Valhalla Rising Final Report

Overview

This project is demonstrating how sound design can add dynamic feel to the movie in the movie production industry. The project was carried out in several stages based on the audio production process such as planning, recording, editing, mixing and mastering.

The equipments used in this entire project were Marantz PMD660 field recorder , AKG microphone CK-91 and 92 , iMac core i7 with OS 10 , music production software such as  Protools 10 and Reason 6 , Reference monitor speakers (Sennheizer and ) and D-Command mixing desk . 

The movie clip was used in this project was the Valhalla Rising directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. The length of the clip was 7:00 minute.

Planning

In the planning stage, we observe the movie several times to identifying the element of sound that is appropriate for particular scenes, identifying the overall mood of the movie in order to design the sound track for the movie. Finally, we produce lists of required sound for sound gathering process.

Recording

We record different sounds from different location in Darwin based on the required sound list using the. Some other sound such as foot steps are recorded in the Charles Darwin University Studio Editing room.

Editing

In this stage, we audit the quality of each sound gathered and edit the sound by normalizing, trimming, and pitching, equalizing and applying soft compression. The edited sound then imported into the Protools and composed into different tracks based on the scenes time line. In addition, we apply equalizing, compression and gating to water drip sound to take off the low frequencies.

Adding special effects such as reverb, delay and stereo expander into three stereo buses mix and assign each track that needed.

Adding fades to impact sound to smooth the sound. Reversing some of the regions to get the pre-hit sound to some of the impacts.

Finally, we create a sound track using reason rewire to add mood and emotion to the movie.

Mixing

In the mixing process, we listen to the overall mix; apply panning and adjusting the levels to get the stereo perspective and equal level across the mix. Apply level automation to each track to add the dynamic flow to the movie.

Most of the tracks were grouped based on its characteristic and its purpose. For the impacts and hits were grouped into one of the sub mix. Similar to other sound such as mud, waters and music. This makes a lot easier to mix the overall mix.

Finally, the fader automations were mostly applied to sound tracks and some of the ambience sound.

Conclusion

This project is to design sound to add characteristic to the movie. In this sound design process, we follow the audio production technique to achieve our goals in this project. This sound design project has helped me in gained the skill in sound editing and mixing process using protools and compose sound track using Reason virtual instrument.