I am finally ready to talk about the process of doing A Quiet Place II Trailer. I had postponed writing this s I was still unhappy of the final product when I initially presented it. I took that feedback and reworked my trailer to sound better. I also wanted to this piece in 5.1 and so I wanted to talk about this after I had finished that as well.
Link to 5.1 Mix
This piece is interesting for me. It is not that I dislike me 2.0 mix but compared to my 5.1 mix I feel like they cannot be compared. I spent many weeks working on my initial mix. I was really happy with all the elements, but it still felt incomplete. I went all the way back to the music and worked on the montage music. I realised that the highs were messing with the feel, so I cut the highs with an EQ. This helped with the feel. I had creatively decided that I didn’t want all of the footsteps visible in the trailer as I wanted to just have the music and the ambience. I still feel justified in my decision. I felt that it created the unsettled feeling that I wanted that lead into the grass scene where I went to silence. I think this was able to draw the audience into the story world. The downside of this was that during the first presentation I hadn’t pulled this off and so it was seen as almost negatively.
I did feel like in my next iterations that I needed to make these scenes work better so that my creative decisions were justified. One comment though made me the happiest was that I had synced my dialogue perfectly. I get so frustrated whenever I see videos without synced sound. I spent so much time nudging by a single frame when I was getting close to make sure it looked perfect.
With the updated version I enjoy it more I am still not entirely in love with the music, but I feel like then only way to fully fix this is to compose the music. I do not feel fully confident in my composition skills. I do feel more comfortable in this genre as I have been playing film score music since I was 12. However, I did not want to spend that amount of time as by the time I realised this I was already working on multiple other projects and needed to manage my time more.
When it comes to my 5.1 mix, I am incredibly proud for a first attempt. I did this over two sessions in the S6 studio. I started with making copies of my three mix sessions. I took these and then up-mixed them into 5.1. I started with the music as it was the smallest session that was going into be mixed into all the channels. I kept it pretty simple by taking everything out of the centre and making some rear reverb ad rear delays. I also tried a decorrelated centre however, it sounded strange in the final mix, so I cut it in the end. I initially was going to bounce out the SFX session and then mix the dialogue in but due to the large amount of sounds I instead imported the edited dialogue. I placed these all into the centre channel. I also made a sidechain aux so that no other sound would come through at the time dialogue was spoken. I compressed these tracks heavily and I also placed a tiny reverb as the dry was too stark in comparison. When I got feedback on the final mix, I was complimented by Guy Gray for the dialogue sounding extremely accurate to movie trailers. The main changes I made to the mix was some dynamic panning. I also made the bottles falling move all around the person and placed a delay moving forward.
I learnt a large amount in this process. It was easier for me as I had to get my mind around binaural for another job. So, having speakers to isolate sound to was nice. I definitely enjoyed the process and also surprisingly the post-production. I do not love post-production; however, I have massive respect for the people who do this work. I definitely will continue to work on these smaller post-production jobs. I am extremely proud of this job seeing how much work I did in this job.
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