Can This Audio Be Improved?

Hi all!

so after a ton of work on fcp 5.0 and taking all your great advice i was able to put my demo reel together by myself =) yay.

I had my friend try to improve the audio but I'm still not happy. I want to remove that echo (bare room sound) that you hear in the second scene where I'm sitting with an orange wall background

If you guys can give me any tips or advice on how to specifically improve that sounds and reduce or eliminate the echoy sound it would be greatly appreciated!

Here is the link to the reel

[www.davidmate.com]

The audio in that scene isn't really that bad. Yeah, it's pretty bright, but it's not instantly objectionable. There's nothing that can be done to improve it barring some fiddling with the EQ, so I wouldn't sweat it.

What is instantly objectionable is the fact that you've got anamorphic footage squeezed into a 4x3 frame. I'd fix that if I were you, and not sweat the fact that the location sound recordist used the wrong kind of mic.

Take down a bit of the treble and high mids. That will alleviate the problem, but still won't solve it, and you can't go too far or all the dialogue will sound stuffy for lack of cut. Even a pro sound mixer would very likely ADR that scene if you needed to get rid of the echo. We had similar problems on a short film two years ago, and even Skywalker Sound had to use ADR.

You also aren't quite helping the problem by not incorporating some sound design. I don't know what kind of space they're in, sounds unusually reverb-y for what appears to be an apartment scene. You can hide some of the problem by putting in some more of a soundscape. But there's only so much you can do, because that scene is shot in the most boring "talking-heads", pure-separation style possible, which limits the number of elements you can put in sound-wise. The guy's extended monologue is especially weak, since the scene's more about her, but we stay on him the whole way. Not a wise editing decision. It only makes the reel more dull, it doesn't help flatter his (your?) performance.

I'd spend your energy somewhere else, such as making the editing more varied. To be honest, coverage issues aside, this is pretty good compared to what you had before. And as Jeff says, fix that anamorphic problem.


www.derekmok.com

hi thanks for your input. Im confused about what you mean when you say the guys monologue is especially weak, since the scene's more about her, but we stay on him the whole way."

this is a demo reel for this actor not the female so the intention is not to have the camera on her and we only threw her in a couple times just so it wouldnt come across like it was shot for a monologue purpose.

Demo reels are purely about the person interacting with another. if the demo reel is about the guy then it needs to highlight the guy and not the girl. But i see what you meant. of course if it was shot for a scene it would be a more dynamic shot

thx

> this is a demo reel for this actor not the female so the intention is not to have the camera on
> her

That's true to some extent. But the problem is, this is an acting scene, which means in order to judge his acting, I have to know what she's doing. If she's shivering because she's holding back tears and he's still making a choice to be utterly merciless, that affects our perception of his performance.

Plus, to get into a character's head, you can neither stay in his POV all the time, nor can you just always stay on his shot. You have to use a combination of his shot (so we see what he's doing), and the other person's (so we see what he's seeing). Just giving him a gigantic close-up all the way through a very, very long monologue simply makes the scene seem a lot more stagnant than it could be.

Cut her down. Don't cut her out. Cutting her out completely also compromises his performance.

Unfortunately, the scene belongs to her character because she's the one at stake. Doesn't mean it's bad for him (the actor), but it means that it was very conspicuous how you didn't cut to her, because everything he says is about her. His words only have an impact in relation to how they impact upon her.

Do you have mediums on the guy? Or shots that bring the actors together? Any coverage at all? If you really had to stay on the guy's shot, a medium or medium-close-up would have "survived" a lot better. Big talking heads scream "TV", where the actors are frozen in space looking stupid, with no body language, because they were told not to move an inch to their right for lighting purposes.

It's a common misperception to think that if Scene A is about Person X, then you need a lot more shots on Person X. As I mentioned before, to get into Person X's head, it's often absolutely crucial to see what Person X sees, rather than be on Person X all the time.

Two examples that come to mind are in Taxi Driver, when Travis meets Sport for the first time, and later when he has breakfast with Iris. Coverage-wise both scenes favour Sport and Iris rather than Travis, but we're firmly in his head. Sport and Iris get more shots because we want to see what Travis sees, observe them as Travis observes them. More shots on Travis don't necessarily get us closer to him; we needed to see what he sees in Sport and Iris to in order for the scenes to work. Those scenes belong to Travis utterly because he drives the action and they change him forever, but he actually gets less prominence in terms of just onscreen time.


www.derekmok.com