My placement with Faustian Nonsense has me mostly editing Super Suits, an audio drama sitcom about lawyers in a superhero world. This is a brief walk through of the process of editing an episode to try and show what I’m mostly up to during my DPS year
We tend to do dialogue edits and then sound design edits 3 episodes at a time, just so I’m not constantly switching between mindsets and ultimately the process ends up quicker that way.
First I collect all the lines, working from a script to see which characters appear in an episode and then going through the dropbox to find them.
I then place them all in a session file and get to work, using the script as a guide I choose the best takes and weave the scenes together. I also take any particularly funny outtakes to put on the patreon as extra content.
The only processing I do on the voices at this point is noise reduction, EQ, and compression to have all of the voices at a roughly similar level so they sit well in the mix together and no dialogue gets lost when sound effects get added.
Once this is done I’ll sit with Jaci and Hannah (showrunner and head writer) and make sure everyone is happy with takes and timings, and then I move on to the Sound Design stage
I first add any voice effects to characters that need it (usually it’s just the AI character but sometimes certain characters will need something added.) And then go by the script again, adding atmos and sound effects to the script. The scripts tend to leave a lot of creative freedom and any time I think of a funny audio gag I usually put it in.
I also pan characters to try and spatialise the scene and then automate the panning going left or right if the character moves. Most episodes also require some new foley which I just record as and when I need it, otherwise I just use my sound library.
I put a multiband compressor and limiter on the whole thing, again just to try and make it easier to hear in different environments.
I then export this and send it off to Jaci Hannah and Tony (our marketing director) to get extra opinions on the overall sound design in case I missed anything or something wasn’t clear. As a final check I run it through and LUFS penalty analyzer which tells me if the episode is going to be reduced or boosted by any of the platforms that it will be hosted on and then adjust it accordingly so the mix doesn’t get affected.