Nine months ago I had an idea- to create
a travel film driven by sound. Visuals almost always come first in the
filmmaking process. They tell the story and sound merely fills in the gaps and
corresponds to what you're seeing on screen. So what if we flipped it? I knew I
couldn't make this concept come to life on my own, so I teamed up with Steven,
Mitchell, and Tommy from TMS. I guess we just started at the beginning-
Neah Bay? What was stood out about Neah Bay was that it was was the only rain we got. In the
context of me having planned a video that was all about mood and rain. Had to
redo some planning there. We also suited up with our yellow jackets. These
things never got some good use, it's all very dry. Okay so we found this really cool spot
on the way to another hike that we're about to do. These are my favorite kinds
of shoots, where you see something along the way to a different spot and you have
to stop and shoot it. It's just something completely unexpected and
I really want to get a top-down drone shot of someone crossing this log over
here. It might not be the best idea, but I'm gonna put the drone up and we'll
see how it goes. There's so much good footage from Neah Bay and I just
didn't use any of it. I think my favorite timelapse of the trip was probably the
one I shot from Cape Flattery. I remember like we're there and the
weather changes like every 30 seconds, not even. Every 15 seconds is a new weather pattern. Short stay in Neah Bay and then straight on to Port
Angeles- to probably one of the best AirBNBs I've ever been in. As
sick as the AirBNB was, I think I was a little more sick. That was when things started to get really dicey. Alright so it's now day two. We've
seen some sick views and we're staying in a sick AirBNB, but as you can
probably infer my voice has left me unfortunately, but it's okay. We're gonna
roll with it. No good shoot ever went to plan and today we're doing a pretty
exciting part of this video, which is the intro shot. And it's basically just a
drone shot going through the house, so it's a little risky, but it should turn
out pretty cool. We've got Mitch behind the camera here, he's gonna be
here setting up a tent. Tommy's gonna be tying his shoe. Basically the idea here is
just to have sounds that will make it obvious to the viewer that we're about
to go on a road trip and go hiking. And we've also got Steve over here killing
it on the FPV drone. He's gonna make sure not to kill us and to get a sick shot. So
we'll see how this goes. So we just did the fpv shot to intro the
video. Stephen absolutely killed it on the drone, everyone killed it on the timing. Yeah looks sick. So we're doing a sunset
hike tonight. We made it to our trailhead and as you can see it's a little steep.
Probably to be pretty tricky and we only have about an hour until sunset
actually happens, and about 2,000 feet of elevation gain to climb in that one hour.
So yeah wish us luck. So we're about a quarter of the way now.
Layer count has reached one for every single one of us and we are all dying at
the moment. And there were all these ropes that we had we had to climb up, and
it was all like slippery and a muddy shale that would just slide and then like
a nice fat cliff on the one side. So we finally made it to the peak. We've got
Mitchell on the drone right back there. And as you can see the view is
absolutely incredible, this is one of the craziest views I've ever seen, Fitting to
accompany such a difficult strenuous hike, but it was worth it without a doubt. We spent a couple days in the Olympic
area, did just some forest hiking, and then moved on to
Portland. That was a crazy day. It's now day four and we've come out to a
pretty unique spot for sunrise. Look at this big plane in the middle of
the forest. Not something you see every day. All right so we're hiking to a waterfall
right now. Just made it down this rope section, pretty intense, and now we're
gonna walk along the edge of this river here. The water's pretty high so it might
get a little dicey. So apparently the waterfall is right around this corner.
Tommy thinks I'm gonna have a pretty hardcore reaction to it.
We'll see if he's right. I might cry. It's very true.
Damn! the Rays! The scariest FPV droning experience I've
ever had my life. It's so crazy because everything comes at you so quick.
And especially coming down from up there down the waterfall it's like you feel
like a bird. It's like the craziest looking thing ever.
My fingers- I'm like I have to be fluid and it's like hard cause my fingers are
just so cold. Abiqua falls is where I got probably my favorite shot that I got.
