Speaker 1: In this video, I'm gonna show you the process I followed to design the audio for my most recent horror short film called The Stranger. I'll reveal all the secrets and everything I did to make this short film sound the way it does, so you can apply the same techniques to your own short films or videos.

Speaker 2: Grab your camera and shoot some business, Rebel Filmmakers.

Speaker 1: Hey Rebel Filmmakers, Reinaldo Cantu here. This is how I do it, it doesn't mean it's the only way to do it or how everyone does it, it's just my process. Firstly, once I have the final cut of the film with all the scenes in place, that's when I tackle sound design. By this stage, we have already have the dialogues lined up since that's part of the editing process.

Speaker 3: Take this part for example.

Speaker 1: By the way, do you wanna see how I cleaned up all the dialogues in the short film? I used a tool that's really good, stay tuned cause I'll show you that later. During editing, I also add music to inspire the scene's rhythm and mood. For The Stranger short film, initially, I used temporary tracks similar to what I'm aiming for, just to capture the right feel, even though I'll replace them with the original compositions later. Now with the dialogues and music in place, the first task is to clean up the dialogues. Despite using a high quality mic for this film, background noises were still audible. You can hear footsteps, street noise, and such. I'll be adding those back in later for better volume control and sound quality. Here, I'm focusing on isolating the dialogues. To clean them up, I'll use an AI powered tool called Audio Studio, which does an incredible job. There are many AI audio cleaning tools out there, but this one has given me great results. So I export the entire dialogue channel to a single file. When open Audio Studio, I upload the dialogue audio here.

Speaker 3: Here's how it normally sounds.

Speaker 1: To use Audio Studio, we just have to click here, wait a bit, and voila, it's done.

Speaker 3: It's really good, check out the before. And then the after.

Speaker 1: I forgot that before doing this step of cleaning the dialogues, I almost always do another step that it's a bit tedious, but it's necessary to do and makes a big difference, and that's adding the foley and all the sound effects. All the sounds of, for example, the footsteps, each single step, oh my god, same with the car key sounds, or the opening of the doors, or closing the doors, all those little details that make the viewer immerse themselves more in the scene. By the way, almost all the sounds I used for this short film, I got from Motion Array. It's a library that has royalty free music, sound effects, plugins. It also has animated titles, stock images, video and photography. This site really has everything, almost everything you might need, and they come with plugins for Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve, where you just install them. In fact, it saved me in more than one occasion. I'm going to leave you the affiliate link in the description for you to take a closer look at it and try Motion Array for free, because you can try it for free. In the music creation process, I include accents to emphasize certain scene parts. Sometimes I feel the music needs an extra punch, so I add elements like these. For example, the music already had this accent. But I felt it needed a little more, so I added this. And I added this one too. And with the three sounds and music combined sounds like this. Once I have everything added, then I go to the previous step I mentioned before of cleaning the dialogues. But there's still a crucial audio track element missing. Can you guess? That's right. Ambient sounds. All the city noises, birds, and more need to be added to enhance the scene's natural feel. Here's an example with city ambience. All the city sounds, all the birds, everything. You have to add that to make it sound more natural in the scene. Next, we adjust sounds requiring filters or special effects. For instance, when she starts the car, I add a reverb effect to make the engine sound distant as if outside the car. Without the reverb. And with the reverb in ambient sound. And for phone conversations, filters are essential. After applying graphic equalizer and dynamic filters, it sounds like a phone call. Now we've reached a critical part of the process, the final mix. This is where you fine-tune each element's levels to achieve the perfect balance. This step involves meticulous adjustments. And with the ambient sound in the door, well, it does make a difference. And then we add the music. This step involves meticulous adjustments, raising and lowering volumes, adding and removing effects until everything is just right. You have to do this one by one, lowering the volume, raising the volume. It's too high, it's too low, it's too high, it's too low. Now I have to raise it again, and lower it again, and raise it again, and readjusting, and put in. Oh, I think I got carried away there. What was, oh yeah, the dialogue track. On the dialogue track, I typically apply compressor filters. Not always, but in this case, I use a single-band vocal booster and a paramedic set to vocal voice enhancer to lift the mid-range tones.

Speaker 3: Here's the difference. And with the filters.

Speaker 1: I also set a hard limiter at minus six decibels to prevent volume peaks. For the music, I adjust the mid-range tones to make room for the voice, add a multiband compressor for volume, and apply a hard limiter. Finally, we thoroughly review all audios to ensure they're well mixed and at the correct volume. I listen on computer speakers, headphones, and even export the video to watch on a different TV to test the sound across various devices. For instance, all the footsteps and ambient sounds were really pronounced on the TV. But on the computer, it wasn't the same. I couldn't hear it that way. I had to go back and tweak the sound levels. After exporting, I'd check the audio on the TV. It sounded too soft this time, so I went back, made some adjustments, exported again, and tested it on the TV to see if it was just right. I must have done this about 20 times. It turned out to be a good workout, too. Once everything is leveled, I apply a hard limiter to the final mix at minus six decibels, which is my personal standard for videos. Audio design is a detailed process that requires time and attention, but the results are worth it. The difference between the raw audio and the final sound is night and day. Here's the raw audio.

Speaker 3: And here's the final sound.

Speaker 1: It's a total transformation that significantly enhances the work. Before wrapping up, here's a tip for editing, especially audio design. Organize your elements. I keep all audio channels separate. Dialogues, phone calls, music, and sound effects each have their own channel. This helps maintain order and makes it easier to locate things during editing. You can also color code each element for quicker visual identification, so you can visually see it faster, locate things when you're editing. This is the order I put all the tracks, but it doesn't mean it's the only order you can put it in. I mean, I put the dialogue tracks first, then I put the music track, and then I put all the sound effects tracks, and finally, I put the ambient sound track. And sometimes I make a final mix, I put that at the bottom. Some people put all the effects first and then the music. That's gonna depend on how you want to do it. But well, this is how I do it. If you want to learn how to shoot a scene and how to edit a scene, you should watch this playlist, cause I'll tell you all about that. And if you want to see this horror short film, The Stranger, I'll leave the link in the description when it's ready. This is Reinaldo Cantu, and I'll see you in the next Rebel Filmmakers video.