Transcripts
1. Introduction: Every image in our everyday life has a sound glued onto it. It is the way we see things and relate to them. The sound of the pier early in the morning, a slight breeze that rushes through the branches of the trees. The sound of the car's engine revving, and the silence of the mountain top. These soundscapes stay engraved into our mind just as much as the visual memories. Sometimes even more. We see and feel through sound. So how do we make the sound? Sound real. Hi, I'm Dusan Brkovic. A filmmaker, sound designer, and editor, focused on storytelling and making the regular bits sound a little bit different. Today's class is about creating and developing a soundscape for a video. Telling your story through sound, and creating a bond with your visuals that will convey the message you're trying to communicate with your audience. Sound design consists of four elements. The dialogue, the music, the sound effects, and the ambiances. During this course, we will be focusing on ambiances and sound effects but we'll be touching on dialogue, editing, and music. We will be defining the goals of each chapter as we progress, and we will move towards them with smaller actionable steps. The sonic environments we will be creating can be used in film, commercial videos, travel videos, games, music, standalone audio bits, and so much more. You will learn how to place, edit, alter, and mix the sound effects and ambiances, and tell the story that you would like to share with the world. All of this can be done on any audio workstation platform, or even a video editing platform, and it does not require any prior knowledge. We're here to play with sound. So feel free to experiment. I'm very excited to share my knowledge with you, and with that said, let's make some soundscapes come to life.
2. Class Project: All right guys, for this class project, we are going to be working on a soundscape for your video. Choose a video you would like to create a soundscape for and post the link to it in the project section of the class. This can be a short film, a Tribal video, a game play, an animation, or any other type of video or audio that you can think of. If you do not have a video that you can make a soundscape for, do not worry. You can create a standalone audio work that can tell us all a story. I'm really looking forward to seeing your work. Next, we are going to be creating the atmospheres for the scenes, ambiances for each and every shot of your clip. After you're done with that, show us what you've done in the project section. Remember, be sure to check out other people's work. Your comments are what makes this platform so incredible. Next, we will be adding sound effects to the scenes and doing a rough mix of the tracks. Be sure to write what stage your video is in when you post it. Finally, step four of the class project is the final mix of the video. I encourage you to upload all the steps of your project as it is very important for you and your fellow students to go through them and comment with each others' work. You can paste an unlisted YouTube or Vimeo link in the project section below. Okay, let's talk about the resources. I have posted quite a few links in the description of the video. So be sure to go through them. If you do not own any sound effects libraries, the easiest way to find them for no charge is through freesound.org. I encourage you to search through the libraries on the website. Please ensure that you are using proper licenses and attributions when using freesound.org or any of the other links that I've posted. Alternatively, you can find a lot of libraries on the web, some of them completely free and some of them paid. Please always respect the licenses that come with the pacs. Next, we're going to take a look at the program I'm going to use for this class, it's called REAPER. Linked to the website is in the description. You do not need to be using REAPER. You can use any that you like. This class is going to be teaching you how to work with sound and not with a particular program. Now that we got that covered, it's time to move on to the next chapter and learn how to layer sounds.
3. Layering Sounds: The relationship between the image and the sound is never dominated by the either of the two. They work in harmony, even when not in harmony to produce emotions in the viewer, they do not compete. Sound designer builds a sonic curtain around the image revealing and exposing just the right amount of reality. We pick and choose what the audience here and that is a powerful tool. Sometimes the counterpoint stance gives the scene meaning that neither sound nor image could do on their own, and that is the charm of designing sound. Having said that, let's start designing. We will be going through the basic setup of the project, it's structure, and the things necessary to start working on the project. First, we have to make sure that a project is set to 48 kilohertz and a bit depth of 24 bit. I usually start by adding a video track to my project. For this project are used four trucks for generation, two of them the live mics and two of them for the shotgun mics. I like to use two so I can have more flexibility when placing two audio clips, one next to the other. I keep them on different tracks so I don't have overlaps. Also this way I can control the amount of failure and outs for each of the clips. Next, I have 16 tracks of ambience. On some scenes in the video, I will build an atmosphere out of four or even five different ambient sounds, so it's really important