Sundejme to celý
is a short film about the relationship between a father (Miroslav Krobot) and his son (Pavel Liška) directed by Štěpán Vranešic (with oversight by Petr Zelenka) in 2018.
I was tasked to do sound post-production as the speech was quite hard to understand due to the acoustical properties of the room in which the shooting took place.
The equipment used for sound recording was Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun microphone paired with Zoom H4n. No ports were used.
The raw audio sounded muddy due to the prominent reverberation decay in middle frequencies.
My approach was to cut everything bellow 100hz and to do a subtle lowshelf at 170hz and bellow. I also did a slight automation of EQ bands in order to "follow" the changing nature of the decay.
To avoid unnaturally sounding artefacts, the EQing was subtle. I also did a compression of the decay using long attack with shorter release in order to leave the speech
unaffected and thus compressing only the decaying tail of the reverberation.
This also had to be automated in order to avoid unnaturally sounding artefacts.
The speech ended up sounding much more comprehensible while loosing only a bit of the bottom end, which caused the voices of both actors to sound thinner.
I also had to design a hair clipper sound. In the film there is a scene in which the actor's hair is being cut. However the hair clipper was off in that scene, but it was on in a scene before that.
The original one used in the film was not available to me and other hair clippers sounded different.
My approach was to use the sound from the previous scene, cut it in a way which fitted the editing and layer it with other hair clipper sounds which were low-cut at 7khz.
The hair clipper sounded very close to the original. However, I had to do EQ automation in order to match the movement of the actor's hand because the movement itself would affect the sound of the hair clipper.
I also had to add quite a lot of sounds such as footsteps, cassette player, room ambience (and so on) in order to create a more immersive and believable soundscape.