sureality

Living in the never-ending world of post-production

Audio work can be a blast and suck hard at the same time. Recording bone breaks, face hits, and teeth shattering are so much fun. Building the sound of the door being kicked in kept me entertained for hours. However, cleaning up hiss, pops, and bad dialog is the most intense pain in the ass. I'm knee deep in sound work on the new project and it's moving ahead at a decent pace. I'm learning a lot as I go. Usually I would have a post sound team doing this for me, but our budget was so tight that I couldn't afford them. So I'm teaching myself how to do it as I go along. The flick comes together more and more everyday. I just screened the rough for some folks here at my new studio. They were pumped!

Someone asked on one of my earlier postings what "picture lock" was. To answer your question Picture Lock is when the final picture edit is completed and when sound design and music composition begins. The film must not change in order for all of the sound work to sync up. Some of you may have seen movies that have a "Countdown Leader" in front of the film that counts down to the number 2 and on the next frame makes a beep. That beep is a sync point for the audio and picture to match up. So when the actor speaks the words match his mouth. The beep enables all the other post- production teams to submit completed work that is timed to that beep. So all I have to do is import my composed music and match up the beep and it all plays where it is supposed to. It's late and I am tired, so I probably did a terrible job explaining that so check out a definition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_lock

Here is a fun little test for you folks.

What recorded sound do you think makes the best leg breaking sound?
A. Chicken Bones Breaking
B. Splintering Plywood
C. Celery