Audio Project 2: Sounk-Ink

LO3: Apply professional Pro-Tools editing and mixing techniques in a Audio Post Production situation for a film project.

 

The Mixing Engineer’s handbook is an essential piece of reading for anyone looking to get into mixing in either a post production or recording environment. Although this specific text features a lot of information in regards to mixing music, it offers vital information in regards to approaching a mix, a skill that’s transferable to any form of post production. As someone who’s mainly focused on field recording, its imperative to the overall project that I familiarize myself with the correct mindset and planning when it comes to creating an overall final mix.

 

The mixing engineer’s handbook distinctly lays out the most important steps when it comes to creating a final mix. First and foremost, the engineer must figure out the overall direction of the final mix, this will include determining multiple factors of the project such as style and mood. This play’s a key role in determined use of sounds and music, depending on the amount of information given by the director; the post production sound engineer decides what will be suitable for the flow of the overall film. The handbook then moves onto discussing the next step that is entitled “Develop the groove and build it like a house”. This stage hints towards the idea of comparing mixing to building a house, meaning that it’s a huge layering process where you add bit by bit. The final key stage if the idea of focusing in on your key element and doing everything in your power to emphasize it. Within the two pieces of filing me and Ed aim to do this semester, the focus slightly shifts between the projects. As one of them is a documentary focused around kickboxing we need to personify impacted based sounds to heighten the impacts themselves where as within the short film, there will be a focus on amplify clear dialogue ensuing the audience isn’t left unsure when it comes to the overall storyline.

 

The book also has key information in regards to file types and whilst this is mainly relevant to the field recordist in terms of filming in mono or stereo, it’s important for me to know what rates i’m mixing in and what file formats i’m asking for from the director of each film crew. From the director, I will be asking for a OMF file. This is so that I have a clear view of every separate element that has been thrown into the pre-mix as posed to being given a single wav/mp4 outputted onto one individual track.

 

Overall, whilst this handbook was heavily focused towards post production in the musical sense a lot of the information was still relevant to post production in the film sense. This text offered vital information in regards to planning a post production session and various other factors.

 

Another key element the book puts over is monitoring your projects at a comfortable level, putting over the importance of not listening back too quiet or too loud. “If it’s too soft, you might be fooled by the nonlinearity of the
speakers and overcompensate. If it’s too loud, certain frequencies might be masked or overemphasized by the nonlinearities of the ear itself.”. This will be a factor I need to consider when it comes to listening back to my mixes as it’s very easy to be swayed to change factors dependent on the volume you listen back at.

LO3: Apply professional Pro-Tools editing and mixing techniques in a Audio Post Production situation for a film project.

 

Sound track is part of an online website that looks into the art and techniques of postproduction sound, the post I’m looking at in particular breaking audio post-production into 12 steps; match levels, control dynamics, add audio effects, add music, add sound effects, record voiceover, replace dialogue, add ambient sound, apply equalisation, reduce noise, change the pitch of a voice and edit sound with a computer (e.g. tonal changes).

 

Whilst these steps are quite generalised, they helped me seperate the sections up in my head and gave me an idea of where my strengths and weakness’s were. This also means that going forward, I can focus my research on more specific sections in audio post production as posed to looking through texts and websites that broadly viewed audio post production.

LO1: Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.

 

One of the key routes to ensure a successful marketing strategy is to assess the marketplace and check how successful websites promote themselves. To do this, both me and Ed have taken a sample size of websites(20) varying from post production portfolios to foley studios and checking out for key themes from these websites. To do this, I have decided to construct a few checkpoints/questions. By doing this, we will see what the majority are doing in terms of marketing, this will help us when it comes to promoting our website.

1. Does this website include social media links?

2. If so, are these links to the social media pages on the homepage?

3. Does the website include a contact email on the homepage?

4. Does this website include a phone number on the homepage?

5. Do these website use paid for ads on google?

6. How active are these companies on Twitter/Facebook?

– Est. Multiple posts a day

– Around 1 post a day

– A post every week or so

– A post every month or so

– No social media presence

7. Do the companies make reference to current events on social media?

LO1; Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.

 

As someone who has little experience in marketing, this would be a task i’d have to put a lot of research into both on a primary and secondary level. The two main methods of marketing i’ll be looking at within this post will focus around paid for marketing and free marketing.

 

The main method we would have to look into in terms of free advertising would SMM(Social media marketing). Although focused around social media, SMM is a broad spectrum, it mainly focuses on creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. In our case the branding goal would be to get as many eyes on our website to increase our chances of getting paid work. Esteemed advertising expert Dan Shewan runs a blog focused around marketing websites on wordstream and here are some of the key takeaways from the blog:

 

– If you’re running a promotion and you want to post about it on social media websites then you should link directly to the promotion, not to your websites homepage.

– Targeting the right people with your social media marketing is important. Going after the right people at the right time is incredibly effective. For our social media’s we will need to follow people within industry, it’s way more efficient to focus on people within the industry who will actually require jobs doing. It’s more important to have a small crowd of industry followers as posed to many non-industry followers.

– Within marketing, visuals are often more important that the text itself when it comes to getting potential clients to consider you. Offering an aesthetic visual experience will often be the gateway for people to read through the rest of the website, never have a page of text on your homepage.

– Use in app functions within social media to gauge how well certain posts do. For example, Twitter makes use of analytics for Tweets including an impression rate. This will be useful to find out which Tweets result in the most engagement,

– Take into account cross platform contract details. For example Facebook has a “call now” button that is useable on pages. This limits the chances of loosing customers/established engineers before they arrive to the landing pages.

 

We could also potentially take some paid for advertising routes as well. One of the possibilities is implementing automatic bidding on GoogleAds. This would be handled by a external company who would adjust bids on keywords within google searches depending on the success rate of the search terms. Using something like this would allow us to constantly be on top of what key terms people are using to look for services such as ours and by readjusting the bids, we will be higher on the Google search. Another route we could take is paid for sponsorship on either social media or paying for GoogleAd placement, ensuring we get more eyes and potential clicks onto our websites.

 

Whilst the paid for advertising methods are potentially useful, we as a company need to ensure we stick within a limited budget and save as much money as possible, this is however a route we could potentially look at once we are more established. For now we will need to make sure of free promotion through having a good social media marketing strategy.