I saw that the Rays were like hitting just one rock. And Tommy's like on the
other side of the little crater we're in. So I just yelled as loud as I could like
Tommy get over here. Just stand on that rock. And then I think one one thing, I
don't think we have any footage of it, but one one moment that stood out: hiking
back up the very muddy trail, hiking up the ropes, this this couple passes us and
they both have on brand new spotless white sneakers. Air Force Ones. What
was even crazier about about the entire day was that we woke up for sunrise, hit
the plane, spent a few hours at the plane shooting, several hours at the
waterfall, then we actually went to Portland. After all of that
like several hours to make it to the Cascades. Cascades was was interesting
because we it was two sequences that were like very important for my
particular video. The fire tower was an important like transitional
sequence. It's where the music changes. It's where the pace changes. And then the
very ending, blue hour on the lake. The morning that we shot that blue our sequence was definitely the
most stressful point in the trip for me. We all had so much to shoot and
stuff kept going wrong. We were gonna shoot it the day before. The car got
stuck so we scrapped that. Got the impromptu train bridge sequence
which turned out equally vibey. But then we had to push blue hour to
the next sunrise. I think that's also the last sunrise in the trip, so the last
chance. It was crunch time. Even then when we we went to the lake
that was right next to the AirBNB, we were going to hike to a trail, and then it was covered in several feet of snow so like
there is no trail. I think I was rolling for the entirety of blue hour
because it's only like maybe 40 minutes. The last shoot of the
entire trip, the fire tower. And then on the way down we shot the
running sequence with the water. That's what was interesting too, is that it could never be as simple as "hey Steve go and stand on that rock and I'll get a shot of you " because there's
no sound. It's such a part of the process like and even planning like months
before the trip. Like what what shots am I gonna need. When we were originally
planning it, we were thinking like, oh can we get things done in time, can we get
everything ready to go. And we were thinking like okay
worst-case scenario we could push it til May sometime. If we'd done that,
this entire thing wouldn't have happened. All right so now that you've
seen the behind the scenes of the wild shoot that went into this video, let's
take a look at the two months of editing that came after that shoot to make this
video come together. Next week I am going to be posting a before-and-after of this
project where you can see the timeline and the raw video and all that, and in
this video I really just want to focus in on the editing process behind the
video, particularly sound. This was definitely the most extensive sound
design I've ever done for a video, in fact I ended up with 31 audio tracks in
premiere by the time I had finished. Sound was not only my primary focus
while I was editing this video, but also while I was planning and shooting.
Throughout the entire process I had to be painfully aware that sound was the
key element here. And that emphasis on sound ultimately ended up manifesting in
four ways: ambience, story, flow, and rhythm. Before we jump into breaking down
all four of those factors in detail, I want to briefly talk to you about
Epidemic Sound, which is not only the sponsor of this video, but where I
sourced the music and sound effects for it. Epidemic Sound is without a doubt the
best place to get sound effects for your project and that's for a few different
reasons. First, you can use their tags and categorical system to search for and
find the exact sound effect you're looking for. And once you find it they
often have many different variations of the same type of sound. This is perfect
for something like the map sequence where every time we move that
map in the shot it's gonna sound a little bit different. So one paper
movement sound isn't gonna cut it. I might need 5, 10, or even 20 of the same
or a similar sound to complete that sequence in a realistic manner. So being
able to search for that exact sound, find it, then scroll through a bunch of
options and download the ones that are right for the project really speeds up
my process when I'm doing sound design. The tags and categorical system also
allow me to find very specific music. So for this project I needed music that
matched the mood of the video very well but also kind of fell off into the
background and let the sound take center stage. And epidemic's categorical system
and tags allowed me to find that exact track. They've got both a personal plan
and a commercial plan depending on the projects you're creating, so if you want to
try it out for yourself, check out the link in the description to get a 30 day
free trial. But, now that we know where our sound effects are coming from, let's
talk about how we're gonna use them, starting out with ambience. The sound
design in this video needed to really immerse the viewer in the Pacific
Northwest location. I wanted you to feel the density and the lushness of those
Olympic forests, and the power and scale of the Cascades mountains, and even the
stillness of the alpine lake at the very end. One technique that I used to make the
ambience in this a bit more immersive would be to take an ambient track,
duplicate it and offset it a little bit, and then pan one to the left ear and the
other to the right ear. So you might hear a different bird on the left than you do
on the right. And this really just makes it feel less like you're looking at
something and more like it's around you, to the sides and behind you. And it just
immerses you a lot more in the sound design. This also allowed me to give kind
of a sense of space to the sound design. So for example in the waterfall sequence,
you hear the dog directly in front of you but at the same time you hear the
echo of that powerful waterfall off of the canyon walls to your right and to
your left. But it wasn't as simple as just immersing the viewer in the
