Protools

I have been working with Protools this week in preparation for the sound edit on Young and Pissed. For this documentary I' m the sound engineer so once an edit is done I will have the exported sound track from AVID to work on in Protools.
For the swimming documentary, Fighting Chance, I had a brief chance to work on the sound but I feel I need to keep working with this software to be competent in using it, not to mention trying to remember where all the buttons are!

The swim Doc uploaded into Protools ready to be worked on

I reworked the old documentary because neither of the current documentaries have a timeline edited yet so it makes sense to work with what I have instead of waiting to the last minute.

On the sound there were issues with background noise, especially with the interview of Len in the swimming pool. I used the 7band equaliser to search out the frequency of the noise and remove it as much as possible. When using this technique it is remarkable how much you can take out but you need to take a lot of consideration into the person voice. It is very easy to change the sound of it it when you remove the unwanted noises.

First Screening!

This week has been a big push with the edit of the swimming Documentary 'Fighting Chance'
The entire team have been working to get the story right, concise and ultimately within three minutes!

Thursday afternoon was the first screening with guest lecture Jeremy Gibson present to give us some of his vast experience and feedback.
The film was received well and the few suggestions made were very useful and will be work on early next week before hand in.

It was great to finally see it on the big screen and to have the chance to appraise it as a final piece. When you edit something it is easy to focus on the points your working on and you need to take a step back. After the last two days working on colour grading and sound in Pro Tools It was nice to stand back and view the hard work in the context of the final edit.

For more information on Jeremy Gibson please look at his production company - sevenstones media
http://www.sevenstonesmedia.com/index.htm

And we're done!

Today was our final shoot on the swimming doc we have been making over the last few weeks.

I have learned a great deal on the documentary, not only about sound, camera and producing but also about swimming and how it can be a life skill but more importantly the effects it can have on people in all walks of life.

The sound recording has been challenging, working in swimming pools with a lot of echo and reverberation to try to deal with was at times very hard. To try and overcome some of the sound issues I have used personal mic's where possible and EQ'd the sound in Pro Tools.
The production side has been equally challenging with the various permissions needed to be able to film this type of documentary.

As the shoot has progressed I have heard many different peoples opinions about swimming and it has made me more aware of why we are making a doc on this subject. This has only fueled me further to make this the best that we possible can and to look into editing into a longer piece that could be used by swimming authorities.