Using the knowledge gained from the Pro Tools Linkedin short course, my classmate and I booked out the Composition Studio and Foley Room in order to record the Foley to the opening scene of Lynne Ramsay’s film ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’.
After configuring the gain structure on both pro tools and the external preamp found in the composition lab I set about creating a new session in Pro-tools. I had in fact already prepared a session in the previous lecture, with the clip loaded, identifying where all the most important cuts were for atmospheres, FX and syncing of image to sound. When setting up the initial blank session, I set it to the audio file standard for working with video: 48khz, BWF (.wav), 16bit. For the i/o settings I chose stereo mix and then named and saved the new session. From there I created as many new mono or stereo audio tracks that I felt I needed, taking into account that we were overlaying and recording atmospheres and foley.
Using a Sennheiser 416 Shotgun mic, we recorded footsteps, cloth sounds, glass clinking as well as other sounds, syncing them up to the image. Given the dreamlike quality of the opening scene, instead of trying to recreate all of the sounds in the scene, which would have been a hefty task considering the sonic content of the scene, we opted to create various drones, time stretching and manipulating them using open source software such as Cecilia and Paulstretch, before overlaying them in order to create a ghostly effect. Unfortunately, due to gain staging issues, much of the initial foley was recorded too quiet, giving a very high noise floor when mixed appropriately. While this means we may have to re-record much of the foley, it is valuable lesson in avoiding the same mistake in future.