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Level: Professional/Semi-Professional Directors, Editors, Shooting DPs or Intermediate/Advanced Beginner Documentary Filmmakers

Who this course is for: Professional/Semi-Professional filmmakers who frequently have to work to budgets without a Sound Designer or Dubbing Mixer. Perhaps you create short-form video content for corporate/non-profit clients, or you might be a filmmaker employed by a company to create internal content, a video journalist or documentary maker creating short-form micro-docs. You may also aspire to create your own feature documentaries and would like to have a better understanding of the post-production sound process before working with a Sound Designer.

Prerequisites: Students must have working experience of editing in Adobe Premiere.

Aims/Learning Objectives:

After completing the course, you will:

• be more confident in listening to sound and have a wider vocabulary to draw upon from which to speak about sound;
• have a confident understanding and command of the audio tools available within Premiere, as well as its limitations;
• be able to create better sounding mixes for your short-form online content;
• be able to create more exciting edits for documentaries, using temp sound cues cleverly to drive the narrative forward;
• be confident in understanding a range of techniques and approaches to create exciting sounding documentaries and to communicate ideas effectively with Sound Designers.

Course Outline

The course will comprise 4 sessions over 2 consecutive days. Throughout the course we will watch and discuss excerpts from documentaries, referring back to key concepts.

1. Introduction: Listening

• listening to and discussing field recordings, exploring concepts such as frequency, perspective, foreground/background, reverberation
• listening to and discussing dialogue, exploring concepts such as plosives, sibilance, loudness and frequency in relation to the human voice

2. Short-form Video Content ‒ Basics of Sound Editing & Dialogue

Working on a sample film project of a short interview in Premiere.

• planning a sound mix in Premiere
• using the Audio Track Mixer
• comparison of fades and volume keyframes
• dialogue edits/fixing mistakes

• using wildtracks to create a smooth dialogue track
• compression, EQ and de-essing dialogue
• blending radio mic and shotgun
• adding atmos to create a smooth mix
• ducking music track to create a smooth mix

3. Observational Documentary ‒ Foley and Ambience

Working on a sample film project from a short documentary in Premiere/Audition, using Foley, Library FX and Ambience/Atmos to create an immersive and poignant soundtrack for a short observational documentary.

• Post-production sound workflow, cinema and domestic channel formats
• Planning a Foley cue list
• Recording Foley
• Using Library FX when Foley isn’t an option
• Layering atmos to create an ambient soundscape
• Adding movement/story to an expository soundtrack

4. Documentary Film Essay ‒ Narrative Soundscape

Working on a sample film project from an essay-style documentary in Premiere/Audition, using field recordings to create an abstract, narrative soundscape.

• Discussing a range of different artistic approaches
• Considering perspective, fidelity/contrast, silence, narrative arc

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