Production Problems | Monologue

Worked on recording some foley this morning (05/11/18) for my monologue project. For those who don't know, foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality. These reproduced sounds can be anything from the swishing of clothing and footsteps to squeaky doors and breaking glass. The best Foley art is so well integrated into a film so that it goes unnoticed by the audience. It helps to create a sense of reality within a scene. Without these crucial background noises, movies feel unnaturally quiet and uncomfortable.

So, for our film we needed to cover everything from footsteps to recording the actual speech itself. The difficulties with recording foley, especially atmospheric tracks are that gathering sound in certain places mean that you will encounter other people. For example, in the beginning sequence of our film, our character is practicing his speech in a public place. So, when we were recording our atmos tracks, we had to deal with people coming in and out of where we were. Our tracks were ruined by simple things like doors opening and wind rushing through from outside. It took us some time to get a minute and a half's worth on uninterrupted atmos.

After collecting our atmos we went to a much quieter place to record some sound effects. It took us a while to find an empty room that fit our requirements for our foley recording but after finding one, we worked for about half an hour to collect all of the foley that we needed. We then went to one of the sound studios on campus to record myself delivering the speech. Thankfully, this didn't take too many takes and we managed to get the whole speech recorded within 20 minutes. As a group we thought it would be a good idea if we used the recording of the speech for me to lip-sync to when we were recording the sequence of our character giving the speech. So, I opened a new project in Logic Pro X and spliced together the takes of the speech to get a full track of the speech.

After collecting the foley in the morning, we went back to the editing suite to review what we had and to backup our recordings. However, not all was well as when we opened our Premiere project, we had lost all of our footage that we recorded last week. Unfortunately, it wasn't a case of simply re-locating the footage so that the project could import it back in, we had genuinely lost all of our footage. After hunting on Google for a way to fix it we found that one of members in the group had backed-up all the footage to his Google Drive. We were able to breathe again.

Ultimately, the footage we thought we had lost wouldn't have been too difficult to reshoot. It would have been annoying but there were some shots that we needed to reshoot anyway. However, this doesn't mean that you should take less care in the protection of your footage. A good backup structure to follow is to have at least two backups. You could even go the extra mile and have two physical backups (external hard drives) and an online back up (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.). You can never be too safe with backing up your footage. Now we know for next time to be more cautious with how we store our footage.