Video Production: Pot Tea Social House

This is a screenshot of a video production project that I have done. It's a commercial for a local Asian restaurant, called "Pot Tea Social House", in Las Vegas. The commercial is 30 seconds long with a voice over and music score underneath it and it shows various parts of the restaurant.

I had the opportunity to work on this production because I had a friend who had gotten in contact with the owners of the restaurant and asked them if he could interview them and make somewhat of a documentary out of it, which I later made into a 30 second commercial. They agreed and since my friend needed help with the whole thing he reached out to me and told me what he wanted to do and I said yes.

The problem with accepting to help on the production was that I was unprepared because I was asked to help on the day of the shoot. I didn't have the equipment we needed and we had to do with what we had. My friend took his Canon 6D and we were able to get our video with that. The interview with the owners was a little harder because of the audio.

I thought that we would be interviewing the owners separately but to save time we did them together. The problem was that I only had one lavalier mic to setup on one of the owners. So I decided to mic up one of the owners and hoped we could get decent audio from the second owner through the camera. 

Once I got into editing the piece together, there was about 2 hours of film to go through. I picked out the shots I wanted to use and used the audio from the interview as a voice over. The audio from the lav mic was decent enough to use but the audio from the camera was unusable so I had to scrap the entire interview of one of the owners because there was no way of restoring it so I decided to use just one of the owners audio. There was a quite a bit of editing to do since she would stutter or pause in between sentence but that was an easy fix. What was a little harder was getting rid of the noise of the restaurant. We did the interview in the dining area so there was a lot of noise. But after using some compression and gating I was able to bring down the noise while keeping the voice clear.

Sound Design: Elephant's Dream

This is a screen shot of one of my sound design projects. It's for a short animated film called "Elephant's Dream". I took a 5 minute piece of the entire short film and stripped all the original sound from it and replaced it with my own sounds. I had about 20 different tracks throughout the entire thing and used almost all of them the entire time. I had about 7 different tracks just for sound effects, 3 tracks for background sounds and ambiance, 2 tracks for music, 2 tracks for dialogue and 6 aux tracks that I used for processing effects. Each aux track had some effects like reverb and delay on them and I used sends and returns to get them on certain tracks at certain times.

The entire project is divided into 4 different scenes. Each scene I had to take into account the way the room sounded and how the sound happening in the room would also sound. I used different timed reverbs and delays to get the sound just  right. In some scenes, the rooms were huge and because I didn't want it to sound too empty or too big the use of ambient noises really came into play during those scenes.

I think the poorest part of the whole project was the voice acting. The reason is because I didn't have time to find good voice actors to portray the characters properly, I ended using some friends and the voices came out really mediocre at best. I do, however, plan on going back and redoing the voices to get them right this time.

Overall, the project came out pretty good. It was fun to do because it allowed me to use my creativity to design some sounds that would make the story make sense.

Live Sound Production

This is a picture taken at Fremont East Studios during an event they hold every month called the Outlet. The event invites local musician and musical groups to the studio and lets them perform on a stage. The artists play live to an audience but the event is also being streamed live online.

The artists in the photo are called AZIAM, pronounced "as I am". For their performance, I was monitoring and mixing their set for the live web stream. While mixing them, I had a few things to work with. Because there was another group that performed before them, I had to quickly EQ and compress each one of the instruments and vocals. I had a dry signal coming in from the live room, which gave me complete control over how to make them sound. After processing, I put a small reverb on both the vocals to give them the sound of the studio in which they were performing.

Aside from doing the live stream mixing, I also helped on the setup of the audio equipment. Both consoles used to mix were Presonus StudioLive 16.4.2 consoles. One was used in the live room for the live performance and the other in the audio room for the live stream. We were only able to use 12 inputs because we had a shortage on microphones. We ended up using 4 wireless Shure ULX-D for vocals, 2 SM57 for snare and electric guitar, 2 DI boxes for either acoustic guitar or piano, 1 Beta 52 for kick, and a Rode NT2a for overhead drums. The last 2 inputs were for a DJ that played between sets.

Overall, the show went by pretty smoothly. It's a team effort and it's a fun night for everyone and it's great to see the production come together.