedback given by my peers on our recent Sound Replacement.

Stefan Volejnik:

"Love the simplicity of it. Things like the voice getting further away in the building scene, and I think that not having tones of sounds for everything on screen kept the audio focus on the important things. At some points I felt like some slight wind ambience could have filled in some silence. But I love how 'Lego' it sounds with all the brick smashes and building"

Jonny Bullpitt:

"Hey guys, excellent work overall. The way you have executed the project as a group is fantastic. You can hear the blend of everyone's talent in one piece. I especially love the ADR, it sounds so professional, if I had never seen the movie I could easily say it’s from the original. The Foley is well recorded and processed, it compliments the visuals quite nicely. I also agree with Stefan in that it could use just a tiny bit more ambient sound of some sort, but in saying that everything else is so good it’s not an issue. I noticed that you mentioned using some engine sounds from Free Sound. In the future I would love to hear those types of field recordings done by you guys as I feel the result would be much more rewarding overall, plus you get some experience recording some cool stuff on location. Recording a bunch of engine noises from different machinery around the place would be cool and would make a wicked sample library or could be manipulated and used in future compositions, the possibilities are endless…"

From the feedback given it appears a major letdown to our project was the ambience, there didn’t seem to be enough in the final mix. I feel as though this could have been fixed through adding additional sounds for background movements. Our group tended to all the sounds that have your direct attention and because of this we ended up missing out on that ambience or background gun shots / ships etc. This comes back to a fault I have seen throughout the project is a lack of polish to the work, something that is due to our lack of time management when it came to our studio sessions. The other piece of feedback is to using found sounds, I 100% understand where this comes from and I hope to not do such thing again in my mix (if avoidable). I am hoping to get out and about to do some field recordings of my own some day, hopefully while I am in this trimester just so I have experience for next trimester, when I plan on doing more ADR / Foley work.

My Final Thoughts:

From the first session we had in the C24 I had my mind blown. I went into this project not very excited from my misconception of ADR and Foley but man I loved it! It has been my favorite project thus far in my uni course. From acting out all the Foley and ADR to composing the falling sequence score, it was a blast! I think there is room for improvement on all fronts of the project, from our group dynamic (which I hope to work with Lachy and James again), to the pre-production planning. I hope to improve on all fronts by the next time I work with film, maybe giving the mix down another shot will help me improve from the feedback given.

Overall I am incredibly happy with the outcome and hope to work within the real of film and animation.. Hopefully with the same group!