Voice in other room sound effect

It also really helps if you're texturing in some ambience: room tone, fridge hum, kids playing outside, traffic, etc. Then you can "bury" the voice in it. Too many videos have no sound development- it's a real detriment, in my not so humble opinion.

In my humble opinion too many movies are too overlaid with sound. Yes, all that sound is there, traffic, kids, fridge, aircon, but nobody hears that stuff except microphones. This has been the Hollywood trend over a number of years, slathering on layers and layers of sound that are filling but meaningless. In reality we don't hear most of what's on most movie tracks. We don't hear the aircon or the traffic or clothes rustle or foot scrapes or even the kids outside, unless your kid's outside. Just seems to me there's too much foley in most video and not enough of the essentials of what people actually hear in real life, too much muffled dialog lost in a ton of effects and LFE rumble.

To the point at hand, if you want the audience to hear the guy in the next room, lay the sound the way we hear sound not the way it really is, don't bury the guy in background.

Tom, I actually agree with you, having been one of those perpetrators for many years. There were a pair of horror features for which I was one of the sound editors. If it was night, there were crickets, even if you were indoors, you could hear crickets. If it was daytime there was a lush bird track.

Conversely, if you've got a scene with a lot of cross cutting and each camera angle has a totally different ambience, you're paying more attention to the sound jumps and less to the dialog. More better to smooth it out with a steady ambience that will cover the (hopefully) mostly filtered out SOF ambience.

Good point Tom.

In many cases though I think all the sound helps hide the fact that the content is rubbish.

Case in point. Last week the kids and I were watching a Network program where the star is engaging with a fair amount of wit, interesting body movement and facial playfulness.

The scenes with the supporting cast though were plastered with ambient noise, music builds, stingers and other subtle accents. Yes I agree that most people never hear that stuff, yet on a subliminal level, I think it helped carry the audience through the other lifeless characters and stilted dialogue until another scene with the star came to screen.

Mind you this is not a defense of the tactic, but rather an explanation.

At least that's my take on it.

The prevailing wisdom in the seventies was to load up the first reel and the last reel and have effects complexity diminish toward the middle of the picture-- not leave anything out, but just don't go all out. This was mostly a budget constraint. Producers always seemed to be out of money by the time a picture got to the audio edit and mix.

I love foley effects-- some of the most fun I ever had-- but they have their place and they can also be overdone to the point of absurdity. There's a very interesting picture called Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) that has not one note of music in it-- it's all roomtones and foleys-- effect work by one of my mentors. There's a clip out there on youtube with a VERY young Frank Langella. The silences, the intimate sounds of paper rustling, clocks, etc, did a very good job of showing the isolation and depression of the main character.

But perhaps I'm rambling. Wouldn't be the first time!

Hi -
I had the luck to hear Randy Thom give a seminar on Sound Design. This article from 1999 should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in production:

http://www.filmsound.org/articles/designingforsound.htm

When he spoke, he had just lost the Oscar for best sound design ("Contact") to that little piece of fluff known as "Titanic". His discussion was how good sound design is not layering in 30 sound effects in a scene, but rather finding the one or two correct ones.

MtD

To clarify something Tom said earlier, we actually DO hear all that stuff, quite well. Our brains, however, are so highly functional, that we are able to disregard the noises that aren't pertinent to the task at hand. But when you hear the sound from the microphone, you're hearing all that audio coming from a central location (the speakers) and so you focus on it more. A really good surround sound system can accommodate for that, but they cost tons of money. (I'm not talking about a Best Buy purchase, mind you.)

I, for one, can't stand when there's no ambient audio filling in the scene. But at the same time I hate it when the ambient audio and effects audio overpower the dialog. It's a tough one to master, but when it's done right, you shouldn't notice the foley. That doesn't mean it isn't there.

I of course agree with you in the sense that your ears are perfectly capable of receiving the sound (assuming adequate hearing), but if your brain doesn't process it, ignores it, filters it out, are you hearing it? If you eyes swing from one person in a conversation to another, do you see the pan, or do you see one person and then the other?

The problem really is that when sounds comes from a central speaker we don't have that ability to filter out the unwanted from the wanted because we're listening to that sound source. I just think that the current fashion is to layer on foley far more heavily than is necessary, and it seems the bigger the budget the thicker the layers get.

Yeah, I'll buy that. But I've seen movies done with absolutely no foley sound, and very discreet audio for dialog, and it sounds like you're standing in a sealed wine cellar. It actually takes me out of the story more than foley does. Like I said, if done right, you don't notice the foley sound, but it's still there.

So true.

From http://www.filmsound.org/articles/designingforsound.htm

+"My opinion is that film is definitely not a "visual medium." I think if you look closely at and listen to a dozen or so of the movies you consider to be great, you will realize how important a role sound plays in many if not most of them. It is even a little misleading to say "a role sound plays" because in fact when a scene is really clicking, the visual and aural elements are working together so well that it is nearly impossible to distinguish them."+

Recorder, microphone, voice yelling, another room filter. works every time!

Recorder, microphone, voice yelling, another room filter. works every time!

Or, Recorder and microphone + *voice yelling from another room*. works every time!

lol.

x

Hi-
Effects Tab > Audio Filters > Final Cut Pro > 3 Band Equalizer
apply so:
!http://www.spotsbeforeyoureyes.com/MuffleAudio.jpg!

But Mr. Cookman's idea is much more fun.
MtD