On Wednesday and Thursday, April 6th and 7th 2016, the 5.1 format mixing workshp supported by La Boheme studio took place. With the guidance of Felipe Linares, a group of selected students with a prior registration had the opportunity to go to La Boheme studio and participate in a small class about 5.1 format mixing.
Currently, La Boheme is the studio in charge of sound production for the Colombian film "Malos Dias". A trailer of this film was used as material for the workshop. Daily, between 6 and 7 students attended the event; who were divided into groups of 2 or 3 for working on different aspects of the mixing process.
A first group worked on the first part of the trailer which consisted largely by music with a voice over of one of the characters of the film. This section focused on the mix of music and its relationship with the dialogues in terms of loudness. Furthermore, the effect known as "voice of god" that voice overs normally have, and management of pan and spatiality in 5.1 were revised; as well as compression and equalization in voices. Here we see the students that worked with this section on Wednesday:
The second part of the workshop focused on how the environments of the scenes worked. Of great importance in this section was managing the change of planes in the scenes. Thus, environments must change accordingly to what is happening on screen. Additionally, it is very important to use different environments or different parts of the same track of environments so that the scene does not feel like a repetitive loop. As for the level it is important that environments do not sit above the other elements; but their absence must not be felt.
Finally, we worked in editing dialogues. An important part of this work is the selection of shots, find the ones that have less noise but also give continuity to the dialogue. For this, one may use one or several tracks to serve as fills. For this clips, we cut parts of the dialogue track that do not have words at all. And these "empty" clips serve as a cushion to give unity to the whole dialogue sequence. On both days of the workshop the same work was done.
