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At 344 Audio we like to provide carefully crafted Sound Design, even with tight deadlines. For Strays, we built a lo-fi soundtrack to compliment this Northern British Dystopia.
November 23, 2021
After multiple conversations with Director Aaron Dunleavy, and providing Sound Effects/Design on his previous film 'The Truants', it was a clear progression to approach a project that harnessed his lo-fi, no frills vision of Northern England. That project is Strays, part of Random Acts Centre North's production programme - a joint initiative between Arts Council England and Channel 4.
The film has themes of survival, abandonment and child exploration without boundaries (for better or worse). Children have taken over a street (and seemingly the neighbourhood), with no rules or discipline to stop their dark imaginations running wild. Aaron made it clear that because the film was completely mute at the editing stage, the Sound Design would make or break the audience's perception of this forgotten terraced block.
With a big passion for sound in his filmmaking process, it was clear that Aaron needed to capture the essence of the locations while shooting. Bringing a Sound Recordist on board to record sound effects meant that the final process was not only quicker, but also felt more authentic to the Blackburn based set. We edited these sounds to use for both their intended purpose, and in new ventures - such as turning a hair trimmer into a transitional element:
Most of all Aaron allowed us to roam free, confident in our mutual understanding from previous projects. He gave us references from video games, films and real life objects to describe the sounds he envisioned. Because of the children's struggle for survival, there was an almost predatory element in both the film's editing and in the vision for the Final Mix.
Dialogue in the film is minimal, but often a gateway to off screen action not entirely described by the visuals alone. The sound of children playing in the foreground, and an almost subconscious sound of distant adult screams, suggests an awful anti-paradise which draws you in.
The Sound Design had to have a musical element and rhythm which flowed with the haunting slow motion of the entire piece. It had to be time stretched and pitched, so that washing clothes in sinks, or even blabber from a baby felt like naturally recorded sync sound. This all was combined with the stunning music offered up by the ever eclectic Slomo. Disturbing guitar drones blended well with our harsh feedback effects, microscopic audio fragments and precise music editorial.
We are introduced to the world with establishing shots, and sounds that are equally reminiscent of the film's world. Wind through the bushes foreshadows emptiness, while seagulls fly by, almost trying to evade impending danger. The interior shots of the film are riddled with industrial sounds, reflecting revolutions of the past in this part of the world.
Our custom recordings of Northern British towns and rural areas, combined with the wild tracks recorded on set, gave us plenty of material to build an immersive soundscape. The use of certain eagle sounds suggest that wildlife has commuted from Scotland and the Moors, a great way to express the predatory element mentioned in the spotting session. We also used ethnic instruments to punctuate moments where the children showed their primal instincts.
Many interesting things occur beyond this point in the film, which we can't give away, but the film closes with quite a crucial sound effect. The combination of static and harsh electronic squeals rises from the lo-fi effects we used, and closes the piece almost as if a busted old television is switching off.
Strays was mixed in stereo for broadcast delivery, but due to the lack of dialogue and experimental nature, there was lots of discussion with Aaron to keep the mix as fluid and natural as possible while still meeting the specifications.
It was crucial with this mix to retain clarity but give an unpolished, disused feel. The flow of volume, panning and frequency balance of the Sound Design had to weave around the music to help elements cut through. We added vinyl crackle, tape noise and other audio dirt, which also enhanced Aaron's characteristic colour grade and film grain. By mixing these low in the soundscape, it gives off a feeling that something isn't quite right, that we are watching this world through a lens.
It was a pleasure to work on Strays, and explore new audio techniques that we hadn't seen used before to tell a story. No doubt there will be more to come from Aaron Dunleavy and 344 Audio in the future.
Strays is currently on the festival circuit, recently achieving an official selection at the BAFTA and Oscar® qualifying Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol, the UK’s leading short film and animation festival. The film is also currently touring the UK as part of the Random Acts Playback Festival; a showcase of short films screening at venues throughout the country and finishing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The film was recently acquired by Channel 4 and will be showcased on the Random Acts website towards the end of the year.
Mindful Audio's new library WW2 Aircraft takes flight, with recordings of rare and wonderful aerial vehicles.
November 23, 2021
Company: Mindful Audio
Product: WW2 Aircraft
Price: $80
Our Rating: 4.7/5
This library was recorded at 96kHz 24Bit WAV with high end equipment: Sennheiser MKH8040 and MKH416 microphones, Sony PCM D100 and Sound Devices 633 recorders.
Upon opening our review copy, we were happy to find a clean and clear file structure. Folders for photos, sounds, demos and documents are featured, including a thank you document with contact details for support - a nod to Mindful Audio's great customer service. We started to use the library on a project to put it though it's paces.
10+ vehicles are featured, which must have been difficult and time consuming to setup and capture to this extent. More than 96 minutes of content in 59 files - impressive. Metadata is also included, although the nature of this library lends itself more to users navigating the sometimes lengthy files to find sweet spots for tracklaying. Mindful Audio have also informed us that they offer free lifetime upgrades for this product, with new recordings already captured ready for releease in the future.
