Speaker 1: The key to good sound design doesn't start here. Instead it starts here. Or maybe even here. The point is you are more likely to end up with a better end result if you take the time to prep your session. What's going on everybody? I am The Sound Effects Guy and today we're going to be taking a look at my workflow for prepping a video for sound design so that hopefully you can use this to kind of adapt your workflow to end up with a better result. If you're new to the channel make sure you hit that subscribe button along with the notification bell so you don't miss out on any future content and if you'd like to be a part of The Sound Effects Guy discord server you will find a link in the description below. With that being said let's get started. Before we dive in I do want to talk briefly about the video clip that we're using. This is a clip from the video SCP Overlord created by Evan Royalty or Evan Muir. I did not work on this video. I had no part in its creation. I'm simply using the clip as a visual reference for the things that we're going to be talking about today. You will find a link to that video in the description below. I highly recommend going and checking it out. Ever since watching this first video I have just been absolutely invested into the SCP Foundation and all of the really cool things that have been created because of it. So if you happen to stumble across this video and you are working on an SCP project and need a sound designer let me know. So this is my workflow and it is going to vary depending on the project that you're working on, the team size that you're working with, and a number of other variables that could be different for whatever it is that you're working on. I'm going to do my best to try and hit on as many key points as I possibly can but if after watching this video you still have questions feel free to drop them in the comments below and I'll do my best to try and answer. So you may find yourself in a couple different scenarios depending on again the size of team that you have and what your role in that project is. So if you are someone who is maybe the sound editor or the sound mixer you know you might want to be looking at all of these things and these are five main audio points that I try to look for when I'm really dissecting a piece. So I've got my music, the ambience, dialogue, foley, and then sound effects. But if you're working on a team where maybe you're just the music editor or just the dialogue editor or the foley artist you know you can kind of hone in on just one specific part but sometimes you might find that working on independent films or short films and things of that nature there's kind of one person that wears many hats and so you may need to really dive deep and dissect all of these things. So these are the five main points that I look for when I'm dissecting a piece of video and this process also goes for TV, cartoons, you know commercials, animations, and so on and so forth. This is just a really good practice to get into is taking as many detailed notes as you possibly can. So let's just say for the sake of argument I'm in charge of all of the audio for this entire piece. What I'm going to do is I'm going to sit down and I'm going to watch this entire film five times. That way I can really focus on each individual category. So if I'm working on just the music section I'm going to be watching through and I'm going to play through the movie and I'm going to pause every so often and I'm just going to jot down some notes of you know it could be anything from the feel of what is happening in a particular scene or you know kind of the the things that are going on because you want that music obviously to match you know what's what's happening on screen you know whether it's horror action or you know some funny kids type thing. Then I'm going to move on to the ambience and for ambience I'm scrubbing through this movie and I'm looking at locations and if we scrub through this movie you can see that some of it takes place kind of in the woods and then we get out into the woods into an open field and then there's some interior and exterior of a dwelling and so you're going to make notes of all of these different ambiences. From there then we can kind of go into dialogue. With dialogue what I like to do is if I have the script available that's perfect. I'm going to make notes of every single character and in a case like this with this particular film they're wearing masks the whole time so you know those are going to be also post-production notes that you're going to want to take. Filters that you're going to apply. Throughout this film there are multiple occasions where they're talking to somebody over a radio so we're going to need to do some EQing for things like that. We can also look at the location that they're in because that's also going to help with things like getting the proper reverb. So these are all real nitpicky things that you have to go into. Foley and sound effects. There is a difference. The biggest difference between foley and sound effects is foley is things like cloth movement, footsteps. They carry a lot of weapons throughout this film so you're going to have some weapon handling and movement things like that. Things that you can reproduce for lack of a better term in real life. Sound effects then are things that we're most likely going to have to fabricate but really like I said I'm going to scrub through this movie five different times that way I can let my brain focus on one specific element. Because if I were just to throw this video into a Pro Tools session and be like oh this thing happened let me drag in a sound for that and then oh this thing happened and I'm dragging in a sound for that there's more of a chance that you're going to overlook something. But if you go through and you look at these five categories and you make as many notes as possible on each individual one, let yourself focus on those categories individually, you're less likely to miss something. Taking these notes is also going to be very important especially if you are working with a team who has somebody who is dedicated to music and somebody who's dedicated to dialogue. Because that way you can take all of the notes that you have and then you can pass them off to say a Foley artist. Then a Foley artist can actually go through your list and see okay well I need some army boots and they're using rifles and they've got this type of armor on so they can start preparing for their Foley sessions while you go to the next step which is a setup called spotting. Spotting is something that happens inside the DAW. Now for this I'm using Pro Tools. This really does apply to any DAW that you can import video in though and as you can see over on the left if I go ahead and disable my camera here real quick you can see that I've got tracks already laid out. Typically I'll run two music tracks. For this example I only have one ambient track in there, typically I would have two to three and from there I've got a section of dialogue. What I like to do is if possible I will have at least one dialogue track for every character that appears on screen or has a line in the script. From there I move on to Foley, five or six different Foley tracks because you know you are going to have some things that are going to be overlapping and then sound effects. You could have any number of tracks. This is just my basic setup and it's just something to get me started. I can add or remove tracks as needed but this is just a really good template. Now what spotting is is scrubbing through the video and actually placing in what we call either ghost clips or skeleton clips and it's basically just a layout. Now how you approach this is entirely up to you. If you want to go through and lay out all the clips for the music and then all the clips for the ambience you can do that. For this particular example I just took a vertical slice and you can see that none of these clips actually have audio in them. They're just placeholders. Now depending on the size of the team that you have you know sometimes you might be in charge of this. If it's a big enough production usually an intern would be in charge of handling this. That way once I get the session I can just jump right in and start pulling all the sound effects and all the foley and all the dialogue and placing them and working with them inside the doll. But to give you a better understanding of the spotting let's go ahead and I'm going to play through this just a roughly 90 second clip and you'll be able to see all of the spots as they hit the playhead time up with all of the different elements that happen within this scene. for a humanoid target moving away from the building, over. Roger, 1-6, over. 2-1 to Helios, any movement on ISR, over. Negative, 2-1, over. If they gave us the slip, SEPTA-2 would've caught them the second they jumped. Fuck. I've got him, hard point four. Bashard, get up here. I'll swap with you, over. Move your lines, I can't see them well. This is SEPTA-1-6, we have contact on the second floor of the target building. 1-1 is down hard, over. Roger, 1-6 to 1-1, this is the location, castbacks on the way. SEPTA-1-2, you're in charge, over. Understood, over. He's not safe here, we have to move him. Move. He's not safe here, we have to move him. Get the fuck in here, Kalinsky. Close it, close the fucking door. So while something like this may look kind of daunting, it's really going to help you get very nitpicky and find every little nuance. Now, since I wasn't actually working on this project, I was a little more generous with some of the blocks that I had created. And the blocks that are there, they're not a hard set, it has to be from this point to this point sound. It really just helps the editor and the mixer kind of get an idea of what is about to take place. So again, that was just my workflow and my approach to working on a project like this. It just really kind of helps streamline things. You'll find that having a session prepared is going to make the actual editing and mixing process go so much smoother. But that is going to wrap things up for this video. Again, if you guys have any questions, please let me know in the comments below, or you're more than welcome to hit me up on Discord. Again, there will be a link to the Sound Effects Guide Discord server in the description below. Until next time.