A Good One: Dabbling with Foley Recording and Colour Correction
Since we are now aiming for our short film to enter the Royal Television Society Awards in Yorkshire, it was obvious that a bit of touch-up work had to be done if we wanted our film to succeed as much as possible. Since sound was the most tremendous issue and our attempts of reshooting parts of the short film failed gloriously (see the previous blog on A Good One), it required us to not only record the actors’ dialogue, but also foley.
Foley
Tuesday of last week, after the Visual Culture lecture, Chloe, Hannah, and I took out the AVC and the sound equipment we used on our shoot for A Good One and began recording foley for Adam to edit with. Since Hannah had done the research on recreating sounds, she posed as the foley artist for our session while Chloe recorded sound and I took the responsibility of filming the clips and setting the order of foleys to be done. For this reason, we have been given a list devised by Has that enumerated all the types of foley that we would need to produce in order to match the footage.
This list contained the sounds of steps and cane on carpet, wooden floor and stone, of rustling clothes, the sound of glasses being picked up, the creaking and sliding of shoes, and the sound of a person sliding down a stone wall. All in all, we had 29 different foley sounds to record, some of which were so elaborate that we needed two people performing the role of foley artists.
In the beginning, it took us a long time to figure out how to best tackle this task since many of the test-recorded foleys did not sound at all like what they represented. Even though Hannah had done a fair bit of research and could explain a lot on how to produce certain sounds, we still had to gather additional tools and materials to make the recording sound convincing as the recorded foley sometimes did not sound as it was supposed to. Since we lacked a wooden cane, we borrowed a wooden window opener from the caretakers to reproduce the sound of a cane tapping on ground. As the room we were recording in did have carpet flooring, all the scenes with carpet were comparatively easy to record convincingly.
This was a bit more difficult with the sound of wooden floor. While we did have a wooden table to double as a wooden surface, it took us a couple of attempts to find the right means of recording the sound so that it would not sound too loud or hollow. This required Hannah to sit on top of the table she was recording on to minimise the vibrating sound of the table. Furthermore, Chloe was required to record the sound from under the table since recording from above was firstly too loud and secondly sounded like walking on a theatre stage but not on a proper wooden floor. Lastly, Hannah had to fill her shoes with her hands to make the steps sound full and heavy.
Another issue that we had to settle first was deciding on how to work through the list. Since we were given the list of foley in chronological order, it would have meant that we would constantly have to switch between tools, positions, items, etc. As this meant losing a lot of time, I decided that we would start off by grouping similar sounds together and thus work the list in bulks. This also limited the possibility of losing focus or missing a foley in between.
Another, far bigger issue was the fact of the surrounding. Although, due to the studio’s renovation being extended and thus the studio being unavailable to us, we retreated to use the very same room we used the week before for ADR (which turned out great quality-wise), this time we were not nearly as lucky. While the room itself was still rather silent in structure, the same could not be claimed for the surroundings, especially for the people using it. On multiple occasions, we were confronted with people talking, screaming and laughing during our recording, even though we had put up signs, repeatedly asked them to remain silent (or at least be a bit quieter). This was especially straining, since it not only ate away at our time schedule (we had planned to record these 29 foley sounds in 4,5 hours and were desperately running out of time), it was also quite a humbling experience to realise that people would flat-out ignore our repeated requests or even purposefully interrupt our work). This meant that we could only work in bursts, having to rely on the hope that people would be considerate.
However, this taught me that I would not only prepare attention-grabbing, red-coloured and laminated printout signs asking for silence, it would also mean that I would furthermore bring a blanket and light stand/magic arms to future sound recordings in order to be able to physically block out the sound without anyone having to hold that blanket up for us.
Last Friday then, we all looked into the first re-edit Adam did on our piece and we were all blown away by the tremendous surge in quality just because of the ADR. We decided then and there that we would definitely move ahead and try entering it into the competition for the RTS Awards. Since our internal deadline for submission will be the 24thof October, we did not have much time to lose and looked at missing bits and pieces that we could improve upon until the submission deadline.
Colour Correction
Since a couple of our shots in our short film were not completely matching up colour-wise, due to changes in our lighting situation or issues with one of the AVCs’ aperture, we decided in our production meeting last Friday that I would be researching colour correction methods on Avid Media Composer during the weekend and correct the relevant clips in our common 11.00 to 18.00 edit session today.
