When editing Brother I ran into what Robin described as a ‘good’ problem. This so-called problem was conveying subjectivity and when to shift away from my subjectivity in the vignette. The beginning of the vignette is from my subjectivity; unbeknownst to my brother’s presence and when he calls it’s muffled by the music I’m listening to. When I cut to the reveal of my brother it’s removed from my subjectivity and the music drops away. The sense then returns to my point of view until a wider frame situates us both in the same location. Once the connection between characters is established the music quickly fades away as my narration is brought in. This required me to spend a bit of time editing the music to make it sound as if it was being heard through small headphones and also further away from an outsider perspective. I also applied similar effects to muffle my brother’s calls whilst the vignette is still from my subjectivity.

To edit the audio I followed a couple of different video tutorials that both outlined processes to achieve a muffled sound. Both however followed the same principle of isolating and removing any high frequencies that tend to be lost as they travel through air and are suppressed by walls etc.


In this tutorial the gentleman opted to make use of the EQ effect. With this he made the sound itself quieter and then removed the high frequencies and some of the mid frequencies. To enhance this sense of distance he used both a Bandpass and added an echo with the reverb effect.

http://www.ivfilms.net/resources/Muffle_Tut/Muffle.html
The process outlined in this tutorial was a little different and used both a Highpass and Lowpass effect to remove certain frequencies. To achieve the desired effect required a bit of playing around with each effect, however the estimations and general guide was quite helpful.

For Brother I experimented with a combination of the procedures outlined in the videos. I began by fiddling with the high and lowpass effects. The result was pretty close to what I wanted. I then added a bandpass and once again shifted that around until I was pleased. Personally I found fiddling with the EQ to be the least helpful of the effects and I didn’t decided to add any reverb either. I applied this effect across each of the music and call audio tracks and then adjusted them independently depending on which subjectivity I was trying to conveying, the tightness of the shot and also depending on their relationship to other audio tracks.