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Originally Posted by DynaForte  Well it certainly always seemed bizarre to me! But they had specifically asked for this, and so I guess that it became my formula or benchmark but I am glad to hear from experienced people like you, so I can improve.
Lemme ask you this Gary - in some cases, small cases, footsteps pan, and dialog doesn't come from on-screen. So these would be creative liberties I guess?
How about if a room tone is used in scenes without production sound to match scenes WITH it, this room tone would be in the center channel, right?
So dialogue, foley, footsteps, room tone would usually be in the center channel?
One more....I got these all bottled up in my head - dialogue reverb, another creative liberty as to making it a 5.1 reverb versus having it in the center?
Thanks Greg have a good night. |
As a general rule I put room tone in the center or often I'll take a stereo room tone and collapse it with panners so it creates a center with side "shoulders". Room tone is kind of like spackle that smoothes out dialogue background noise and also connects it to the rest of the mix. I sometimes get 5.0 room tone, which I use out of respect for the editor's sense of aesthetics, but I'll generally push the center and then have the "shoulders" taper off so the center is dominant and the surrounds are lower than the sides.
In terms of panning foley, for main characters I just place it where the dialogue is. Generally the dialogue isn't panned too often because it gets distracting, but sometimes it is very effective. If there is no dialogue but there is some production movement and I want to pan the foley when say the character walks off screen, then I will try to convince the dialogue editor to pan the production sound as well so that it all moves together. Sometimes, even when the character is screen center I will pan the props if the character's hands are extended to the right or left or off screen, but you have to be careful that it doesn't sound phony. Generally I have to keep foley panning less broad than car bys, etc.
In "500 Days of Summer" there were a number of split screen sequences where we panned everything to one side or the other, but we didn't go very wide, just enough so that the audience could instinctively recognise which side the sound was attached to, but not enough so that anyone would catch what was going on with the panning. We wanted it to feel very natural and counteract the gimmicky nature of split screen. It was important to the story and the emotions of the character so, the split screen device was necessary, but we didn't want to underline it, we just wanted to avoid confusion.