How I made the audio for Dual Vision using crows and sonars and overconfidence

I feel I need to preface this blog post by saying that I have little idea what I am talking about. I have no actual training in audio design, recording and mixing. It is just 10 years of feeble skills from toying with it because I totally love anything audio. Heck I have very little training in anything, I make it up as I go along. As Doctor Who says: I am armed with a screwdriver and overconfidence, I am absolutely sorted!

Ok, with that out of the way let me tell you that audio is really really important. Or is that super super important? Watch the movie above and you will find out! And if you need to re-fresh the actual movie, you can watch Dual Vision here.

It appears that because Dual Vision has no voice over, I felt the need to go on for 17 minutes in the making-of movie! I know, a bit much, but hang in there, might be an entertaining and informative idea or two for you in there! I won’t go into much more details, it is all in the making-of movie above. Designing, recording and mixing the audio for Dual Vision was so much fun! I am pretty happy with the result, I do wish the actual music was better though than the free stock stuff I had to use. And that I had an actual studio with actual speakers to mix the audio on. And that I could time-travel. Etc etc. A friend in the movie-business used to always say “What we don’t have we don’t need”. Totally right. You make do with what you have. Screwdriver and overconfidence.

Before I end this post with some links, let me just entertain you with and an image of how I look when I am trying to remember the colour of the record button:

Hint. It’s the same colour as your headphones, dummy!

Links

Audacity – free open source sound editor

Youtube Audio Library – some decent royalty free music and effects

Loopback – how I recorded the audio for the video, I used the free trial (limited to 20 minute recordings and aren’t you glad!) to create a virtual sound device mixing the audio from my mike and the audio from Premiere and then I just used Quicktime Player to record a screen capture, selecting this virtual sound device as input. Brilliant software!

Ableton Live – Thanks to my dear friend and allround awesome dude and musician Ras Kjærbo I have learned just a bit of Ableton, enough to slice out samples, use them as instruments and add loads of effects to them. Really cool stuff!

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PS. By now you have of course watched the movie, so you know about my real foley effects! This is a behind the scenes picture of the making of the foley effects, it is the view from my X-T2 with a microphone pointed at it trying to record the shutter sound and getting some funny pictures of Charlene as a bonus!

 

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