The artwork is nice, but it would have been better to have a darker themed background and warlike font to match the vibe of the library.
The first thing to say about this library is that the selection of planes is wonderful. They each have a character of their own and are named according to model, allowing users to pick a German or American plane for instance, in their battle designs.
The movements and textures the planes create are really soothing to the ear, and they feel natural within a warzone. They don't have an over designed aesthetic, which allows each plane's engine to tell a story that viewers will recall throughout the length of your projects.
The fly-bys are exquisite, and could definitely be useful for Sci-Fi sound design as well as their intended use with the high sample rate on offer. The natural phasing and flanging that is occurring here is so addictive to listen to, you'll find yourself wanting to overuse the library!
The overall tonality of the sounds is quite midrange focused, which lends itself well to the film and game genres you will require them for. Mindful Audio clearly focused on accuracy here rather than Hollywood, over-hyped war planes, leaving more options for the end user.
We have already started implementing some of the distant planes into a WW2 Drama film we are working on with great results, which correlate with the project's harsh reality and coldness.
There isn't much criticism to be given for this product, it serves it's purpose well and is a historically accurate representation of multiple vehicles that many Sound Designers will need and use.
It is worth mentioning that some vehicles have less files and content than others. Thankfully, the good ol' Spitfires are covered extensively, perhaps a sign of great British engineering? It would also have made sense to put each vehicle into it's own folder, for the sake of file navigation, but this cane be arranged rather quickly.
The price of $80 really is a steal for your clients working on war movies, considering a recording session for one day alone with these beauties would set them back much, much more than that. You can even get some free sounds from the links provided below to hear for yourself how you can transport viewers to wartimes of the past with WW2 Aircraft!
Are you working on a WW2 film, or looking for spaceship design and movement layers? This product is for you and is a bargain.
Get a FREE WW2 Aircraft Sound 1
For this week’s post we decided to explore and create the retro-futuristic aesthetic of Synthwave.
November 23, 2021
The photo above shows a city in the late evening, glowing with thousands of small light sources increasing in density towards the horizon. The highlight of this image is the red and white trails of light twisting and turning off into the distance, almost like streams of energy running through the landscape. It gives off a somewhat futuristic vibe as these ominous yet vibrant energy streams flow, untethered to the physical world. We wanted to represent this feeling in the form of a music track, that’s why for this week’s post we decided to explore and create the retro-futuristic aesthetic of Synthwave.
Synthwave is a genre that draws heavy inspiration from music and soundtracks from the 1980’s, it’s aesthetically infused with vibrant neon colours and night life culture, and perfect for listening to while driving in a car at night. Its attempts to sonically represent the concept of ‘cool’ and ‘nostalgic’ calls back to those movies in the 80’s where synthesizers and drum machines featured heavily in the creation of their soundtracks. In this post, we’re going to break down how we created a track inspired by this aesthetic.
First, we began with the most important element of this track, the bass. The sound consists of a saw wave being passed through a low pass filter with a fast envelope applied to give the sound its attack. Effects were added such as a flanger, a chorus, a small amount of distortion, a short reverb and a dimension expander to give the sound some subtle width. The purpose of the flanger and chorus was to add slow textural movement to the bass to keep it interesting. A multiband compressor was used to balance the bass and high end of the sound and a subtle EQ was used to control the frequency content more surgically. The result sounded close to bass commonly heard in the Synthwave genre.
After the bass sound was completed we moved on to the drums, the kick and snare were samples taken from a LinnDrum, a drum machine that was manufactured in the 1980’s. The kick sounded good without any processing, however a small amount of EQ was applied to accentuate the thump and transient of the sample. The snare required much more work to fit it to the track, the LinnDrum sample was lacking in presence and had a soft transient, therefore a separate snare was high passed and layered over the top to add what the initial sample was missing, post processing began with a compressor to add more of a snap to the sound, as well as a transient shaper to increase the attack and decrease the sustain by a very small amount. A combination of algorithmic and convolution reverbs were used, then gated to cut the tail just before each kick. The gated reverb technique was very commonly used in the 80’s for snare sounds, they are an excellent way of filling empty space within a track without letting the reverb bleed into other elements, such as the kick drum. For transitions, we used a simple sweeping white noise riser with a high passed EQ, convolution reverb and a delay.
For the pad sound, pulsewidth modulation (PWM) was used to create a supersaw-like sound with two square (pulse) waves detuned slightly. The PWM utilised two LFOs looping at different speeds to control the width of the square waves independently of one another, this gave the sound some timbral movement to prevent it from becoming too repetitive to the ear. A low pass filter was used with an envelope applied to give the sound more of a stab quality, this also prevented the high end of the sound from ringing out for too long, as well as adding dynamics to the sound.
The final musical element for this piece was the lead, this was made with two detuned saw waves with a low pass filter, the filter was modulated by an envelope in the same way as the pad, however the resonance was dialled to a higher value to give the sound a sort of brassy texture, like a synthesised trumpet. The effects used for this synth were a flanger, a dimension expander, a chorus, delay and reverb, with a multiband compressor and EQ for processing. A technique was used to achieve a pumping delay effect with the use of sidechaining. The synth was routed to two different mixer channels, one of the channels contained the final sound, while another contained the same sound but with a delay effect added with 100% wetness. The signal from the former channel was used as a sidechain trigger for a compressor on the latter channel, which meant that whenever the original synth was playing, the level of the delay is reduced to near silence, however when the synth stops, the sidechain releases and the delayed signal increases in level, so the delay is only present whenever the original sound is not being triggered.
