Creating Muffled Sound

[glinda]

So I just finished working on the sound design for a short film. One of the bits of feedback I got was that the dialogue was 'too clean' could I dirty it up a bit. Now there's a lot of things I've done with dialogue, I can make it sound like its on the radio or the telephone, make it sound like its underwater (which I did for another bit of this film), speed it up, slow it down, pitch shift it. I've made specific sounds 'dirty' but that was foley recordings and I specifically recorded them so they sounded that way. But everything I've ever done with dialogue recording on location for the last five years has been to get as clean dialogue as possible. Almost every article I could find on 'muffled' or 'dirty' dialogue sound was about how to clean it up.

So I thought I'd try and tap into the hive mind. If you've got nice clean dialogue, how do you make it muffled in post-production without just making it sound odd/distorted?

(For reference I'm using ProTools)

Comments

[alexbayleaf]

Huh!

Perhaps it's just that I recently had to listen to I am sitting in a room for school, and I'm wondering whether simply taking the recording and playing it back through speakers, then re-recording it badly (outdoors, say, without a wind shield, or whatever else is appropriate for the film you're working on) would be a way to do it and get a natural sort of sound?

Failing that, what *is* dirty dialogue, really? Mostly it's ambient sound, wind, hum, that sort of thing, right? So can you just put some low-volume pink noise or a recording of street noise or whatever, on another track at low volume?

[glinda]

Oooh. I don't think that would have worked for what I was doing last week but that might be a good way to make ADR dialogue sound like it was actually recorded in the location so you loose some of that 'dead' studio quality...

In the end I used a different louder atmos which seemed to work but I'll keep pink noise in mind for when that isn't an option. (I also made the director listen to the original dialogue without the annoying buzz from the location they filmed in as comparison and he did accept that the clean version was better)

[alexbayleaf]

I'm not very familiar with film stuff... what do you mean by "different louder atmos"? (if you don't mind answering random vocab questions)

[glinda]

Hee, no problem, (I don't get to talk shop very much at the moment, so apologies if I ramble) atmos is atmospheres. Basically its background sound for a scene. For example the scene I was talking about was in a pub, if you recorded the dialogue in a busy pub you'd loose bits of your dialogue in the general sound and it would be really obvious where you'd cut from one shot to another (sort of the aural equivalent of the pint glass where the amount of liquid goes up and down between shots). So you record the dialogue with the pub quiet and then the sound recordist records all the extras chatting away creating the atmosphere of the place. Then you layer them together in postproduction and can adjust the volume against each other so you get the atmos of being in the actual pub but can still hear your actors clearly. In this case we had two scenes in a pub: one where its supposed to be a busy night and another where its a quieter afternoon - so I recorded one atmos/wildtrack with all the extras we could find sitting around chatting and then another with just a couple of them having a quiet chat at the far side of the pub and the barman operating the till and serving a few people. In the end I used the busier sound (my 'different louder atmos') under both scenes because the director liked it better.

(When I go on holiday I take my micro-track recorder with me and record the atmosphere's of interesting places in case I need them in future.)

That was possibly an awfully long explanation for a random vocab question, but hopefully it makes more sense now?

[alexbayleaf]

Thank you! Makes perfect sense, and thanks for the comprehensive explanation.