I Swear | The surprising challenge of the sound mix

by Emma Butt |
I Swear
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The brilliant I Swear came to the screen on a tight budget – and that presented a hell of a challenge for the small sound team. Emma Butt was one of the small sound team on the newly-released I Swear, and was its Dialogue Editor & Supervisor. With huge thanks to her, here’s her story ... I Swear | The surprising challenge of the sound mix

The brilliant I Swear came to the screen on a tight budget – and that presented a hell of a challenge for the small sound team.

Emma Butt was one of the small sound team on the newly-released I Swear, and was its Dialogue Editor & Supervisor. With huge thanks to her, here’s her story of working on the film.

I Swear got released last Friday, it’s a beautiful film that I hope people will go watch. There’s a couple of things about the dialogue that people might not be aware of that I wanted to share, which I hope other soundies find interesting.

The big one is, besides four words (words not sentences) there is no ADR (automated dialogue replacement) in the film. This is almost unheard of these days and thanks in large part to the expert skills of the re recording mixer, Dan Johnson.

When I say no ADR I mean no breath passes, no crowd, no technical safety lines.

Having no crowd was the trickiest part.

There are multiple crowd scenes throughout the film where stock sound wouldn’t be enough, but luckily Simon Hayes had been production sound mixer and had recorded wild tracks of each of these scenes. Even still, these wild tracks weren’t enough and crowd scenes needed to be built up.

There’s a scene in the film where all the young kids with Tourette’s come for a get together. It needed to feel full and chaotic but the dialogue from John (played by Robert Aramayo) needed to be clean and clear.

I wanted to give Dan, the mixer, the freedom to place voices around the space, to hear the ticks coming from all directions, and wildtracks couldn’t give me that complete freedom as often multiple voices were speaking at once.

That meant I had to go through every single take for that scene and listen through to find any free and clear voice that could be used, that had a different vocal tick from the last, so it made the room feel fuller.

I had five weeks only on the film. To some that may seem like a lot but when you’re told there’s no safety net of ADR, that time goes very quickly in the search for alts, in clean up and in building the crowd scenes.

Some exterior scenes only used booms, no lavs (lavalier microphones), to make the film feel real and visceral.

The main time this gave me a difficult job to do was keeping John’s breathing alive in a scene. Shot up in Scotland, the wind was noisy as feck at times, changed tone and level on different angles and became a pain in the arse to keep consistent.

Processing would mean I risked losing the breaths or taking the life out of them. But also we needed them to keep people connected to John. It meant searching again for any clean breaths where the wind and background noise wasn’t awful and cutting them to fit or, over processing a copy of the boom while keeping another copy clean and balancing them together.

There was no massive post sound team. The team consisted solely of me on dials, Dan on the mix, and Joe and Niv on SFX.

We all worked our backsides off on the sound and hopefully that comes across when people see the finished film.

The brilliant Emma Butt can be found on Instagram, right here. Her website is here.

I Swear is in UK cinemas now.

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