LegoMatrix - Audio

With the bits of the audio collated, I could start laying them out in a timeline and matching it to the video that Trevor had generated. You can read about what he had to do here, if you haven't already.

This process was somewhat less technical than I would have liked. I basically had the video running in VLC at the same time as my audio, and listened intently to make sure it was all in synchronisation. When I thought I'd got it pretty close I exported a stereo down-mix into a WAV file and sent it to Trevor to attach to the video. He could then tell me if any of it was a bit out and I would move things accordingly.

I think it's safe to say this was the least efficient method of doing it possible. I could have used something like Adobe Premiere to line everything up if I had loads of money to spend on it, but that's not how I roll.

The closing credits went a similar way, except we had no existing music track to use. We didn't like the ones in the actual movie credits, and those had effects over the top of them anyway. I went through my music collection looking for some industrial stuff that either had no vocals in it, or had a vocal-less section I could loop. I found a couple of nice loops that I considered using:

Frontline Assembly - Epitaph (5 seconds - 151k) and Apoptygma Berzerk - Deep Red (29 seconds - 683k)

After playing with these for a short time, I remembered that there is a track in the film near the start where Neo meets Trinity for the first time at the nightclub. This was Rob Zombie's Dragula, which has at least 30 seconds of great intro to it. Perfect.

After this I examined the actual movie closing credits sequence, listening for the sounds that are used as the text is displayed and those Matrixy characters fly across. Lucky for me, those sounds were isolated on their own audio track for the most part, so I could rip them out with ease.

Then it was just a matter of watching the video and pasting in those two sound effects when our text was doing it's thing.

After that was done, I thought the whole thing needed a punchy finish, rather than just fading off. Going back to something that I loved from my childhood, I recalled the end theme from the 1980s Doctor Who episodes. This ended with a great synthesised explosion sound, and it was with a certain amount of nerd glee that I ripped that from my Doctor Who 25th Anniversary album CD and slotted it onto place.

Job done.

Steve writes: The audio was pretty straight-forward for the most part. We started off our movie using a fairly low-quality copy of the original movie soundtrack. For testing purposes we really didn't need anything high quality. When we came to producing the final mix, though, we wanted to highlight certain sounds that were a little less distinct in the real audio. We also needed to make the audio tracks for the opening and closing titles. I used the excellent freeware audio tool Audacity, pretty much just based on the price-point. I also had access to a Blu-ray copy of The Matrix, and was able to rip a DTS stream out of it that gave me the full soundtrack in 5.1 - all 1.5GB of it. For the main body of the movie, we used the original soundtrack, obviously. However, some executive decisions were made about how soft or loud certain parts were. As some of the audio was on separate tracks in the 5.1 stream, we were able to boost some of the speech and fiddle with the music levels in places. We feel this helped the sound, at least for our little production. We're not saying the guys who mixed The Matrix audio did a bad job, it just didn't suit our tiny section of it. When it came to the opening and closing titles, however, we couldn't just use existing audio in its entirety. Our text animations are at different speeds and do slightly different things, so we had to make our own.
	For the opening credits, I had a look at the existing audio in that part of the film, where The Matrix words are appearing from the falling rain text, as shown in the thumbnail on the left there. I could use part of the orchestral music, but I needed to re-sync the sound it makes when the letters are dropping into place, and when they fade away. I was able to isolate one of the sounds in the 5.1 audio mix, but the other I actually got from another part of the introduction. It's not the same sound, but quite similar and suits the animation quite well.
With the bits of the audio collated, I could start laying them out in a timeline and matching it to the video that Trevor had generated. You can read about what he had to do here, if you haven't already. This process was somewhat less technical than I would have liked. I basically had the video running in VLC at the same time as my audio, and listened intently to make sure it was all in synchronisation. When I thought I'd got it pretty close I exported a stereo down-mix into a WAV file and sent it to Trevor to attach to the video. He could then tell me if any of it was a bit out and I would move things accordingly. I think it's safe to say this was the least efficient method of doing it possible. I could have used something like Adobe Premiere to line everything up if I had loads of money to spend on it, but that's not how I roll. The closing credits went a similar way, except we had no existing music track to use. We didn't like the ones in the actual movie credits, and those had effects over the top of them anyway. I went through my music collection looking for some industrial stuff that either had no vocals in it, or had a vocal-less section I could loop. I found a couple of nice loops that I considered using: Frontline Assembly - Epitaph (5 seconds - 151k) and Apoptygma Berzerk - Deep Red (29 seconds - 683k) After playing with these for a short time, I remembered that there is a track in the film near the start where Neo meets Trinity for the first time at the nightclub. This was Rob Zombie's Dragula, which has at least 30 seconds of great intro to it. Perfect. After this I examined the actual movie closing credits sequence, listening for the sounds that are used as the text is displayed and those Matrixy characters fly across. Lucky for me, those sounds were isolated on their own audio track for the most part, so I could rip them out with ease. Then it was just a matter of watching the video and pasting in those two sound effects when our text was doing it's thing. After that was done, I thought the whole thing needed a punchy finish, rather than just fading off. Going back to something that I loved from my childhood, I recalled the end theme from the 1980s Doctor Who episodes. This ended with a great synthesised explosion sound, and it was with a certain amount of nerd glee that I ripped that from my Doctor Who 25th Anniversary album CD and slotted it onto place. Job done.