to optimize the number of the tracks. Next, I have 16 tracks of sound effects as this project is not particularly sound effects heavy. I usually have 32 tracks of sound effects, 16 plus 16, just so I can have more flexibility, but here it was not needed. The idea here is that the first eight tracks are used for Scene 1, the second eight for Scene 2, and then we go back to the first state for the Scene 3, to the second eight for the Scene 4 and so on. You might not need eight tracks for many scenes, but some of them will require it. I always keep my tracks organized as much as I can as some projects require more than 256 tracks of audio, and navigating through that amount of tracks can be a chore. Let's get into it, I will play you the first scene of the clip. Now, I'm just going to play you the ambiance. Since I'll bill the ambient three different sounds, I'm going to play each individual sound. The first sound is the gentle morning atmosphere with birds and some city traffic in the background. Here it is. Next we add a sound of traffic in a busy street. The tone of the ambience was the right amount of traffic that I wanted in the background of the scene. The third one that I added is the sound of the wind. It's a light breeze that moves the small flags. However, I have significantly lowered the volume on this one as it completely overtook the scene. Let's hear the three tracks together. It's time to add some sound effects to the scene. The first I will add is the sound of the dog barking. Here it goes. Let's hear it again. I think it fits really nicely into this scene, now, we will add a movement of the flags to the mix. This sound effect is very subtle, but adds so much to the scene. Let's hear it. Let's play it all together. Great. Let's do another one. We have a van that's moving down the dirt road. We will first that the sound of the van driving. That works great, but there is something missing as we cannot hear the gravel heating the underside of the truck, so we add the second track. Now, the two work great. We're done with the atmospheres, let's move on to the sound effect. Let's add some people noises. How about some people talking? We add somebody coughing. Perfect. Let's play everything together now. Now that we understand the process of how to layer the sounds starting from the ambiances and then moving to the sound effects, let's use these building blocks to build our soundscape.
4. Creating the Perfect Ambient Sounds: Ambiance sounds are the foundation of every scene. The site-specific backgrounds that give us locational atmospheres and spatial information. Oftentimes the location sound will be recreated to simulate the original. But with each of its elements that can be controlled. They can be created to simulate the real environment and the not so real one. Think about Star Wars for example. It's the first thing that pops into my mind. How do you create an ambiance for a space battle if you've never heard one? Disregarding the fact that the sound in space is almost non-existent due to it's almost vacuum like qualities. The drum sounds of spaceships and galactic battles are very creative. These sounds are created through synthesis and are mostly artificial. Real sounds can be shot on location or used from a pre-recorded library. It is our choice to decide which way we want to go, of course, considering the nature of the project. All right, let's create some ambiance. The first thing we want to do is think about what actual sounds you could hear in a scene like the one we're working on. Let's take a pirate scene from the video. Perfect. We are on a wooden boat, probably in a harbor since the sails are not up. Seagulls making their usual noises and the sounds of the sea hitting the shore. We would hear wooden squeaks of the boat, naturally. Water lapping around the boat. Of course, we can go further than that. If you want to make this a pirate ship and add the screaming of drunken sailors or the sounds of apparel jabbering, or the bottles being shattered and the sounds of swords colliding. Of course, we can take this another route and make this a post-apocalyptic piece. This boat is far inland. There are no sounds of the sea. Just the sound of the barren desert. Sand hitting the side of the ship. The heavy wind, some metal clunking and the eerie sounds of its insides. How do we choose the right sound? We just listen to as much of them as we have available and find the one with the tone that matches our piece. Sometimes, it won't be perfect, but we will work on it. I like to choose several, import them into the project and line them up perfectly with the scene. Then I play them one-by-one and see which one works the best. I leave that one as a lead ambiance. Then I play the other ones and change their volumes, pitch or speed to see if they can improve the lead one, and they often do. You have to get creative when searching through libraries of sound effects. Not a lot of libraries contain a sound of post-apocalyptic pirate ship. Although some might. But surely there's a sound of an abandoned warehouse with the wind rushing through it. You just have to get really close. The rest will come easy. We have chosen the type of the ambiance's we want to place, we have chosen the sounds, we have placed them on our timeline, layered them, and found the tone of our scenes. Guys, this is the time to show us what you've done up to now. Be sure to upload your work into the projects section. I can't wait to see what you guys have done. With that said, let's move on to the next lesson.
