Debbie Post-Production- Sound Design

Having finished the sound design for Debbie yesterday I have quite a lot I can say about it. Back in October, when we were in beyond the boundaries still, I expressed some ideas about the sound design and the sound track. I was trying to base it off of a kind of classical version of a pulp song for the reference to Jarvis Cocker, who was a main inspiration for the film. However, this was when the film was more inspired by film noir and the script was very different:



So my approach and sound design has also become very different.

When given the sound files for the film, the first thing I did was spend some time on noise reduction. Quite a lot of time in fact. One of the first things I realised was that everything take twice as long on a 10 minute film. Which sound silly, but when you've done a five minute film or are really passionate about sound design you'll think it's fine and underestimate how long it will take you to do something!

However, length aside I got the noise reduction done. Then came all the track laying and syncing sound, doing foley etc. Luckily for me, Josh and Marco (who were on sound for our shoot) did a really good job at picking up even the smallest of things like a pen clicking or a cup, which made my life so much easier. It meant I could spend more time on really crafting the sound and perfecting it than spending a lot of time correcting things that could have been picked up on the shoot.

I decided to work from the bottom up in terms of building the sound. Which meant I would start from the lowest sound (the ambient noise of the cafe) and work upwards from there. This was so I didn't start my levels off too low in an attempt to not make the ambiance too overpowering. Because this was my first time mixing a traditional film like this, I looked at a lot of reference material. Looking at various diner and cafe scenes and how loud or quietly they have their ambiance.

Looking at these examples really helped me when it came to mixing. Not only because they gave me a general level, but because they are all so different from eachother. Taking Daredevil and Thor for example, which are set in diners that are similarly quiet. The sound design for those is quite different, but it's nice seeing it like that as it reminds me of the creative choices I can make, and that there is no 'right or wrong' way to do it. However, it gave me a good indication anyway.

The next main thing I did was the drug tripping parts of the film. I had a lot of fun with this, and as the film progresses and it becomes more intense, I got to play around with it more. I already had a pretty good idea how I wanted to do it, but I did look at a few examples:

Again, these are all pretty different. However they were helpful and made me think about my decisions more. I decided to go for a kind of underwater muffled feel. With everything slowed down around Jarvis. Then, later on in the film I made it far more sudden. I combined this with juttery, kind of electronic sounds to go with Lauren's quick cuts. I really liked how it came out. 

The only thing I regret not being able to do was make a soundtrack for it. I wanted to, but because of delays in the edit for Debbie and Dance I didn't have time to. However, I put some just light synth ambient backgrounds in to give the film some feeling, with a view of returning to it later and making something for it.

Another thing I found particularly challenging about this process was the sheer amount of tracks there were. I knew this was going to be a big job, but I hadn't realised just how confusing it could get quite quickly. It really opened my eyes in terms of the amount of workload I could expect in the future with a career in sound. I feel like I need to start improving on my workflow more, to help me better handle those larger projects for next time.