LONG BLOG
Some musings on a short film I did sound for- Recollection
Oh hey, it’s me again, ScionVyse, back with some more stuff for you all to watch/listen to. So, in my last semester of college (ever hopefully) I had a big assignment where I had to work on a short film with a group of students from different programs, from start to finish. I came onboard in the production stage, and what we ended up producing was this- Recollection.
Just an FYI, you'll need decent speakers ot get the full experience, there's a lot of low end and some decently high stuff going on.
I was part of the sound team on it, (a team of two, myself and a friend of mine) was lead sound designer, mixer, and had the pleasure of being the music composer for it as well. This was essentially all I did for a good three weeks after filming was finished and a cut was done. Writing music, placing it, getting a new cut and having to adjust, doing ADR, designing the sounds that were used (which I designed along with the music to keep a consistent feel throughout) along with a bunch of other things. I was going for a minimum of 6 hours every day on top of all my other work, up to 12 on some days. In the end, it paid off, since the film won (with other awards) the award for best sound design in the school’s film festival.
There's a lot in this film that I'm really happy about, as early on it was looking like there was a lot that was unsalvageable or wouldn't turn out too well. There's some dialogue in some areas that are ADR, (dialogue replaced afterwards) but I was able to blend in with the original production audio really well so most people even among the other audio post students weren't able to tell the difference. Some of the Foley that was done, (which was mainly my partner but I did assist with it) sounds super good as well. We worked on it up until the day that it was due, and even mixed in some different backgrounds and changed some levels right up to the deadline, essentially. It was really stressful, I definitely didn't sleep much throughout the process, that's for sure.
This was my first real experience working on something audiovisual where I wasn’t the one ultimately in charge of the end product. I'm very self conscious and don't have a huge amount of confidence in what I do, so having someone else have the say in whether or not what I did was good enough was fairly rough, at least at the start. I generally never like having people see something I’m working on until it’s actually done, but that wasn’t an option this time around, but it was a good experience, learning that what I think a thing should be isn’t always correct- thinking in terms of what a client would want instead of what I want. Thankfully my director was really good, understood (and liked) what I did, even when a few tracks weren’t exactly how he originally envisioned things.
The music for this was really interesting to write, as the director wanted an ambient, synthy sound to a lot of the music, and prior to working on this my experience on writing music with synths was very limited. The first track I wrote for it, Memento Mori, ended up being moved around and didn’t end up where I originally placed it in the end. I originally had it in the last scene, giving it a much darker tone, but it ended up as an end credits piece. I really like the song, and I’m glad it got moved, it definitely fits better as a credits song than it would as score in the film.
I really loved working on this, and I hope to be able to do this sort of thing as a career eventually. This is obviously just a school project, but it’s definitely a good stepping stone, and I’m very proud of the work I did here. Being able to do this, win an award, and end the year off with honour roll is a really good way to end my college career, I have to say.
I'm not going to go though every piece of music on their on this time, but I will say there are some motifs spread out throughout the film and I composed the entire soundtrack in a very specific way, I'll be impressed if you figure it out! I suppose if you want to listen to the music for this on its own, you can do so in a few places, on youtube via the video here, on my Soundcloud, and if you have way too much money that you absolutely hate to have, you can buy the music on Bandcamp or you could do something better with the money like throw it off a bridge or something.
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