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?