I routed all my audio tracks to folders and colour coded these for organisation and workflow. I also used markers to help me cue the recordings of the ADR and foley as well as my other SFX. I colour coded these markers corresponding to the folders (Dialogue – Pink, Coraline foley – Indigo, OM foley – Aqua, SFX – Purple) and this made my workflow faster and smoother as I could see visually where I needed to record from next.

There are 3 characters present in this particular clip so 3 audio tracks were recorded. I used gentle compression on all as I was only wanting to use it as a way of keeping the dynamic range consistent and even out any potential peaks. For example, one piece of dialogue has a character letting out a quiet gasp before a loud grunt within seconds of each other. To avoid any issues with this I set a high threshold on all but with a soft knee as I was only wanting it to affect the peaks rather than compress the entire audio.

As stated earlier, I wore similar shoes to this character to keep the performance true to what is on portrayed on screen. I did use a high cut filter at around roughly 8kHz as the high frequencies made it sound too tight and by sculpting the EQ this way it added a little weight to the character’s steps. C is the “good guy” in this scenario with the OM being the villain. It was important to me that, although visually she is significantly smaller and in this scene is scared but determined to save her parents, that she has some weight in her steps and not seem small with the way she moves. It added an almost quiet confidence which I feel was beneficial to the story conveyed.  

I had originally recorded these footsteps with 2 wooden sticks that had a flat edge however I felt that it sounded too closed in and thin as the sticks had a very small surface area. It was mentioned during the playback session with the class that perhaps layering a scuttling sound would work as the character is insect like. I recorded this scuttling sound with metallic drum brushes and this worked perfectly as it reinforced, not only the insect nature of the character, but the metallic side too. I then closed the drum brushes and used these to replace the wooden stick footsteps. The drum brushes have a wider surface area and are heavier so this added more weight and made them sound more like footsteps. As the main body of frequencies appeared in the mids, I used a high and low-cut filter while giving it a slight boost in the mids. By shaping the EQ this way, I felt it added some density which aided in making it sound like real footsteps. They do sound quite staccato, but this is due to the character having long, skeletal legs with a sharp point at the end as my idea was to recreate something sounding like a thin stiletto heel.

I sourced my other sound effects needed from both the college sound library and external websites such as freesound.com. I added some cat growls and meows as this is another character present in the clip although he doesn’t speak in this part or have any movement. I used the Time Shift plugin again from AudioSuite to pitch shift the cat sounds as the recordings had a higher sounding meow but as the cat is a male and to fit with the tone of the scene, I felt it was best to have it sound lower.

I composed the music for this clip using Ableton. I started out with some low bass strings and I added a reverb to create an ominous sound. I then added a droning higher string that I added a slight vibrato to as I felt this could mimic what it’s like to shake with fear. I then used a flange harp which I inputted some pizzicato notes too that went down a semitone each time to create a dissonant, uneasy sound.

I decided to add some howling wind ambience as you can see large spider webs floating on the walls. After listening to my mix through speakers, I noticed that this sound was too overpowering and that it wasn’t getting fixed just by turning the faders down for this and the music up. I used EQ to cut the low-end frequency to allow the music to be more prominent and I noticed there was some hiss near the higher frequencies, so I removed this using a high cut filter. It still didn’t fully fix the issue of the overpowering sound, so I dipped the frequency at the low mids (this is where the main peak is) and this worked better without having to turn the volume on this track down.