Composition

Sky Children Of the Light Sound Redesign

The Composition Process

It was written originally in Musescore 4 with the goal of creating a fantastical world that inspires the imaginiation. I took an idea from a similar earlier project where the low strings would drone on a low root note which I found evoked the sort of world I saw in front of me

It then got brought into Ableton where I added further musical dynamics and expression. I used an Akai EWI to re-record the midi notes to humanize them and make them feel more musical before then pre-mixing the score as stems to send to Protools

With the sheet music I created in Musescore, I brought it to Silva Concert Chorus where I did a recording session. The final recordings were then brought into ProTools to be synced.

The Virtual Instrument Score from Ableton and the real recordings taken with Silva Chorus where then mixed in Protools with the intention of it being played back in a 5.1 equipped theatre.

Recording A Choir

As a part of this project I had the fortune to record Silva Concert Choir. This was a significant challenge as I had never recorded a choir in the context of a Film project so ther was a lot of work and preparation to be done. In total there was 5 cues that involved the choir each of which was composed, recorded, edited and mixed by me.

The Recorder

Choosing the right device to record with was the first thing to consider. After looking at all my options, the Zoom f8n acting as an interface for Protools ended up being the best solution thanks to it's 8 inputs. This worked out perfectly for one Ambisonic microphone and 2 stereo pair mixes. The 2 sets of outputs one for monitoring the recording and one for the conductors click track was also vital to the session as it allowed far more freedom in what was going to me the recordist and the conductor.

So Many Microhpones

Once I knew how many inputs I had to work with, the next consideration was how I wanted to mic choir. From my experience in live sound I settled on Dual Stereo Pair Rode M5s for above and a matched pair of CO2s for close up on the Soprano and Alto Sections. The Tenor/Basses were covered by an XY Stereo BP 4025 aswell as an NTG4+ acting as a room mic. Finally there was an NT-SF1 Ambisonic Mic as I wanted the ability to control virtual mic placements at the mix stage.

Connecting Everything

All said and done there were 13 channels of microphones and 8 inputs so the final step was enlisting the help of an Allen & Heath GL2400 live mixer to pair down the many microphones to two stereo pairs which would be sent to the Zoom F8n for recording. My main goal with the live mix was to get good seperation and coverage of each section to allow me to rebalance them afterwards on the mix stage. The NT-SF1 was connected directly to the F8n as well totalling 8 channels of Audio

Editing It All Together

With 8 channels of audio to work with I had a lot of flexibility at the edit stage to premix the choir. The Ambisonic recording allowed me to virtually place extra microphones for greater balance and spatialization. Overall the process was very smooth else than some clicks that got embedded in the audio from what I believe was a clock desync between the F8n recorder and Protools. Fortunately after some work with Izotope RX I managed to remove the clicks to make it sound seamless.

The Mixing Process

During the mix process I found that having premixed the choir was invaluable as very little adjustment was needed within each track. Instead, I could just control the choir as a whole using it's routing folder to balance with the other sections of the (virtual) Orchestra. The Ambisonic recording yet again came in handy when I wanted to fill all 5 full range speakers with the choir during the climactic moment as I could create a sort of super LCR by adding the LSRS channels at a 180° from the centre line. This is instead of doing 'fake' surround with reverb and delays which ended up giving a very natural clean sound which was the goal to begin with.

Google Sites

Report abuse