Since it was not many clips that needed to be adapted to their surrounding clips (and most of them were mostly a matter of readjusting the white balance and the mid-tones), I was confident that I would be able to find a solution that worked efficiently and quickly to further the project within the time frame that was given above.
Thus, during my research of colour-correction methods, I came across a splendid blog/podcast by my fellow countryman Christian Förster, who is an editor based in Los Angeles. On his website, and in a complete guide, he teaches the proper procedure for colour correction on Avid Media Composer in two possible ways and in a splendid step-by-step, easy-to-follow, easy-to-understand video collection called: Color Correction in Media Composer – The Complete Guide.
So I sat down and learned about the proper procedure to go about colour correction in Avid, about the do’s and don’ts (major spoiler: you never change the values for contrast and brightness), his three-step approach, and about all the practical reasons as well as the necessary technical background information to these three steps.
So far, so easy, right?
Not so much. While the induction seemed easy to understand and follow, and while also the set-up of the relevant tools, windows, bins and effects on Avid worked like a charm within less than five minutes and looked exactly like the setup Förster has taught me, I have encountered other problems further down the line that ended up costing me the entire day.
For the first, many of the measures that I followed to the point, did not bear any fruit. I could change the midtones as much as I wanted, sometimes, the effect would not come through. It took me a couple of hours to realise that the approach by Förster: First setting the blacks, then the hightlights and then the midtones, often did not change much. While the blacks were usually fine, changing the whites was always futile, as the individual colour values themselves did not change when I attempted to match the individual values for red, green, and blue. Many of the attempts I made resembled the tinting of film stock in the early days of cinema: Images that were completely overcast by one single hue, instead of just adjusting the areas in which the colours and tones were actually prevalent, as in Förster’s guide.
After losing several hours on trying to understand why most of the commands Förster demonstrated did not work out, or why Avid acted up and either refused to add effects to a single clip (or to delete said effect from a clip), or why it applied that effect to the entire timeline, to Avid freezing up twice in the process and requiring restarts, to one of the reference monitors glitching and displaying the second previous clip when it was set to display the previous clip and vice versa, etc. pp. Thus, I decided that damage control would be the most time-saving option for now and settled for the worst colour mismatches first.
I started experimenting with the colour picker, trying to match up the skin tones between two different clips instead of focusing on the correct exposure of shadows and highlights.
As Förster points out in his tutorial, ensuring that the blacks are truly black and the whites are truly white in whatever light setting you have, has an important psychological impact on the viewer. This is due to the fact that we unconsciously use the ‘colours’ black and white as visual reference points to assert our surroundings and the time of day. But that not only applies to our daily life, it is also how we measure whether a scene takes place in daylight, at night, or at any other particular setting. The more convincing we are in honouring that part of our psychological makeup, the more convincing our images become. By the way, the same also holds true for skin tones, but more about that now.
As I could not recreate the reference points for blacks and whites as I was taught to, I at least wanted to go to one level below and try using the skin tone as another point of reference for the audience.
And suddenly, it worked! While it was certainly not a fool-proof solution and still required a lot of tweaking and finding the right base image to take the colour from, it yielded much more results than any of the other measures that I saw Förster performing so effortlessly in his video tutorials.
And while this is still somewhat of an automated effect, it seemed to be the only one sufficiently working for the clips we had at hand. This made me realise that colour correction has massive limits depending on the file type of the clip and the codec the clips are stored in. For with the AVCs, we did film in a codec that is non-native to Avid Media Composer and thus needed to be transcoded. This, in turn, means, that a lot of the information on colour is compressed and – for our purposes – lost in the aether. It was thus impossible for me at this point in time to single individual colours out and create a balanced but saturated look.
This is a before-after compilation of the worst shots for you to compare:
However, this was a valuable lesson in time-keeping and understanding the process. While it seemed like an easy task to solve, it turned out that it took much more time than I had expected to get Avid up to work properly and furthermore to understand how Avid wanted me to interact with it. As a programme that is usually extremely reliable in the outcome, it does require you to follow certain protocols and ‘chains of command’ in order to accept an input given. And that took an unexpected amount of time.
During the last week of working with A Good One I realised that there is still a lot that I need to learn in regard to estimating the amount of time that goes into colour correction and foley recording. While I did not think that I would be done quickly with either one of these tasks, I still underestimated how much time I would need into settling into tasks and getting things done efficiently. Knowing how to do things and actually being able to perform them is a different kettle of fish. This I need to remember for future time management as this has taken a lot of valuable time out of my schedule that I could have put into further improving the quality of the shots.
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