Tag Archives: audio post 101

I just happened upon a great interview with filmmaker William Friedkin done by Elvis Mitchell on KCRW on their brilliant show The Treatment. They talk for a long time towards the end (and I haven’t gone back to start from the beginning yet, so maybe more than just the end) about how Mr. Friedkin has used and continues to use sound in his work. I should let him speak for himself, but the upshot is he approaches sound and visuals with two entirely different mindsets and gives each one equal emphasis. He even uses our favorite word to describe the finished product of our work: soundscape.

I was doing some poking around about a new workflow idea and came across this gem of a blog post. To be honest, I haven’t read the whole thing because it was interesting but didn’t actually answer the minute question I was looking for. Having said that, I will come back to it. If you are at all interested in making your own movie, you should read it, bookmark it, commit it to memory, print it out and wallpaper your bathroom with it, whatever it takes.

The blog starts with some great quotes from A-list directors. I’ve encountered the Lucas quote summed up as “half of what you see is what you hear,” although I’ve also been told Lucas didn’t say that, he was quoting Scorsese or one of his film school chums. In any event, regardless of who said what, the quotes at the top and the whole premise of the blog post underline something Kat & I have been saying to anyone who would listen since we started this business: nothing telegraphs says “boring indie film” to an audience faster and more effectively than poor sound.

This blog post also inspired a pretty lively conversation over on the DUC, which is also worth reading/bookmarking/wallpapering/etc.

I’ve often said there’s a difference between editing dialog and Dialog Editing, but I’ve yet to come up with a succinct explanation of that statement. Well, perhaps these two pictures can shed light on it:

The first picture is dialog after it’s been edited the way a picture editor edits dialog (put in place to sound like what you want the scene to sound like). The second picture is after Dialog Editing has been done, and it’s ready to go to the mix stage. At this point, they both sound virtually identical (you’re going to have to take my word for that–we don’t have clearance to release the audio associated with these images yet), but the latter has had redundant information removed and everything reorganized to make it easier to mix and ready to easily create deliverables and alternate mixes.

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between editing dialog and Dialog Editing.

(By the way, in this example, the first picture has been edited by us to get ready for a temp mix. The original OMF as it was delivered from the picture department was even more cluttered with sounds which ended up on the effects tracks and aren’t in either image.)