Production/Post-Production – Sound

With the final script written and a better understanding of the duration of my short, I finally proceeded to record the voices. Initially, I was uncertain about the approach. I anticipated renting a microphone from the tech park and finding a sound-dampened room to record the lines. However, I had a desire to use the recording booth at the tech park. Unfortunately, my request to access the booth was denied since I hadn’t received training on the equipment, and the staff didn’t see it necessary to train me. Regardless of the reason, this option was no longer available to me.

Fortunately, prior to this, I had been in contact with an audio student at the university. They expressed interest in handling sound design for my project and also offered to assist with the recording process. They would handle the technical aspects while I directed the actors. Although I had to relinquish some control, I had already received rough versions of their work for the portal sound, which demonstrated their competence.

We scheduled a 3-hour session and I gathered the actors. The audio student chose to use three different microphones to accommodate different sounds and mitigate peaking issues. Sound-dampening walls were also set up.

During the recording session, one voice actor would be in the booth at a time while I provided direction through a speaker on the other side.

Over the session, 200+ takes of the lines were recorded, and after they were sent back to me, I picked my favourite takes and placed them in the timeline. In some instances I did cut certain things, a couple of lines worked better when shortened, but after the rough layout I send the timeline to the audio student using an .aaf and .omf, depending on which file was more successful as Premiere to Pro Tools can be fairly buggy.