Wow.
It’s finally time to put it all together. You have
your clean dialog, sound effects, and music/score. Mixing
dialog is very tedious and the benefits are seldomly noticeable.
The better job you do, the more the audience shouldn’t
notice your work. Audio should be transparent. The audience
should walk away from the movie thinking the sound was exactly
like that when recorded in production.
Where
do you start? I normally start with dialog. Normalize the
levels. Mix the boom and lav mics together to get the appropriate
sound characteristics. Add a little bit of reverb to the
lav mic recording to match the boom mic. Paste room tone
in where the scene was extended. If the sound was blown
in the best visual take, see if you can word-by-word paste
in the dialog from another take. Increase the bass in the
leading man’s dialog so he doesn’t sound as much
like a girl. Not all the dialog will be perfect, but get
it as perfect as possible–then think about ADR. This
is sweetening. It is very subjective and this is the time
to make the dialog work better. The audience doesn’t
know what it sounded like when it was recorded, but you
do. This will make you less objective because, invariably,
you will try to recreate how it sounded when recorded. Why?
What’s the point? Change how it sounds to fit the scene
and movie better. Movies are fantasy, not reality. Remember
that. One thing to think about while mixing dialog is perspective.
If the audience sees a long shot and the dialog, recorded
with a lav, sounds ‘close,’ they’re going
to ‘feel’ that something isn’t right. Boom
mics are great for maintaining perspective because when
shooting long shots, the boom will be farther away than
when shooting close-ups. Lavs may need tweaking to sound
right. As for levels, I like to put my dialog about -10
to -12 dBs (digital dBs) with peaks going up to -3 to -6
dBs.
Sound
effects are pretty basic. Mix them consistently with the
style of your movie. Do you want the SFX to seem hyper-stylized?
Turn them up and maybe add reverb. Using good quality monitoring
speakers really helps when mixing because you need to hear
just how loud or quiet to make stuff like the rustling sound
the actor’s corduroy pants made when walking to the
door in scene 18. Yeah, very tedious, but it will make your
movie sound better. Another thing to remember with movies
is they often take shortcuts that are impossible in reality.
The best example is the man who gets into the car, starts
it, and drives away. Go look at a movie. By the time the
door is shut, the car is started and beginning to pull away.
This never happens in real time. You need to use these shortcuts
too, unless there’s a reason to spend 15 seconds of
screen time having the actor start the car. Also, movies
cheat some things to motivate action. For example, a woman
walks up to a jukebox, puts her quarter in, and selects
a song. In real life, the old song would finish playing
out, and then her song would start. In movie land, as soon
as she selects a song (in a split second, BTW), whatever
was playing stops and her new song starts. This is much
more dramatic than real life. The audience needs to see
the cause-effect right away. Sound effects help these types
of ‘cheats.’ Make the sound of the quarter dropping
into the slot and the buttons being pushed louder and all
will sound right. Fill the soundtrack out with sound effects.
Audiences like full, rich soundtracks.
Put
the music in now (if it’s not already). Some people
like to edit with music already in the scene. Once the soundtrack
fills out (including with music), the ‘beats’
in the movie will need to be adjusted. This is normal. Try
and keep everything as adjustable as possible throughout
post-production. Trust your instincts–as a moviegoer
yourself, you are an expert. Don’t be afraid to sweeten
the music if it needs to have more bass, sound like it’s
coming through a wall, or from a radio with poor speakers.
Some scenes may need to create a music ‘bed’–the
music starts loud, gets turned down when the actors are
talking, then gets turned back up just before the scene
is over.
I’m
no mixing expert. Mixing is an art and science. It takes
a long time of tinkering and making slight adjustments to
make it the best it can be. Take your time. Start each new
mixing session out by listening to the mix in entirety with
fresh ears. Keep the dialog at -10 to -12 [digital] dB and
let everything else fall into place from there. The audience
may not notice all the work put into the soundtrack, but
they will like the movie that much better because of it.
(Reprinted
with permission from JorenClark.com
)