5. Adding Sound Effects: We are ready to add some sound effects to our scenes. We pretty much go through the same process of analyzing the scene and look at the particular sounds that we need to highlight. I usually start with listing the obvious. If we have a person in the shot that she or he move, do we need footsteps? What surfaces are the footsteps on? Then we move on to the clothes. Is the clothes the person is wearing made out of cotton or some other nylon like fabric that rustle as it moves? Now, we go to the surroundings, is there anything in the shot that we'll be making a specific sound? If for example, we are working on an interior shot over room, is there a fan in the shot or a lava lamp or something else that is moving mechanically, an old TV perhaps, we should use that. Then, we further our investigation outside the frame of the shot. We think about what can be heard in a place like that. In a room that a person is sitting in, you could hear the outside traffic or the sounds of a war raging, or a neighbor playing very loud music, which is annoying obviously. We follow these paths and mold our characters and situations through them. We build the world that is outside of our visual perception, outside the realm of what we can see just as we do in real life. This is all important information to the viewer. Think about this in the context of the story. Where is your story place? What is the world that surrounds the protagonist? Is it a nice place? Is it a harsh place? Is it a surreal place? With that in mind, we move into adding and taking away the sounds of the scene. Even if the piece we are working on is super realistic, we still have the opportunity to manipulate it and extract only the pieces that are important to the story. For example, let's take a guy who is out of time for some reason. He's sitting alone in his room, just sitting. Now, we add all the sounds that could be heard in that room in reality. But in order to create his state of mind, we over-exaggerate the sound of the clock ticking. We instantly insinuate that this person is unable to solve the task code in front of him and builds tension in the scene. He is about to explode due to his inability to act. We know this as we have all lived through it. Now let's take the same scene and flip it another way. Let's make the same setup, but exaggerate the sound of static coming from the radio somewhere in the room. The man just looks blank, like he has lost all the reasons to live. Let's do another one, let's add some nice jazz music coming from the record player. This guy is enjoying a nice relaxed evening in his house, and the possibilities go on and on. When thinking about sound, we are creating the personalities of the characters in our stories, be they people, places, or object and make no mistake. Places and objects can be characters in our story too. Just think of any car commercial, the car is the protagonist. Now that we've established the motivations for the scene, we start to build it. I usually start with the footsteps. This is often the most time-consuming part. After I've done these, I move to the next most obvious sections in the scene, and usually the most important ones. When done, I will move to cloth movements. I sometimes like to record these as Foley as they sound incredible when they imitate the movements on screen, but you can get great results from these prerecorded ones. I encourage you to try recording Foley, it's an incredible experience to create sounds for your piece and it brings so much creativity in the process. Sometimes it's hard to find the exact matches for the sound effects that we need, so we have to get creative. For example, the wire pull on this shot was made from a sound of the wire fastener pitched down. Some effects are very specific and take a lot of time to produce. This is especially true if working on a time piece or sci-fi. Let's get back to work, we've done all the sound effects visible in the shot. Now let's turn our attention to the things that are off-screen. In this shot, I added some birds that fly away as the girls move forward. I also added these water drops as the building on the right makes a perfect home for them. As they move through space, they're surrounded by the sounds giving this place an eerie feel. Now, let's hear it all together. This is the end of step three, so export your makes and posted in the project section. Please comment on each other's work, give ideas, share thoughts as this will greatly improve everybody's understanding of the subject and the choices we make during the process.
6. Creating Perspective and Depth: Creating depth and placing individual sounds into their designated spaces within the scene, is extremely important for the soundscape and can make or break the viewer's attention. In everyday life, when we hear a sound that is far away from us, it sounds distant, and that helps us determine the relationship to the sound source. We can determine how far away the sound is. Now when we think about film, the changes that occur when an editor cuts from a wide shot to a close up have to be accompanied in sound, but to what degree? That is the choice we have to make? Is the perspective change important to the scene? If so, what are the ways we can simulate the distance? This come down to the way we hear sounds and determine perspective. The sound that is far away is obviously more silent and the one next to you. So, we lower the volume. Next, as lower frequencies travel through the air further, the sound that is far away will lose its high frequencies. So, we take an EQ, we put a low pass filter on it and play around until we're satisfied with the sound. We take the low pass filter. Now let's hear it without the filter. Alright. Finally, what we can do is control the amount of space that the sound is in. This is called the reverberation. We find the reverb plug-in and add it to the sound. We find the right amount of reverb for the specific scene. Alternatively, if the sound is very far away, we can even add an echo or a delay to it. Now we have a sound that seems far away. Okay. Now let's hear the sound inside the mix. With multiple layers of ambiances in sound effects that we have created, we can control the depth of the scene by moving layers back and forth in our auditory field. The elements we control the sounds with are loudness. The closer it is, the louder it sounds, the timber, the further it is, the darker it sounds, it loses its high frequencies, and finally the reverberation, the dryer, the sound is, the closer to us it seems. Okay. Now we'll figure it out where we want our sound in relation to depth, but there is one more component that we can control in the mix. It comes from our binaural hearing. Binaural means that we here using both of our ears at the same time. Due to the differences in timing it takes from the sound to reach each of the two ears, we can determine the direction and the origin of the sound in the space around us. This ability has been one of the very important tools of our survival. As we could predict the direction from which the danger was coming from. We can distinctively locate 16 or more different points of origin of sound in our panoramic listening. However, sounds coming from above and below are not that easy to locate. This is possibly due to the lack of threat to humans from these directions. So, the way we move sound in the panorama is called panning. We can control each individual sounds place in the panorama, placing its origin from left to right. We can also automate its movement if we have a moving subject, so it pans from left to right, for example, or the other way around. In this scene, we have placed the bird sound effect and the water dripping sound effect, and now we will pan them. Okay, the birds would obviously have to go to the left. Let's put them to like 70 percent. Now we're going to take the pan envelope and we're going to move it almost all the way to the left. Okay, let's hear it now. Now it's all the way to the left. Lets solo the water dripping effect. We'll pan it to like 90 percent right. So it seems that it's coming from the abandoned house. Okay. Now, let's here it inside the scene. Okay, I'm going to move it to back a little bit, like this. I'm going to move this one too, perfect. Now let's take care of the foot steps. We press ''solo.'' I will change their panning to like 20 percent right. These ones too. Okay. Let's hear them now. Okay, perfect. Now that we've chosen, placed and pinpointed the essential sound effects, we can move on and create the depth and perspective inside the scene.
