Behind the Scenes - Project Timelines

Good afternoon everyone! I decided it might be fun to take a look at the project timelines for several of my projects. A lot of people make audios in a way that's very different from me. For one, I don't use Audacity or Adobe Audition - any kind of dedicated audio software. Instead, I use Premiere Pro. This is for two reasons. The first is the display window and media tabs allow me to preview an file's waveform, so I can identify by sight how it might sound, how loud it is, etc. The second is that I can quickly create a visual preview for twitter using the thumbnail, and make a motion comic or animatic out of the audio if I wish. In general, I recommend making audios in a video editing software if your audio program doesn't allow for waveform previews.

Let's start with the Juri Han audio from yesterday! I think it's the best example to go over the way I mix sound.

Since this one is on the shorter side, you can get a closer look at the sound effects. At the very top are the vocals. Premiere Pro allows you to affect an entire track via the Track Mixer, so I can pitch up/down, add reverb or other effects, or hard limit every audio file in a given row. Keep that in mind for later. Light green sounds are general sound effects - footsteps, toilet paper, doors and door handles, Juri throwing a hapless woman off the toilet. Your normal every day sounds.

Forest green is gas. For gas I often layer 2-3 sounds that compliment each other to give them a more distinct shape and better match the vocals. It's rare for any one fart sound to really mesh with the unique way a voice actress reads a line or gives an effort, but layering a few of them goes a long way. And the deep purple is stomach grumbles.

The brown is... uh... yeah. You'll also notice purple, yellow and lavender. Yellow sounds are scat-like/gas-like sounds that aren't explicitly scat, such as splatters, squishing, crunching, bubbling, etc. The lavender is gooey sounds, more subtle and complimentary, like Gak being played with. Blue is water to give the dump sounds a little more of a splash.

One key feature of Premiere Pro is the ability to "nest" clips. You can group them all into a single sequence, then open the sequence and edit inside of it. As you can see, the brown parts are darkened. They're "disabled" on the timeline, because they're all inside the long forest green file. If you were to click it, you'd see all the brown, yellow, green, and blue colored files inside of it, arranged the same way. The requester wanted the sound effects pitched down to sound more gross and guttural, and it's easier to apply a pitch down to one file than dozens. For the most part, every audio looks a bit like this, though the amount of sounds may vary depending on the story.

Felix, Rem, & Ram Audio

For a project with a lot of sound and Binaural panning, this is the fastest way to apply such effects. At the top of the timeline are the vocals. Felix is the sort of sky blue one, Ram is the red one, and Rem is the teal one. There's sadly limited color label options on Premiere Pro, but if there's a way to make custom labels please do tell me.

This project file is extremely disorganized and contributed to it taking much longer and being more tedious than I wanted to. It's why you might have a more positive opinion of this audio than me visualized. But by nesting the scat and vocals, I could also make the binaural panning a single action. What I SHOULD have done was layer two vocals on top of each other, cut their volumes in half, and then have one in the center of your hearing, and one panned left/right more so it is a little more even centered. But there's time to experiment with that in a future audio. At the very bottom of the screen is the music. And for safe keeping, the actual vocals and sound effects are disabled below their respective nest.

Princess Zelda

As you can see, this one is a lot less heavy on sounds in the first two minutes, but heavier in the middle and the end. A more story-driven audio will usually look like this. But you can see there's more sound effects over the gas than usual. Those are the "hyper" sounds, and they were layered higher up so they could be quickly disabled for the non-hyper alt. As you can see, the big explosion at the end is almost all yellow sounds. This audio is much more organized as you can see.

Palutena, Samus, Lucina, and Bayonetta

This clean-looking timeline is actually my most sound-rich and chaotic audio, it's just very well organized. All messing and pooping was relegated to nests, so the only thing outside of nests, fetish-wise, are farts and stomach grumbles. You can see toward the beginning how sound effect and layer heavy the cooking scene was! There's multiple little sounds (spice, salt shakers, bubbles, and percussive plops) layered to make it match Palutena's voice in a satisfying way. When the vocals and gas are in close proximity, the audio is also panned slightly left and right to help their voices and noises stand out a little over the centralized sounds (music and "main" voices) and make them more easily identifiable to the listener. This helped the audio be much clearer than it would be even without visuals. If we take a look inside nest, we can see what Palutena's explosions actually look like. Her vocals and diarrhea/gas are separated into two separate nests and synced up, and labeled appropriately so I can quickly mix and match them. Despite being in numeric order, these were made to be mixed and matched to the pace of the audio - mixed first and placed/tweaked after the fact.

All of this is to say... the audios are a lot more work than people often realize. But thanks to doing nearly 30 of them up to now, and my previous editing experience informing my workflow, I can produce some very complicated quickly. Up to now the limit has been how long I could stomach an edit. With more comfortable headphones and better file management, I am much more efficient and I plan to catch up quickly on a lot of overdue work.

I hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes!