Late last year I worked on sound design and audio post for 'The Barrel' a 52 minute surf film that explores the lure and magic of getting barrelled. Not only was it a real treat to get to watch amazing footage from the world's best barrel spots including Bali, Puerto Esondido, Teahupoo and of course Pipeline, but I was given a lot of creative freedom in terms of sound design.
Filmed and produced by renowned surf photographer Tony "Harro" Harrington and edited by Trinity Ludlow of Monarch Post, there was also an interactive social website created to share photos and experiences of surfers' own barrels surfthebarrel.com . All in all, a really cool concept.
Before I go on, check out the trailer...
Surfing videos are almost always images set to music, with little or no recorded location sound. One reason for this could be because audio isn't usually a huge priority for a guy swimming out in the line up, trying not to get killed while getting great shots!
The simple solution is to usually add some pumping music and let the footage speak for itself, which does work pretty well I must admit. However, for this film Tony and Trinity wanted to give the footage more impact so asked me to create sound design from scratch for every single wave. Yes - every single wave in a 52 minute film... so... I said OK.
Although a somewhat daunting task, I was fully stoked by the prospect and immediately started coming up with ways to reproduce the various sounds you hear from waves. In my youth :-) I spent a lot of time out in the waves around Hawke's Bay so I knew where I needed to go, but it took a bit work to get there.
As I started putting together preliminary sounds I realised that a wave is much more than just one sound. It's a combination of many different 'flavours'. Much like cooking (which I love) sound design is like putting together a recipe for a tasty dish from many different ingredients. In fact I often think of cooking and taste in terms of sound frequencies - but that's another blog altogether! ("ooh a bit more high frequency please from this lemon juice will give it a nice bite...")
I did use some stock wave sound effects, but found that alone they didn't cut it. Also because every wave and every ride is different, each wave had to be individualised with additional effects.
Here's how I broke the wave down and some of what I used for the additional sounds:
Spray off the wave (hose spraying, waterfalls with volume automation)
The crack of the wave's lip hitting the flat water (thunder claps, home made effects)
Surf board carving and spraying (hose sprays and waterfalls with volume automation)
Deep rumble for power and heaviness in the really big waves (scary subby samples)
...and others...
So in the end each wave became a combination of around 6 or 7 tracks of audio with varying ratios of each, plus individual pan and volume automation depending on the wave.
Things were getting a little intense :) Here are a screen shot showing the Pro Tools session...
The red tracks are subby sounds and more astract elements, while the green tracks are the more realistic elements. There were also music and dialogue tracks but they are off the screen in this shot. In the end I had over 80 tracks of audio.
One sound that I felt was lacking in the effects I had was the real powerful crack of a very heavy lip hitting the water. I wanted to try and record and design my own sound for this, so taking a leaf out of sound design guru Diego Stocco's book, I got a little bit creative...
After a few experiments I worked out that:
A: pouring water out of a bucket onto flat concrete sounds like someone peeing on flat concrete.
B: pouring water out of a bucket into a bucket of water sounds like someone peeing in a bucket of water.
C: pouring water into a flat pan of water gives more impact, more splash and water movement.
Still, it's not exactly Teahupoo.
So I went hunting for effects that would beef it up. In the end I doubled the water effect, panned the left and right to give a stereo effect, then used a few different things as effects. Distortion and EQ were used but the main thing was a reverb plugin called TL Space. Not only does this have nice reverb presets, but also has a multitude of really weird presets for sound design and general weirdness. i found one that almost blew my head off, so went with that.
This gave me 3 different sounds I could use - the plain water effect, a combination of both effect, and the dirty bass on it's own.
After all this sound design there was also the important work of making the dialogue, fx and music all work together to create the final mix.
The Barrel was a fantastic and challenging project to work on. The film premiered in Australia and was also featured as part of the programme for the Vans Triple Crown of surfing in Hawaii, so was a huge honour to be a part of that. Thanks a lot to Trinity and Tony - you are legends! Sick! :-)
