For this week's task, we were assigned to focus on sound engineering and sound concepts to incorporate to the visual context on screen. We were assigned to film a sequence up to 90 seconds exploring the use of sound and its usage in film through the various sound concepts. We had to choose at least three from the list given to us.

For this week, the groups were assigned to us - so I worked with Abbi Potter, Shauna Griffiths and Owen Loughnane. I specifically asked to be sound engineer and editor for this week because I wanted the editing process to be easier for me knowing I did the sound recording to my liking and perfectly. Abbi acted as producer and sent over the script. Content wise it's a simple back and forth conversation with card games and wine that ends with an argument in the end. I began to make a list of all the sounds that would be present in the context of the story world: cards flicking, card shuffling, wine sipping, wine glass, table cloth etc. The sound concepts I aimed to incorporate were diegetic sound, synchronous sound and contrapuntal sound. Diegetic was to include all the sounds listed above present in the story world. Synchronous sound was the implied meaning to the visual context/reference to provide clarity and dramatic tension to emphasis what was happening on screen. With contrapuntal sound, we played around with the idea of the background music being juxtaposed with the tone of the scene: it's a serious argument taking place between two individuals. I planned on syncing over a track that provided an opposite context over what was happening on screen.

The shoot went well- we had booked out the studio for a few hours at night. We finished it all that day too. Abbi had found actors for the short. During rehearsals, I got kit up and adjusted the levels of my tracks and had my volume to an adequate level to focus in/hone in on the actions of the characters and the sounds being picked up. That helped me figure out what was being picked up and what I should focus my attention.

I did have problems recording sound however due to my back pain. I couldn’t hold the boom pole quite stiff as I wanted to and the wire was picked up on some of the recordings. I did ask for reshoots just in case so I could get more audio files to play around with and edit around.

I edited and colour graded the footage with Avid Media Composer & Davinci Resolve. Through editing, cutting through close ups was quite difficult as one actor didn't maintain the same level of tone and mannerisms of his voice and pace of speaking. That made it hard to match up things for the purposes of visual continuity. So I included as few close-ups as I could and mainly used the master shot as the running shot throughout. The continuity issue also came up with the wine glasses as in one shot it would be adequately filled and in close-ups seem empty. That was easily fixed by zooming in and levelling the angel for that shot.

Synching sound, editing process and colour grading footage didn't take as much time as I anticipated. Prior to filming, I had practiced sound editing on Avid to be familiar with the process so I knew going in what to do and not waste my time around. The sound as mentioned earlier was posing to be a problem. I fixed the master recording by adding in anchor points to level up and down between the pauses so the wire sounds weren't heard. Plus I layered over isolated sounds of the actions to amplify them as subtly as I could for the purposes of visual context and for the purpose of the task.

I enjoyed this task a lot as it helped me dive much deeper into sound and understand it from a theoretical perspective. Being an editor while doing sound aided in that as well. That helped me hone in on the issues I had with the sound recording and how difficult they pose to be when post-production begins. A better position to hold the boom pole might have served better and more proper frequent breaks.