Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
156 M PS E . O R G "We would set the filtering for the sixties and be like, okay, we're happy with this. And then it was, what do we do when we hit 1970?" stereo and we wanted there to be a little bit of a contrast. I think for the game engine, the mono scenes might have all delivered as stereo files, but it was essentially a mono mix. Chris: And you mixed that inside of Pro Tools? Kevin: Correct. The film clips I worked on are all pre-baked assets, in that the audio is predetermined for each clip. The dynamic game audio portion comes from the player scrubbing through the footage forwards and backwards at different speeds as they choose, and the dynamic music score that responds to the players' actions. But since the video sequences themselves have audio that was set in stone, I did all the work in Pro Tools, just like delivering a whole bunch of short films. Chris: You mentioned that the processing as you were editing, that mouth clicks and ticks and pops and stuff like that were really exacerbated by your processing. Kevin: Yes. A key part of creating the vintage film sound, particularly for the sixties and seventies, was dramatically reducing the dynamic range. And doing so would immediately reveal that a lot of the production audio was recorded with lavaliers. Every little mouth pop and cloth crackle would bump up dramatically in presence. Slamming right into the limiter! Chris: You were probably using RX a lot. Kevin: Quite a lot. All the production audio necessitated very thorough mouth noise removal, so I ran the majority of the shots in their entirety through RX Connect and just manually cleaned things head to tails, or at least all the relevant sections with dialogue. Too much batch processing would be detremental to the voice clarity, so I would do a "gentle pass" of decrackle and declick, and then manually go through and pick out everything that was left. I got really obsessive about quashing all mouth noise, more so than is typically necessary in dialogue. Creating the illusion that these scenes were recorded on booms was critical to the narrative and immersion, so becoming a deranged "click hunter" felt like justified behavior. I realized revisiting the project sessions that I was still using RX7 when I did Immortality. I definitely could have saved some hours of misery had I upgraded for the project and had some of the more recent modules available, but that's a lesson learned in hindsight. Chris: Well, and also with that, I would imagine too, that, that actually helped you get the quashed dynamic range. Tell me about the processing on the faux Johnny Carson sequences. Kevin: Those scenes were special in that the footage was actually put through a VHS machine in post to create the audio-visual degredation. So I did an initial pass on the sound where I gave it a cleanup and retro filter pass—basically creating a "pristine" broadcast version. That audio was married to video and put on VHS, and after the footage was run through the machine, sometimes quite a few times to really distress it, I got the audio back and did a second pass. I ended up taming down some of the genuine VHS crackle and distortion since it was actually jarring and too aggressive, so I brought some of it down a bit. Just down to how much it might have popped on an older, tinny TV speaker. Out of all the historical audio formats featured in Immortality, VHS is the one of the few formats I actually had direct hands-on experience with growing up (the third film in the game, Two of Everything, has rehearsals that are supposed to be shot on DV cassettes, which I also had as a kid). So it was a fun challenge trying to create the believable illusion of audio formats that I've never worked with professionally. I grew up watching most of them, so I have a certain personal sense of what they "should" sound like, so it was chasing my memory on one hand, while balancing objective observation and direct reference on the other. But there was no way we could have done the period sound with authentic equipment—a re-recording process wouldn't have been feasible with so many formats and scenes, as well as the need for quick notes turnarounds, so the processing was