Foley begins for Hell Hole.

The Hell Hole, The Series pilot has finally reached the rough draft stage of editing and as we are plugging away at fine tuning the edit, many other things may also be occurring.  For instance, we already know that we are replacing the audio from the exterior of the Perfect House due to its proximity to I80. If this is news to you, please read our earlier posts for details on how this occurred.  We recorded Ryan's lines for this scene wild at a more quiet location during principal photography... thank goodness for preproduction.  Anyway, those lines work as an equivalent to ADR... and in my opinion a much better equivalent.  While sync may not be perfect, Ryan was already in his character Jason and so the performance is believed to be stronger than it might possibly be in ADR. However, every actor is different.  Some love and some despise ADR.  As a sound designer, I dislike ADR due to the fact that the physical space and mic placement are often way too different to make the ADR sound believable.  Of course there are many tricks to combat this common problem in low-budget films... but few actually take the time or have the tools to exercise these tricks.

So we have our dialog problem somewhat solved.  But what about the rest of the universe Jason and Lucifer exist in?  Well, tons of foley has to be done to make the scene play out as natural.  I have been looking at the first draft to begin taking notes on what kinds of foley will have to be done, what materials may be necessary, and what can I record that will not be too much of a pain to edit later as the cut changes. I suppose it becomes more like recording sound effects than actual foley at this point in the stage, but it will save me some time later.  

So while in Utah, I built a ghetto sound booth in Jason's (DP) basement.  There we are going to record beer can, baseball and mitt sounds which will then be used later in sound design as effects made specifically for Hell Hole.  Check out the pictures below.  To record the foley, we will primarily be using an ME66 and a Shure SM57 dynamic microphone.  In my opinion it is more about the items and actions performed during foley than the microphones themselves.  After all, if it does not sound believable, it is most likely a problem with materials and the foley artist.

Please remember that this sound booth is a no-budget representation of what can be done... it is not the prettiest thing in the world.  

Behind the Scenes

Most times I watch the behind the scenes of films I really enjoy to see the crew's trials and errors.  Well, we all have our trial and errors with our pilot of Hell Hole, The Series being the first of these trials and errors.  The episode calls for some kids to run by on fire, and working with children is always a trick.  To prepare ourselves, we set up the camera and marks before the kids arrived on location, and in doing so, we caught some funny footage of our producer, Stephen.  Now you must understand that we rag on Stephen for a number of silly things so it was natural to create this video as our first installment of the behind the scenes of making a no budget pilot for a web series.  Enjoy!