Thoughts and Processes I

The Living Thames

September 2018

I had a really enjoyable time working on this film, thanks to some lovely material and the constant encouragement and energy of Dorothy Leiper, the film’s creative force.

One thing I really love about “The Living Thames” is the great storytelling; it takes viewers on a wonderfully relaxed but poignant journey through the history of the River Thames, its function at the heart of London life, along the river’s estuaries and eventually out to the sea.

The sound post was completed on a three-week schedule, which included the premix. We had two days of mixing at Sound Disposition in north London. That’s quite a nice schedule considering the film’s budget, genre and length (60 minutes). I was therefore able to put more detail and colour into the sound than one might expect, and this really contributes to the result. I think it helps the audience better engage with the film’s central story. I did the final mix and international version mix for this documentary, and I don’t do a lot of long-form mixing. I find mixing film and television material quite attritional—as opposed to music, for example, you start at the beginning, you finish at the end, and in between you give every minute of footage equal weighting. That doesn’t mean you spend the same amount of time on each minute, of course, but you’ve got to maintain your highest technical and creative standards from the first minute to the last. For this reason, mixing a film sequentially minute-by-minute—or scene by scene—and not jumping around here and there, as you might do when you’re cutting sound effects, is the best way to ensure that consistency of quality. It’s a bit like running a marathon, and you must pace yourself accordingly! During the final mix, I found it efficient to work my automation in stages— particularly with ambiences and dialogues. For example, using Auto Join in Latch mode (in Pro Tools) on a first pass, and then Touch mode for subsequent passes. Simple stuff, but it meant I was able to get the right result quickly. Also, really taking advantage of automation Preview and Capture.

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One thing that I’ve learned on this project was to use my brain less and my ears more. Rather than believing something sounds a certain way because that’s what a graph or a plug-in is telling me, I reacted to what my ears and my gut were telling me. I try to implement a new technique or break in a new piece of software on every major project I do. It’s so easy to get stuck in a groove with workflow, especially when you’re running at 80 miles an hour from project to project, without time in between to pause and reflect. I used The Living Thames to bring the Pro Tools Dock into my workflow. I bought it earlier in the year, and it was perfect for the premix. Aside from that, I’m always trying to become more discerning with specific tools for specific jobs, and I got stuck into Equality (EQ plug-in made by DMG Audio), which is a recent purchase. I found it very easy and intuitive to use, and with good results.

The Living Thames is a documentary about the natural environment, and around 95% of it is shot outdoors. This presented a few tricky moments with unwanted noise in post-production. Ironically though, the trickiest moment we had was with the one segment shot indoors. We had 2-3 minutes of very problematic dialogue. We did record ADR for that section, and fortunately, we were able to record in the same location as the shoot. However, the interviewee had a cold on the day we turned up to record him! ADR is never ideal, but the result was a lot better than using the original audio. Other than that, with mixing the dialogue, the main route to getting the best and most natural results was riding the fader constantly while using trim automation for further refinements.

Denoising tools are a massive help and on this project I used Cedar 8, Izotope RX6 Advanced, and Waves X-Noise for all manner of specific, offline tasks. Interestingly, and this speaks to the difference between an edit room and a mix room, once in the mix I bypassed Cedar and RX and found there were very few instances where were brought back into play. My threshold was if the noise was impacting negatively on intelligibility, or getting in the way of the storytelling, I’d use the denoiser. This subtractive way of denoising was quite new to me, and I’ll definitely work this way again.