Fine-Tuning the Music and Pacing Aspects of your Audio Portraits
Hi All,
I edited an audio interview I did last year with my Dad to clarify the pacing and music components of creating an audio portrait. It was a voiceover to a short film, but I just turned it into an audio portrait with music and sfx for the purposes of this class. Later today I'll post a tutorial for the SFX aspect.
The concept is that as my dad has been getting older, he's spending time thinking about tying up lose ends his life and also re-analyzing events and relationships in his past. One of those lose ends is a farm that's been in our family for over a hundred years. He begins the interview talking about himself and then goes into the story of the last time he took his mother - who was born on the farm - to the farm, before she died. I thought this would work well for a demo because a lot of you have a similar construct...it's a portrait of someone told through a story that demonstrates some aspect of who they are.
I downloaded the ambient music here: http://freemusicarchive.org/ and I'm going to use the music to open and end the piece, and as sort of a bridge.
The SFX were recorded on the farm, and it's mostly wind and birds. I'll start using the SFX when he starts the story about the farm.
Here's screenshots of what the original interview looked like in Premiere (It was a 1.5hr long interview but this is just the 15 minutes that I knew I would start with):
And here's a link to the unedited piece in Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-723581022/160-demo-audio-portrait-unedited
1. First, I sequenced the pieces to convey the story:
Older man tying up lose ends and reflecting on his past, as he thinks about his mother when she was dying. Conflict: You spend your life building and building and creating memories, but what does it mean in the end? Change: Grandmother sees the farm in a ruined state, and wants to leave. Resolution: Grandmother slips back into dementia fog. This works for a portrait of my father, too, because he's analyzing his own aging and through witnessing his mother's journey.
2. Then I played it and watched the audio meters to make sure everything was around -12db. Nothing higher than -6db and nothing lower than -20db. Adjust first by moving the volume bar and if you need more latitude, adjust the audio gain sparingly.
3. Then I gave it a listen and cut and separated pieces where I felt like there could be a natural pause. This may seem awkward when you first do it, but trust me, it really does help the audience process what's been said. Often I'm just adding in .5 seconds to 5 seconds depending on what they're saying. An easy way to cut is to zoom in and look at the waveform. Whenever the line gets flat, you can cut, because they're not talking. Give yourself some room to edit later by cutting at the end of that flat line (before the waveform goes up and they start talking). You can always expand or cut into later using the Trim tool.
4. Then I added roomtone in-between these gaps onto Track 2
4. Then I added transitions to the interview and the roomtone so that it sounded continuous. You will most likely have to go back and adjust this later after you add in music and sfx, but this is a good place to start by making sure the interview sounds smooth without the music.
Add audio transitions (fades) by hitting Command Shift D (Mac), and then adjusting that effect to make sure it doesn't cut into the part where they are speaking. Unless you want it to cut into their words because there's too much inflection there.
7. After listening to it a couple of times, I found there was a change in the music that worked well with a change in my dad's voice, so I adjusted the position of his audio, the audio volume of both clips, and the length of the transitions.
Here's the finished 45 second intro here, and I'll edit a portion with the SFX next. Obviously these times are shorter than what you guys are working with, but hopefully you get the idea....if I were to edit this piece for a real assignment, I would do a different piece of music for the second segment, and then only use ambient recordings/SFX for the rest of the piece. And then probably another piece of music for the final segment.
This is not perfect by any means. Listening to it now, I can hear that I turned the gain up too high and that I need more roomtone in a couple of other sections. And the music may be too loud/distracting to his voice. AND, my dad just listened to it and said, "You need to change that, it's too morbid!"
https://soundcloud.com/user-723581022/160-demo-2-2
I edited an audio interview I did last year with my Dad to clarify the pacing and music components of creating an audio portrait. It was a voiceover to a short film, but I just turned it into an audio portrait with music and sfx for the purposes of this class. Later today I'll post a tutorial for the SFX aspect.
