Poetic Soundscape

It was this aspect of the poetic documentary that I found the most challenging. 

The plan for the sound was going to be simple, non sync atmos recorded in the market and layered on top of the visuals that would rise and fall as the day progressed from morning to evening. When it came to doing this however it didn't sound as tasteful as I imagined. One of the many problems we encountered was the music that's played throughout the market. To get a clean recording of speech without an over powering pop song was near impossible. Second to this, the speech that we did manage to cleanly record was so clean that each individual word was audible. The result of this was a soundtrack of several clear conversations that seemed to have some importance to the piece where as in actuality they were meaningless. All we really wanted was some of the general jumble of noises the market produces. 

Eventually we found a few recordings that were free of any music and began playing with ways to make them less clear. We got around the problem of being able to hear every word by chopping them up and layering them on a number of tracks while panning them left and right to give them a sense of depth. The result is atmos that seems to surround you while at the same time being essentially unrecognisable as real conversations. As planned, the sound of customers and traders begins very faintly, climbing to a climax at around the one minute mark then beginning to fade away. Rather than just increasing the volume of the atmos track to represent a busier space, we layered more and more tracks of atmos on top of one another giving the sound added density. We found that if we played solely with the volume the result was a loud, yet hollow track. It wasn't convincing as portraying a space that filled up with people and the noise. 

The grab above shows how two of the three layers of atmos are combined and panned to increase density and represent space. The third layer, not visible in this image, was used as a constant track that the ones above added too when the climax approached. 

With the basic atmos in place, we set about adding more specific sounds to the piece. While initially we thought we wouldn't need any, with the results we had achieved thus far, it was felt that since we had the opportunity to produce a more creative soundscape, we would. The most noticeable and most challenging sound to get right was the sound of the fluorescent lights turing on during the opening track. Though the sounds arn't that obvious in reality, we were so pleased with the look of shot we felt that it was necessary to give it added impact by creating a definitive soundtrack to accompany it.  We started by getting recordings of the same type of lights turing on, then we went though the clip and synced the flashes with the sounds. Next, we added a small amount of reverb to give the sense that the lights are turing on in a space the size of castle market. Finally, we used a succession of fast pans left and right to match the sequence in which the lights turn on left and right of the centre of the frame.       

We did the same thing with the footsteps, playing with EQ and reverb to give the effect that they were recorded at the time of shooting. 

To help with the sometimes 'clunky' cuts between shots, we used a number of sound bridges to help carry the audience from scene to scene. Below is a grab that shows how the sound of the trader pushing a trolly bridges from the clip before and the clip after, leading the audience through. I've also panned the sound to the left toward the end to represent the side of the screen he exits. From here, the scene changes completely, now set around 11am, the sound of voices slowly start to the heard, this marks the first major change in time.  

Trader exiting to the left

  

Pan left, following trader