Check back next week for part 2, where we explain how the introductory soundscape for the track came together, how it was inspired by the image above, and some thoughts on the composition of the music track.
Part 2 of Audio In Pictures – Sounds of the 80’s
November 23, 2021
If you haven’t read part 1 of this post, please check it out here.
For the introduction, we made a soundscape to establish a visual mood. It starts with repeating footsteps on a hard surface, this was to recreate a person walking on solid concrete. Furthermore, this sound was sent to a convolution reverb, making it appear as though it was recorded in a car park. As the footsteps progress towards their destination, the convolution reverb gets drier, as if the listener were stood beside the person walking to their vehicle.
The main track was processed with subtle distortion and EQ to sound as though it was playing in a card radio, additionally, the convolution reverb used for the footsteps was also used on other elements, becoming dryer as the scene focuses in more. We really felt like this kind of soundscape worked well to introduce the track, Synthwave is commonly associated with nightlife and cars, so we wanted to depict the audio equivalent of a silent night with a person's short journey, ready to take a ride through the empty streets.
In terms of composition, we felt that the bass held the most importance within this track, it is the driving force behind the rhythm. Playing at consistent 1/16 notes, the bass keeps a simple steady pulse throughout the entire track. Even though sometimes it deviates in terms of notes used, the rhythm remains the same. This simplicity allows the rhythm to be felt more by the listener, it’s easier for them to understand the flow of the track. Furthermore, the bass accentuates the kick and snare, letting you know exactly when each drum is about to hit. We also felt that the use of steady notes implies movement, which fits perfectly with the scene of a car driving at night.
We worked hard to create sounds that reflect the visual aesthetic of Synthwave and 80’s culture. Matching soundtracks to specific stylised moods is a fun challenge which we always enjoy!
A collaboration of efforts from both Soundbits and Monte Sound, Artificial Intelligence contains 2800 synthetically processed vocalisations of Sci-Fi inspired dialogue that can be used to piece together voices for robots and computers.
November 23, 2021
Company: Soundbits and Monte Sound
Product: Artificial intelligence
Price: $60
Our Rating: 4.6/5
On opening our copy of Artificial Intelligence, we were presented with the promotional images, as well as a PDF list of all the sounds within the pack, each sound metadata tagged and categorised appropriately. Furthermore, the product contains a “Sounds” folder which holds six subfolders, each containing a unique voice with the recordings split into 6 categories, these are: Numbers and Letters, Phrases, Single-Words-Adverbs-Adjectives, Single-Words-Nouns, Single-Words-Prepositions and finally Single-Words-Verbs. When downloading the pack from the Soundbits website, they offer the choice of having 24bit 96kHz WAV or 16bit 44.1kHz WAV audio files for greater flexibility, the license agreement also being available in the downloads section.
Our first impressions of this sample library were very positive, the recordings were of a very high quality, and the frequency content of each voice is balanced well. What is particularly impressive is that the sounds are all ready to be placed into a project without much need for post processing. The phrases category allows the user to instantly place dialogue into a scene without going through the effort of recording and processing their own synthetic voices for their characters. Furthermore, the sheer number of different words recorded would allow the user to create their own lines of dialogue just by piecing together individual nouns, adjectives, prepositions, numbers and verbs.
Regarding how successful the sounds are at achieving synthetic voices, we think SoundBits and Monte Sound have done very well in establishing that the dialogue is coming from an artificial source. Even though some of the nuances of human speech are still perceived in the recordings, the post processing has been successful in giving them a robotic feel, with the speech patterns adding somewhat of a personality to each voice. This also matches with the current trend in films, which is to have Sci-Fi sounds more grounded in reality.
The performances from each 'character' included sound great. We especially liked the Anne Droid character, a perfect blend of a neutral accent and 'at your service' attitude. With multiple male and female voices here, you certainly won't be stuck for choice when building your phrases and scenes.
Another way to get more use out of this library, is to use it as a word builder. Simply load the WAV files into your sampler of choice, and play up and down the keyboard to create sentences and form scripts for your Sci-Fi voice talent. We have also been informed that additional mini packs may soon be available with extra words, to further add to the flexibility.
While the library has a huge amount of dialogue options, the amount of flexibility given towards processing the voices could be better. Some of the voices are heavily processed and adding more to them could cause problems, unless it is just for worldizing purposes. However, we don’t think that this is that big of an issue, as all the voices sound good and perfectly usable as-is. To be fair to the creators, offering an unprocessed alternative would have likely created a plethora of files.
Overall, we think that Artificial Intelligence is a very solid voices library, the price of $60 is justified by the number of sounds given at your disposal and the sheer number of dialogue combinations you can make here. Check out the product in the link below and listen to the demo!
