RECORDING

For the recording stage of this project, I had missed a few days in college due to health reasons so I decided to take advantage of the evening studio bookings to record my foley however there was a technical error with the patch cable so I was unable to record. I compensated for this by recording my Foley at home using ProTools on my laptop, my Focusrite interface and the SM57 I had at home. I used the spare room in my sister’s house which by luck was a dead space and proved to be perfect for this. I made sure to pull curtains over the window to further dampen any possible noise.

I initially intended to use the RODE NTG3 shotgun mic to record my Foley as it is able to produce natural sound with very little self-noise and a nice flat frequency response (FR) with a very small peak in the high end (around 5kHz). With the most obvious difference being that the NTG3 is a large diaphragm condenser and the SM57 being a dynamic microphone, they are both very durable mics that provide a high-quality sound with a fairly similar FR (NTG3 being 40Hz-20kHz and the SM57 being 40Hz-15kHz) that only differs round the high end. For what I was recording it worked as a fairly useful substitute.

When I was choosing props for the foley I ensured that they corresponded with the visuals on screen, e.g. for C, I found similar shoes to ones she was wearing to create the tight, high-end sound that trainers make on a wooden floor. For the bag and clothes that C wears, I used a mixture of a headphone and mic bag. The headphone bag was made of polyester and I used this for when she was rummaging in and moving the bag. The mic bag was made of a leather type material and when twisting this, it helped create some squeaks that matched with the body warmer she was wearing.

For the OM, her character design is that of something unhuman and a blend of insect and metal, so I had to make sure I used items that reflected this. I had a lot of fun choosing props that would create the sounds complementing what was shown on screen. The OM has sewing needles for hands so to mimic this I decided to use 2 metal whisks rubbing against each other as the spokes are thin enough to represent sewing needles. I was very pleased with how this turned out as I was able to recreate the hand movements in sync. The back of her dress has panels of fabric to look like the back of a spider or beetle that deteriorates as the movie progresses and by the time we get to this particular clip it looks skeletal. I found some shredded paper used for gift hampers and used this to mimic the individual pieces as they moved.

I was careful about my mic positioning when recording the foley for this project. When recording the footsteps for each character (trainers for C, wooden sticks and drum brushes for OM) I angled the microphone toward the ground but not too much as I wanted to accurately recreate how the footsteps would sound from someone in an upright position. As I was using a dynamic mic that was set to cardioid, I didn’t have to worry about it picking up sound from the sides and rear.

I then used an LCT 441 large diaphragm condenser to record the ADR. I initially recorded myself doing the 3 different character voices as a guide track which I had intended to re-record later with voice artists sourced from the various performance departments at NCL.  However, after watching the clip at a feedback session, my lecturer and peers agreed that there was no need to re-record as the voice acting I had recorded worked very well and was sufficient for the clip. This movie is one of my favourites and I have seen it multiple times so knew exactly how these lines were portrayed, was able to match the cadence and portray the emotion involved. I also tried to make my voice sound different to help distinguish between the characters as well as use processing effects.