Jimmy & Friends

Who am I?

Audio engineer
Mixing technician
Audio creative director

Contact Me:

Instagram: @tommcarrutherss

email: twcarruthers99@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.carruthers799

Click on my photo to find out more about me!

Project

Project Synopsis

For my interdisciplinary project this trimester, I was given a short film where I was tasked with creating a score that fit the brief outlined by the film director.

I worked on the music, sound design and audio mixing for the short film Jimmy & Friends, written, directed by and produced by Aiden Lombard.

It was my job to ensure that Aiden's vision for his film was upheld to the standard that he desired. This included sourcing background music, ambient sounds, mixing, applying sound effects, mastering, etc.

Jimmy Friends Audio Brief.pdf

Film Synopsis

Jimmy & Friends is a light-hearted comedy that views the world from Jimmy the fish's perspective.

Jimmy's owner heads to the shops to buy some food and comes home with fish fingers, much to Jimmy's dismay. Jimmy's owner ensures him that he will not be eating the fish fingers out of respect for him, but it is clear his owner has an ulterior motive.

The Film

JimmyFriendsCompletedAudio.mp4

Composition & Mixing

The brief requires that I keep the light-hearted comedic tone throughout the film, and that it shouldn't become "overly cheesy". To achieve this, I first took inspiration from Pixar's Finding Nemo and applied the sounds of a fish tank to help the viewer become more invested emotionally in the film. My next process was to find a piece of music that would be suitable to be played softly in the background, as if listening through a Bluetooth speaker in the home. After some research, I came across Beyond The Sea by Robbie Williams, which I found to be very suitable as it includes oceanic themes.

Next I moved on to the dialogue. The raw audio was lacking clarity and had too much low-end frequency response to sound natural, so to combat that I brightened it up and removed some of the low end frequencies. My goal was to make it sound as natural as possible, as if it were being spoken to you in person.

After I had applied my EQ, I noticed there was still an issue with the sound; there was an unsatisfactory amount of pops, clicks and natural room reverberation that had become apparent, so the next step of my mix naturally became removing these discrepancies. To do so, I applied a "de-hum" tool to remove the majority of these undesired artefacts. I very quickly noticed that in order to completely remove all unwanted noise, audio fidelity had been sacrificed, which was unacceptable. To rectify this situation I had to find a "happy medium" in which there was still a substantial level of audio fidelity, but there was also a significant reduction in extraneous sounds.

Then I had to balance the volumes of the dialogue, the music and the fish tank bubbles. I began by brightening the EQ on the bubbles to help them sit above the dialogue and be more distinct, without taking away focus from it. Finding the right level where the sound isn't over-bearing, but also not too quiet is always a challenge and is a large part of mixing. After I was satisfied by the volume of the bubbles, I approached the music in a similar method, except this time I made the music warmer so it would sit below the dialogue, but the melody could still be heard clearly.

You can see where I brightened the higher frequencies of the bubbles!

It may look like a lot was scooped out of the backing track, but it was necessary to get the sound I wanted!

Finally, after everything had been mixed, I knew there was just "something" missing. I concluded that I needed to add an underwater sound effect to the parts of the dialogue that are from Jimmy's perspective inside the tank. This took some time to perfect. I spent a while playing around with the EQ of just the first 3 sentences of dialogue only to be dissatisfied with my end result. So, I went hunting for a plug-in that had a underwater distortion pre-set, and luckily I found one! After playing around a little bit with the dry/wet (saturation of the effect on the audio signal) and the drive, I found a sound that still allowed the dialogue to be understood, but it was obvious that it was being heard as if you were under water. You may notice that the first few sentences of dialogue are significantly quieter than the rest, but do not worry as that is nota mistake! It is done so intentionally to help the viewer see things from Jimmy's perspective of being inside a fish tank.

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