Life is a beach -_- 🏖(Post-Production Day #7)

I truly don’t know why I don’t listen to Sebastian The Crab and go live “Under The Sea” as well. You know the one, “Up on the shore they work all day. Out in the sun they slave away. While we devotin’. Full time to floatin’. Under the sea.” Yeah, when a talking crab tells you things via the tv, you better listen because “the human world is a mess” (Ok I’m done with the little mermaid references). You see, I’ve been editing this scene for 3 days or is it 4? I can’t remember, it’s just on repeat in my head. Time is meaningless. I hear it when I’m in the shower, I see it in my dreams. It’s just great.

As you may recall, I thought that this scene was going to be hard to piece together and it was. Then I thought it was going to be difficult to level, and then it wasn’t! Actually, leveling this scene was quite enjoyable! So what’s so bad? ONE AUDIO CLIP. ONE SINGLE AUDIO CLIP! This clip probably contains the most important line in the whole scene and it’s lost, buried under sounds of wind and waves crashing. And it is driving me insane. So in order to avoid pushing a hole through the wall, let’s talk about the mixing and leveling thing.

As I expressed, I thought this was going to be difficult, in fact, it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be! Since all the audio was recorded with the same mic, in the same environment, and about the same proximity to the actors, the audios were pretty to level with few exceptions here and there. The waves and wind, which I thought was going to be a pain, has been my holy grail! The white noise hides the transitions in audio beautifully ( with little exceptions). Because the audios are also separate from the videos, there were a lot of gaps of silence in between them, I fix these pretty quickly by adding what I call “patches”.

“Patches” are basically audio clips of white noise taken from an actual audio from that day, making it usually constant thought all audios. As long as the patch is faded in and out it is almost unnoticeable! Here’s an example, see if you catch the patch!

Anyways, back to the vein of my existence. This audio clip is crucial for storytelling pursues and the progression of the plot. Amazingly there is just ONE TAKE of this. I don’t know how this happened; Jake had headphones on so he had to hear the wind, it would certainly have been helpful to redo it again. However, what’s done is done and now it’s our job to work with what we’ve got:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TFTAhy8zZx_i3lUKtEk1oFvSIuUxNDsE/view?usp=sharing

I tried putting the audio through pitch filters, which made it sound really odd and muffled. I’ve watched 5 YouTube videos on the matter to see if anyone has an answer to our problem; however, it seems like there is no easy course of action. I’ll keep playing around with it for the time being but I have to move on. Jake has to piece together the last part of the scene and we have to keep working to meet our deadlines.

Signing off,