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I am working on a short that is mostly slow motion (shot MOS). Not severely, but enough to give it a surreal quality. This is opening the door for a lot of sound design moments, which is great, but I am having a little trouble in places.

There is a moment when the main character is walking and distracted. CITY EXT - We hear a cacophony of "inner thoughts" and he steps into traffic and a person grabs him before he is struck by an oncoming car. The thoughts are sucked away and the character is back to reality. The problem is that the footage is still slowed down at this moment. So there is now a ton of sync that I feel should happen, but just plain foley isn't working.

I am trying to create something natural in these moments, and I feel like I am overplaying the pitched down, soaked in reverb slow motion effect.

If anyone can point me in the right direction or just brainstorm with me, that would be AWESOME!

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1 Answer

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this sounds like a fun problem. :)

by what percentage is the footage slowed down? if its in the 10-20% range, you could go with straight foley and it may work (no pitching or slowing down required, just perform it to picture) and leave bgfx natural sounding. This will give the impression that all of this is actually happening at the slower speed in reality.

if its slowed more than that, you could experiment with the removal of sounds - IOW losing all of the bgfx and only having the foley in place, or vice versa. I think the pitched/verb thing may end feeling clichéd at that point, so again just perform the foley to picture and see how it looks with the removal of the bgfx context.

another option would be to go with non-literal foley. IOW choose props that are bigger and heavier than what you see on screen, and perform those to picture instead. exaggerate the materials and not the performance, and you may end up with a cool result.

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