Day 7 - Writing in Pencil

Today's clip is maybe the simplest yet, but still required a surprising amount of editing. The clip is simple, a woman drawing a dress in a notebook. I once again, to capture foley, slowed down the recording speed to 0.25x, and simply used a pencil and drew lines in sync with the video on my own notebook. I had my microphone (an MXL 770) right next to the notebook, so I could capture those quiet sounds.

If you know anything about capturing audio, you might have guessed that I had a lot of noise in the background. My MXL 770 is not the best microphone for capturing very quiet sounds. With all that noise, a few frequencies really resonated strongly and were rather unpleasing to hear. I used a subtract-noise setting in Reaper, as well as an EQ plugin to monitor the frequencies that were too strong. I used a series of notch bands (basically just very accurate EQ drops that lower small ranges of frequencies) to eliminate the most prevalent frequencies, and was left with a much duller, average sounding noise, that could come from anything. If I were to try and eliminate any more, it started to detract from the audio of the pencil scratches, leaving weird artifacts in the audio.

It took a few captures of the foley to get it right, and a couple takes were ruined because my dogs decided to jump on each other, but overall, this one was a fairly easy process!

If these videos seem like they aren't anything special, like they could just be normal, that's a good thing! That means I've done my job correctly. My goal is not for the audio to stand out, but for it to mesh completely with the video, making one seamless AV experience. If the audio stands out for some reason, and some of mine do, then it could certainly use a bit more work. This really is a learning experience for me, and I won't be 100% successful every time, so I can always improve.

Here's the clip! If you'd like to see the page I scribbled on, leave it in the comments!