Prometheus Trailer [Redoing the Audio]

Here's my lastest assignment - redoing ALL of the audio for a trailer from the movie, "Prometheus." The trailer itself runs about 2:30, so I had a lot of work to do. You'd never realize how much work goes into such a seemingly small work like a movie trailer, let alone an entire feature-length film. To show you just how much effort I put in, I'll walk you through the process from start to finish. This could be another long post, so get ready to read.

So to begin, our class formed groups of 5 or 6 students each, for which we'd set the foundation for our project. Although we ultimately would have our own individual sound design, mix & deliverables, we collaborated initially for things like ADR (automated dialogue replacement), field & foley recording in order to put together a small library of sound from which we'd work later on separately.

We began with some work in the studio, where we would setup our Pro Tools sessions according to the required video specifications, and all that other technical stuff. A few hours of creating tracks, putting in the right specifications, simple yet time-consuming routing, and we were ready for some dialogue. Did you know, about 3/4 of sound is completely replaced in the majority of modern video productions? This means whenever you see a commercial, T.V. show, movie, etc., they'll shoot the video and often go back and have the actors re-record their voices to match their performance on screen. Interesting stuff. Anyways, so my group of 5 classmates and I took turns manning the console (we were fortunate enough to have access to a D-Control), operating Pro Tools, manning the preamps, filling out take lists, and being the voice actor. It was kind of funny starting out with ADR, because the finish product was nothing but the video and the voices. We ended up with a session looking something like this:

Logic Session - Dialogue spotting, FX design

So after the ADR, it was foley time. Foley refers to any small effect that deals with a characters actions - such as footsteps, cloth/clothes movement sounds, using an object or props...things like that. Our group was split in half - 3 of us were assigned to record foley for a bit, while the other half would go outside to do field recording and we'd eventually swap jobs. I got to start out with foley. Foley's a pretty fun thing to do, although there are very few people who do it in the industry. We pretty much got to spend two hours in a top-notch studio stomping on wood and metal, dragging our feet across sandpaper, hitting things against other things, and making weird noises with out mouths when we were out of creative ideas. After that, we got the chance to field record. That's just a technical way of saying "taking microphones outdoors and recording sounds." Have you ever seen a group of people with an elaborate setup of microphones on poles with fuzzy sock-looking things around them connected to a multitude of wires who are generally holding up traffic? Yeah, that was our job (minus the holding up traffic, hopefully). We got a few hundred sounds worth of airplanes flying overhead, traffic, the rain, and ourselves singing. After we got back inside, we compiled our field recording library and finished our documentation. From here on out, it was up to us as individuals to come to a final product for the Prometheus Trailer.

Stephen Vitiello field recording (by Katy McDaniel)

Something I think I've failed to emphasize throughout this process so far is documentation. You document EVERYTHING. Literally. You document the points in time where you think you'll need dialogue, effects, backgrounds, music. Then you document the times where you actually had them. You document every take you recorded, what it was for, if you liked it or not. You document any change to region lengths you've made during the session. You document what you ate while you 

Documentation > the area of my desk.

documented. But it's all for the sake of being on the same page as the rest of your team - good documentation and organization is vital. If you have a line of dialogue coming in at 01:01:02:14 (1 hour, 1 minute, 2 seconds and 14 frames into the film) then you document it as 01:01:02:14 so that everyone else who may be working on the session knows that this line of dialogue is at 01:01:02:14. Plus, if your session ever gets unorganized or messed up, you have an exact time where everything is. So...document everything.

Final Mix Session (before predubbing & printmaster) in Pro Tools 10

The Final Mix Session's mix window

So here's what my mix for Pro Tools is looking like. I've got somewhere around 50 - 60 tracks, which is not really that much. I've seen sessions in the HUNDREDS before, but with a little bit of efficient routing and effective organization, I could bring the track count down and ultimately save my Macbook Pro from overheating its processor and catching fire while I worked. I pretty much organized everything here so that I could get a final mix and automation before I recorded them down to predubs for another final mix, before recording them down to a printmaster mix (finally). What the heck are "predubs" and a "printmaster"?! Those are just terms to describe when we combine a bunch of different audio sounds or tracks together. Within each track in Pro Tools, I had multiple sounds, effects, lots of automation and other such information that may not translate very well when it comes time to transfer the sounds over somewhere else (as you're not the only sound engineer working on a typical film - you're part of a team). So by recording each track of multiple sounds, different effects and automation down to one single sound region is called "predubbing." Think of a song in MP3 (or preferably .Wav...) format. In the actual recording session for that band, there's probably TONS of automation, effects, takes, instruments, and whatnot. Eventually, all of those sounds get recorded down into one track and delivered to you so you can hear it how it was intended to be heard. Predubbing is similar to that. A printmaster is taking the predub of each track, and combining it into one single file for the entire session. Think of printmasters as the parent of a predub - the predub is consolidating a track, while the printmaster is consolidating an entire session.





















So now I've got my Printmaster (the final soundtrack) and my movie. Time to throw them into a final session, sync them up, and deliver them!

-Matthew Morrison