Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
160 M PS E . O R G from. That was probably my biggest "uh oh" moment on the project, since we'd committed to panned screen positions in the supernatural sequences, but a mono track wasn't going to make it easy. Chris: So, even though they were probably all radio mics, for some reason, they gave you a mono mix. Kevin: Yes, and I was never able to get split tracks. Being critical of my own work, I don't think it's the best sounding scene in the game, but I was ultimately able to split the mono track apart and maintain our panned speaker positions. I used RX when characters overlapped and tried to separate the voices, and I gave each speaker a pre-panned track with dedicated room tone, so the room tone wouldn't jump around when different characters spoke. I recorded some Foley to help pad out the stereo illusion as well, so when all the characters turn the pages of their scripts, that has proper stereo width since that action is happening throughout the room. Sometimes your mix ends up being an elaborately duct taped house of cards, and you hope it holds together just enough to make it across the finish line! We sometimes had only a boom track for the supernatural sequences, when I would have actually preferred lavaliers, which is a bit of an inverse challenge I had with the archival footage. There's a decent number of supernatural scenes with nudity, so many of these were boomed, but sometimes too far away to feel "real" to the audience. So instead of trying to make lav mics feel farther away like the rest of the game, I was struggling to make a boom feel closer. Thankfully, we were able to ADR the handful of shots that were just not going to happen any other way. These specific challenges mostly came out of deciding on a style template upfront, and then having to uphold that standard no matter what came our way. Chris: Well, one thing I wanted to ask you is, because this was done in a raw dailies sort of thing, there's a lot of a script supervisor throwing lines to the actor to respond to. Was that that how it was recorded? Kevin: For the majority of the off- screen direction, it was the AD or someone else on set reading, and then we'd have to replace them with wild lines that were recorded by the actual actor, but they were usually at a different location. But in some cases, they really did have the actor present off-camera, where there's no additional processing beyond the vintage filter. Chris: But most of the time it was one of your ADs and you have to record the lines later. You had to match the distance. Kevin: Right, match the lines to the space with EQ and reverb, and then remove the AD and add fill. This is what was challenging about having audio delivered in QuickTime MOVs without handles—finding that fill! Chris: Did you have any trouble with anything like crickets or any unusual sounds? Kevin: Yes, particularly for Ambrosio, the '60s sound stage film. While they did film on a stage, their stage location was not very quiet. There was a lot of traffic bleed, airplanes, generator hum, and some electrical interference. And when the audio is being run through processing that, to use the technical term, crushes the absolute sh*t out of it, there's no hiding from those issues, or from RX cleanup artifacts. And as is often the case with single-take scenes, matching in alt lines was often really shaky since performance rhythm and timing wouldn't line up. So it was a tricky process moving in and out of RX Connect, making adjustments and checking them back in the Pro Tools session. I would identify problems in the audio with the vintage filter processing turned on—which is how I always monitored my sessions, since that's the final product—and then I'd go into the raw, unprocessed audio in RX and try to suss out what frequencies were causing problems out the other end. So it turned into a bit of a guessing game that required multiple passes to troubleshoot in some cases. Baking in the processing upfront would have significantly reduced the information available to me in RX, so that wasn't really a feasible path either. The trial-and-error removal of environmental noise was the trickiest part of the dialogue editing. The one thing the sound stage location did have was a great stage bell that they could ring after they called cut, which I was able to sample and use throughout those scenes! Kevin has a lot more to share about Immortality. If you would like to learn more, you can check out the Immortality interview at the "A Sound Effect" website or he will be at GameSoundCon 2024 at the Burbank Convention Center October 29-30.