British Indie Films
In late 2023 I was approached by Louis Baxter, a British Film Director, to help save the audio mix for his feature length film.
The original mix had become stuck and delayed with another engineer and, when the results came finally through, they were not up to the standard of the directing, scripting and acting.
The deadlines for several Film Festival submissions were very close and Louis was ready to accept missing them.
Spoiler: We worked day and night together to craft the whole mix, finishing in time for the deadlines.
“A Place To Hide And Wait” has so far won five awards, including Best Writer, Best Feature Film and Best Sound.
The time constraints placed on the audio mixing process makes winning Best Sound miraculous in itself. But the audio I received was also faulty. A loud electrical ground buzz was present throughout every scene, having been recorded with a relatively budget Rode mic mounted on a camera. Probably the camera’s cheap pre-amp caused the ground buzz.
Every scene also relied on a lot of silence and space. With no music, foley or SFX to mask and hide imperfections in these dialogue recordings.
As such the majority of time spent on this mix was spent in iZotope RX 10 forensically using all the available audio restoration tools to reduce noise whilst retaining a natural room tone. A very difficult balance given the circumstances.
I wish I could provide a link to the film – it’s a great watch – but it’s not yet released to the public. Still, I’m proud of the Best Sound award and I have never had to work so hard within iZotope before.
Editing Tasks Included:
- Heavy Audio Clean-Up: Utilizing iZotope for removal of clothes rustling, chairs creaking, birds whistling, sirens blaring and that constant electrical ground hum.
- Dialogue Matching: Not all scenes were recorded on the same day, but were in the same room locations. Despite the changable recording setup, the dialogue needed to match scene to scene.
- De-Reverb: Every scene was recorded in rooms with no acoustic treatment. As such, the raw audio was very reverberant (particularly the bathroom scenes). Reducing reverb whilst retaining the quality of the dialogue is a very finely balanced task.
- Compression, EQ, and Loudness Balancing (LUFS): Fine-tuning the audio for a polished and professional result.
- Mastering: Loudness and dynamics, in this case, were set for cinema standards.