On Sunday the 18th of October, I did some reshoots for the scenes I wasn’t happy with, namely the scenes that weren’t framed as symmetrically as I’d like them, or had a strange golden hue on the frame due to my unfortunate use of a lighting reflector.

Whilst I was visually pleased with the shots, I had a major problem with the sound when I eventually watched what I had captured in the editing suite.

The sound didn’t record!

Yep, despite using both a zoom h4n microphone and the camera sound, sound didn’t come through either source. I did go and address this problem, as that night (after discovering my mistake), I recorded wild sound with the same h4n of the car to add in underneath each shot, and was glad to find that this was successful. I have also addressed the camera sound issue, and am confident now that this will not happen again.

The day of discovering my mistake. I combatted this on some shots by exporting small clips of the corresponding non-dialogue shots from the October 2nd initial shoot. Because there was no dialogue for these shots, it worked well.

I also attempted to even fix the shots I had taken that did have dialogue. Considering I was using the same dialogue said by the same actors in the same emotional range, I used the dialogue from the corresponding 2/10 shots, and found that if I split up the lines, it worked well.

However, this only fixed the shots that I intended to reflect the emotion of “sadness”. On the actual day of reshoots, I shot a number of scenes, saying the same lines, but in a way that reflects a context of “sexual tension” between Matt and Max opposed to sadness. Because I had not shot any of these sexual tension shots before (in order to use the old sound on the new shots), the majority of these shots are beyond saving.

Finally, as I mentioned, on the night of 21/10, I recorded a number of different “wild sound” clips with the same Zoom mic from inside my car, hoping that the next day I would be able to sync them up with the previously “silent” shots that I had thought lost.

Well that day had come, and I planned to link the sound I had recorded up with the silent shots, to see if I could adapt to and fix the situation.

I found that the sound I had recorded from a previous non-dialogue clip was ok, but I was going to test the wild sound I had recorded the night before to see if it was more effective.

I duplicated the clip, and deleted the sound track. This way I would be able to play all the different clip options against each other, and deliberate on the best one.

The previous night, I had tried to record soft breathing, that I could possibly play under Matt and Max in order to see if it would sound like their breathing. However, now that I was playing it back, it was clear that it wasn’t going to work, it was obvious that it was someone different, the sound was too close to the mic, and frankly, it was uncomfortably erotic in the worst way possible.

I found that unless I cut the dialogue to only the dialogue, the clip was uncomfortably disjointed when switching between two different empty sounds.

I was frustrated at this point, because I had found that no matter what I did, the clip still sounded disjointed as it mixed between different sound tracks. I tried adding the original background sound alongside the wild sound, yet it still didn’t sound realistic.

I had one last solution, I would duplicate the clip, and then try adding the wild sound in between the clips of dialogue. I split the clip, and added the measured sections of sound in between the dialogue.

I then blended the clips together, I did this by adding the “constant power” sound effect between each clip, and matching the volumes

I don’t know how, but it worked! This was the best I’d ever heard it, and I decided I definitely wasn’t going to be able to get it better than this.

It was time to export.

The clip is linked below. The first third of the video being the original, the second being the clip with the added wild sound as a separate track, and the third being the successful clip with blended sound tracks.

This experiment may not have been planned to measure the emotional intensity of the clip, yet now that I the three clips together, it’s clear that the third option is the one that makes it easiest to grasp the emotion of sadness. With the first two, I think you’re distracted by the disjointed switching between the different soundtracks, without even noticing that the scene is one of sadness. Yet when you integrate the clips and join them together in the right way, there is no distraction, and you are able to focus on Matt and Max and the emotional context they are delivering.