location. I also needed the sound design to tell a cohesive, understandable story
throughout the video. This aspect was actually less about editing and more
about planning. Before the shoot I basically thought
about the certain sequences we needed and then wrote down every sound that you
would need to hear to understand what's going on in that important part of the
story. So for example in the intro FPV shot, what would you need to hear, if you
couldn't see anything, to understand that these people are about to go on a road
trip in the Pacific Northwest. That's why we set up that shot in such a way that
you would hear the radio in the background giving the weather forecast,
the tent being packed up, boots being laced up, the car being unlocked, and all
these different sounds that establish to you aside from the visuals that we're
about to go on a road trip. I did use a few additional vocal sound bites
just to solidify that story. So we have the radio voice over in the introduction,
we have Google Maps establishing that we're going to a trail, and then in the
fire tower sequence we have a bit of actual dialogue that I just recorded and
slapped into the edit. The idea was ideally to make a film that you could
watch with your eyes closed and still have an idea of what was happening. But
it also needed to flow smoothly from shot to shot, and for a travel film
that's a large part of the editing process. And I wanted to be able to do that
through sound. So throughout the edit I've used essentially sound design
transitions, some of them planned before we even filmed them and some of them
kind of just found in the edit. For example we have the sound of ropes
creaking transitioning into the sound of a log creaking as Mitchell's walking
across it. We also have the sound of the car driving on the road transitioning
into the sound of me zipping up my coat as the car pulls over. These sound
transitions are something I've been toying around with for a while, but I
wanted to really go all in with that concept for this video, and I'd say
they're definitely a lot more difficult to plan out and execute than visual
transitions. To plan out some of these I would essentially write down on a piece
of paper every single sound I could possibly think of that would be part of
a sequence, and then literally just draw lines to connect the ones that could
possibly sound similar. And finally a factor that goes very much hand-in-hand
with flow is rhythm. I deliberately chose very ambient tracks that would kind of
sink into the background and didn't have
a percussive rhythm to them, so that I could make the sound design solidify the
rhythm of the video. I actually edited this entire video with a metronome
playing in the background. So I downloaded a metronome that was the same
tempo as the track, put it behind the entire edit, and then made sure that
actions in the shot lined up with the beat, kind of creating a percussive
rhythm to solidify the rhythm of that ambient track. So any shot that has
footsteps in it or any other consistent repeated motion like that, where we have
the blinking light or even in this shot the rate at which these windows are
passing the camera lens, those actions happen on the beat. But everything I just
talked about is a way the sound design could do things that visuals would
normally do- take the viewer to the location, tell a cohesive story, I want to
do not just that, but just use sound design in a more creative way than I
normally would. In the airplane sequence, that plane is definitely grounded,
chillin in the forest. But you here in the sound design of that sequence we're
essentially bringing it back to life. You hear it starting up, you hear the pilots
talking in the cockpit, and you hear the plane take off. So in that sequence sound
is not only telling the story of what we're doing, but telling a story that's
entirely different from the visuals. That's just not happening in the visuals.
In the night sequence where we're running through the forest, what you hear
is determined by what our flashlights illuminate. Just digging a little deeper
than location and story and using sound design very thoughtfully and creatively.
Finally, I used a lot of audio effects to enhance the existing sound design and
make them serve the story a bit better. For example, if someone walks past you on
the left side of the shot then you'll hear that footstep sound start in the
middle and then slowly move to your left ear. That's just a tool called panning
in premiere that you can use on any audio effects that I used an insane
amount throughout this project. I also use reverb, particularly on the waterfall
sequence, to simulate the sound of everything
you're hearing echoing off the canyon walls around you. And I also used the
lowpass filter to muffle certain sounds, for example creating that distant
rumble in the Cascades mountains. But that's gonna have to be it for this
video. Honestly so much has gone into this project that I could probably talk
about it for hours but I have to call this video quits at some point so it's
not hours long, and I think that does a pretty good job of summing up how we
made this project come together and what makes it unique from other
travel films hopefully. And of course just another massive thank you to
everyone who made this project come together. There are links in the
description to where you can check out the videos TMS made from this trip and
also where you can get a 30-day free trial of epidemics sound to try it out
for your own videos. And I guess the best way to end this video off is just to
acknowledge that this entire project came at kind of a weird time. It's all
about getting out and going on an adventure, exploring a new place, which is
not something we can do at all right now. But if you take anything away from the
film, I hope that it inspires you, once you can go out again and explore a new
place, hopefully the outdoors, just to listen a little bit closer and think not
only about the landscape you can see but what you're hearing and what really
makes that landscape and that location come to life. But thank you so much for
watching. I hope you enjoyed this project almost as much as I enjoyed making it,
and I'll see you later this week.