The concept is that as my dad has been getting older, he's spending time thinking about tying up lose ends his life and also re-analyzing events and relationships in his past. One of those lose ends is a farm that's been in our family for over a hundred years. He begins the interview talking about himself and then goes into the story of the last time he took his mother - who was born on the farm - to the farm, before she died. I thought this would work well for a demo because a lot of you have a similar construct...it's a portrait of someone told through a story that demonstrates some aspect of who they are.
I downloaded the ambient music here: http://freemusicarchive.org/ and I'm going to use the music to open and end the piece, and as sort of a bridge.
The SFX were recorded on the farm, and it's mostly wind and birds. I'll start using the SFX when he starts the story about the farm.
Here's screenshots of what the original interview looked like in Premiere (It was a 1.5hr long interview but this is just the 15 minutes that I knew I would start with):
And here's a link to the unedited piece in Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-723581022/160-demo-audio-portrait-unedited
1. First, I sequenced the pieces to convey the story:
Older man tying up lose ends and reflecting on his past, as he thinks about his mother when she was dying. Conflict: You spend your life building and building and creating memories, but what does it mean in the end? Change: Grandmother sees the farm in a ruined state, and wants to leave. Resolution: Grandmother slips back into dementia fog. This works for a portrait of my father, too, because he's analyzing his own aging and through witnessing his mother's journey.
2. Then I played it and watched the audio meters to make sure everything was around -12db. Nothing higher than -6db and nothing lower than -20db. Adjust first by moving the volume bar and if you need more latitude, adjust the audio gain sparingly.
3. Then I gave it a listen and cut and separated pieces where I felt like there could be a natural pause. This may seem awkward when you first do it, but trust me, it really does help the audience process what's been said. Often I'm just adding in .5 seconds to 5 seconds depending on what they're saying. An easy way to cut is to zoom in and look at the waveform. Whenever the line gets flat, you can cut, because they're not talking. Give yourself some room to edit later by cutting at the end of that flat line (before the waveform goes up and they start talking). You can always expand or cut into later using the Trim tool.
4. Then I added roomtone in-between these gaps onto Track 2
4. Then I added transitions to the interview and the roomtone so that it sounded continuous. You will most likely have to go back and adjust this later after you add in music and sfx, but this is a good place to start by making sure the interview sounds smooth without the music.
Add audio transitions (fades) by hitting Command Shift D (Mac), and then adjusting that effect to make sure it doesn't cut into the part where they are speaking. Unless you want it to cut into their words because there's too much inflection there.
5. Listen to it again. Does it flow without the music and sfx? Great, you can move on to the music/sfx portion
6. Add in music to Track 4 and adjust the volume. For this portion of the piece, I knew I wanted to fade music in at the beginning, then slowly fade out as he begins to talk, then slowly fade back in again as he ends the first segment of the interview. I would then put in a different piece of music for the second segment of the interview, when he starts to talk about the farm.
So I wanted the music to fade into around -12db, then fade out to around -24db. So I added an audio transition to the beginning, then I dragged down the volume line when my dad starts talking, using the Pen tool and keyframes on the volume line, and then applied an audio transition at the end. But then I had to listen to it. And the music was still too loud, so I adjusted the audio gain of the music track and pulled the music volume down until it was about -33db. This is just a rule of thumb. You'll have to play with it. You should listen to the tracks both independently and together using the Mute option.
7. After listening to it a couple of times, I found there was a change in the music that worked well with a change in my dad's voice, so I adjusted the position of his audio, the audio volume of both clips, and the length of the transitions.
Here's the finished 45 second intro here, and I'll edit a portion with the SFX next. Obviously these times are shorter than what you guys are working with, but hopefully you get the idea....if I were to edit this piece for a real assignment, I would do a different piece of music for the second segment, and then only use ambient recordings/SFX for the rest of the piece. And then probably another piece of music for the final segment.
This is not perfect by any means. Listening to it now, I can hear that I turned the gain up too high and that I need more roomtone in a couple of other sections. And the music may be too loud/distracting to his voice. AND, my dad just listened to it and said, "You need to change that, it's too morbid!"
https://soundcloud.com/user-723581022/160-demo-2-2
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