Update
Ok, so it’s been a while since I have last blogged about my progress on my major project for The Conjuring 2 (Sound Replacement). John and I have been heavily working on this project, spending hours upon hours in the studios trying to get everything done and meeting the industry standards. The project is really taking form and we have finally got to the stage of final touches. In this blog, I would like to recap what we have done and where we are at within the project.
Creating the composition
Synth (13/11/16)
After spending a few days cleaning up all of our foley and ADR we began placing everything into the scene, It was amazing to see everything come alive. It really felt great knowing that all our hard work looking for sounds and organizing voice actors really paid off. Even know we didn’t have any composition yet we could tell that this project was going to work and really push our portfolio beyond our expectations. Once we spent a few days getting everything organized, we began to think about what we needed for our composition. From the very start, we knew we wanted to add elements of guitar and really experiment with sounds to create some eerie ambiance to the scene. I really wanted to use my guitar rig which is full of fuzzies, Reverbs, Volume pedals and Delays to create wide open effects. But the thing I really wanted to experiment with was using a violin bow on my guitar, I have seen it be done a hundred times by artist like Johnny Greenwood, Jimmy Page, Matt Bellamy, Jonsi from Sigur Ros. Jonsi technique is dark and ambient and heavily effected, so I planned to study his work and technique.
Below is a video of Jonsi playing with a bow.
Even know we were super keen on creating weird guitar sounds, I wasn’t fully ready to record yet due to the fact that my violin bow was still in delivery and I felt I really needed to practice before I begin recording. Because of this, we decided to jump on to creating synth parts for the composition. John and I never really experimented with sound design before and have only really played with analog synths once or twice in the previous trimesters, so we thought we would just go for it and jump in the deep end head first. SAE Brisbane just upgraded their Raven Midi studio with a whole bunch of new analog synths. We heard from a fellow classmate that the studio has a synth called the Virus TI2 by Access music which has a load of cinematic presets which you can also tweak, we knew this would be perfect for us and decided to book a 6 hour session to see what we could create. We went in and ran through each preset until we found a few that would work with our scene. Once we found the perfect sounds we then jammed to the clip and got a little creative using the oscillators and delays to tweak and create even more ambiance. The session was so fun and really pushed our clip even further. When we rewatched the clip we realized how synth really does help with creating ambiance and composition in movies.
Below is a few different sounds from our Synth session, plus some photos.
Guitar (15/11/2016)
After having a great session creating synth presets, it was time to create some weird guitar sounds, my bow finally arrived and I was super keen to jump into the studio. Before we went in I spent the day practicing how to use the bow. For some reason, I thought it would be pretty straight forward but I was wrong, it took me the whole day to get the technique down andI still hadn’t mastered it yet but I wasn’t going to let that stop me, after all, it was meant to be experimental. We booked out the studio for yet another 6 hour session and jump right in. I have recorded my rig many times and knew what microphone technique I wanted to use straight away. The technique we used was a Royer 121 close-miked and an AKG C414 for the room. I really wanted to have the amp set up in the live room and have myself in the control room so that I could communicate with John while recording. We did this by setting up the pedal board through a DI which then went into the first channel on the desk. The DI fed into a ‘gender-bender’ which then fed into a female-to-female connector that was connected to the output from line 1 in the live room. We then connected a ReAmp box in the live room to the corresponding to the line 1 output to the amp via a 1/4 inch lead. Once we worked this out we began recording. To create the sounds I wanted I used a Telecaster deluxe loaded with Gibson humbuckers so I could get a really big barky tone. I sent that through my wah, Fuzz and Flanger then final two separate delays. The first delay was set to a long repeat that would fade out after 8 seconds then my second delay was a space echo set to a short slap back delay soaked in a large hall reverb. The session went quite smooth, it took me a while to get the hang of things but once I worked it out we smashed it.
Below is some footage of session, along with some photos
Refrences
Blinco Productions. (2016) The Conjuring 2 – Sound Replacement by Lloyd Edgar & John Blinco. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/blinco-productions
TC Electronic. (2013, November 5). Jónsi creating “Sigur Rós” TonePrint for Hall of Fame reverb (Roskilde Festival) [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alp2rzZiSVU
Lloyds World of Audio 