7. Mixing the Tracks: Now that we've taken care of the pan, let's mix it all together. When mixing, always keep an eye on the Master Fader located in the Mixing Console. The levels of the audio on it will give you an idea if the mix is too hot, meaning that it's distorting. Keep your levels below red and you will be fine. I like to start from the Ambiances, find the level that I find optimal and try to keep all the atmospheres around the same output level. I will work on each scene separately and then move across scenes. I'm going to mix all my Ambiances for scene one. I like to lower or raise the volume of each clip individually on the timeline as it gives me more control over the clips. You can use automation and control the clips through Faders if you prefer. Move on to the next one. Let's lower this a little bit more. I'm happy with that. Now, I'll move to scene two. Now let's check if it's okay with the first one. When I get them to sound roughly the same, I move onto scene three. From here, I will just go scene by scene until I've finished everything. Now, we add sound effects. Now we add the atmospheres. Now let's check the Master Volume. Everything seems good. Okay we can move on. When we finish all of our scenes, we give the project around 15 minutes of rest, and then we come back to it and listen to the whole mix. If we hear anything that is off, we fix it and listen to it again as a whole. We do this as many times as we need until we are completely satisfied with the mix. There you go. You've done your first mix. Congratulations. Now we will move to our next lesson where we learn how to export our mixes the best way possible.
8. Rendering the Soundscape: Now we will move to our next lesson where we learn how to export our mixes the best way possible. In this chapter, we will take a look at the codecs and particulars around the exporting of the final product from our workstations. Since there is a lot of differences in the options provided by different workstations, I will not be focusing on the export or render screens. We start off by adjusting the locators to select the duration of our audio clip, similar to in out functions of the editing programs. By doing this, we mark the part of the timeline we wish to render. We hit the render or export button. Our output is usually called master route or stereo out, and is basically the sum of all of our tracks. It is the mix that we hear through the speakers or headphones. This is the channel we will be exporting. Next, we choose a file name and an appropriate folder for the file. We want to be rendering to a WAV file as this is the lossless standard for audio. If we're rendering for video use, we want the sample rate to be 48 kilohertz and the bit depth to be 16-bit. We want the stereo file. If we are rendering just standalone audio, we want the sample rate to be 44.1 kilohertz and bit depth 16-bit. Also in a stereo file. If you are working on a standalone audio and you have set up the project in the beginning to 48 kilohertz, do not worry, the program will down-sample your audio to 44.1 kilohertz without any losses. WAV file sizes are much bigger than the ones that you see in MP3s, but are worth the extra space. Compared to video files, they are many times smaller and should not be that much of a problem to store in this day and age. The usual file size is 10 megabytes per minute of audio. We have made the final mix of sound for our video. Now we can open the editing program and create the final version of our video.
9. Final Thoughts: Here we are. We have learned how to approach sound design and really dive deep into the creation of the soundscape. Then we went on to reveal the layers of the scene, select the sounds for a specific project, create the ambiances and give our viewer the spatial information for each scene. We went on and added sound effects, positioned and mixed them in relation to each other and in relation to the viewer. Finally, we did our mix. Now, we have a soundscape for our video. I hope you guys enjoyed making the soundscape as much as I did this course. Remember, comment and share thoughts on other people's videos and ask questions. This is what makes Skillshare community so great. I thank you for being a part of this course. I hope you create incredible soundscapes and continue playing with sound. Be sure to follow my Skillshare profile for future classes and updates.
Dusan Brkovic, Filmmaker, Sound Designer, Editor
