I have decided to combine the posts about the two sound exercises that we have tackled so far.

LENNY EDIT

I have always wondering how hard it would be to sync audio for a film. I always assumed that the person making the folly sound would try to make the sounds whilst watching the footage. I am however, completely sure they don’t record folly before filming or before planning what is going to be shot.

Despite this I was actually pleasantly surprised with how my Lenny edit turned out, despite the obvious lack of cohesion between footage, folly and dialogue. I think that cutting on action really made it easier for us to attempt to sync the audio with the footage, at least when it came to folly sounds like footsteps, sitting down and the paper noise. When trying to link up the sound with the video I felt that if I altered with the speed of some of the sound (especially the footsteps) it probably would’ve sounded relatively okay. I decided against this because I assumed we would learn how to properly sync sound later on.

In terms of the Lenny video itself, I thought that all our group did a great job with our shot selection and our collective eye for continuity. Our well planned out shooting schedule and framing made it really easy for the video to look cohesive despite the obvious change in subjects.

TWO LINE SCRIPT (LYNDA’S SCRIPT)

I think that I must’ve zoned out momentarily in class when we were talking about clapping before a take. This become clear once I was trying to sync up the audio and footage, when I realised that I was clapping wrong the whole time. Not only did I clap and release my hands immediately, in some takes my hands weren’t even in the frame (sorry to everyone in the group). I quickly realised how bigger a blunder this was when trying to work out when to mark the audio. Due to me not knowing when the clap stopped I had to rely more on sound then anything else which was problematic to say the least.

Once I merged a few files I started to get more confused because the syncs was still very off. I wasn’t sure how to fix this so I ended up manually moving the audio forward or back to try and make it look a little more synced up. I was also doing this ‘manual moving of sound’ in the sequence box which I know was wrong. Despite my guilty feeling of editing in the sequence box I was unsure how else to move the sound without having to remerge the files. In retrospect I probably should’ve just done that.

My constant remerging, adjusting and moving the audio made it really confusing when actually trying to edit the footage. For a 25 second video with a fundamentally terrible sync it took me a huge amount of time. A lot of which I felt was wasted trying to edit an already merged clip. I also realised that I didn’t adjust the volume of the seperate merged clips. This is really evident in when Jeevan speaks after Caitlin. After making this video and merging the clips I still feel like I’m not that much closer to working out how how to properly sync audio.

Despite my video looking passable on a surface level I feel that I went about merging the files and syncing the audio the complete wrong way. Next time I attempt to merge audio I need to work out how to edit a merged file in the top left section (source section?) of premiere pro and also need to make sure that whoever is clapping or using the clapper board knows what they are doing, because my terrible clapping made it harder for me and i’m sure everyone in the group. I also think that when recording folly, sound effects and even dialogue someone should probably clap or call action.  The opening of the video below has a count down beeping sound so we could even use something like that.

One positive is that despite our sound/shot logsheet being written in the wrong format. It still was a huge aid when I was trying to work out what files were what. I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to fill in one of those sheets pretty much perfectly next time I use one.

Overall I am going to do a lot of research about folly sound and syncing. I think having a good understanding of the audio you use in your work is incredibly important and crucial if you want to make a nice sequence.