Ebony Samuda talks candidly about her own experience(s) of parenting, disability, superstitions, and the stigma that is attached to these subjects from both a British and Caribbean perspective.
Narrated by Francis Lovehall (A Thousand Blows, Small Axe) with an original score by Anil Tumkaya, it’s both an entertaining and eye-opening account of the day-to-day of a parent with a child affected by Niemann-Pick disease type C.
I’ve had the great honour to work with John Lee Taggart again! I would like to thank John and NPUK for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this incredible story.
On this page, I’ll show you part of my process on how I restored the audio recordings for some of the scenes of this film. One thing that’s important during any shoot, is to make sure that the audio is being recorded at the highest possible level. The reason we needed to restore some of the audio, is because there’s a few devices running that we can hear in the background. I used iZotope RX 11, combined with an analog compressor and EQ, to get the dialogue audio to the highest possible level.
How I did it
Raw audio
As you can hear, there’s some noise in this recording that we can hear. It’s the high pitched hissing that you can clearly hear in between the phrases. Every time she pauses, we can hear the noise. My job was to get rid of the noise as much as possible, while still making sure it’s intelligible.
Audio restored with RX 11
This already sounds better. The noise level is now very low. However, I wanted to make sure her voice would sound as clear as possible.
Audio after using an analog compressor and EQ
Compared to the previous example, we can hear that in this one the audio sounds more clear and crisp. I achieved this by using an analog compressor and analog EQ. After polishing and restoring the audio, I composed an original score for the different scenes of this film and mixed that in with the new dialogue audio.
CREDITS: Directed by John Lee Taggart // Starring Ebony Samuda & Amarii Newland // Narrated by Francis Lovehall // Original Score & Sound Mix by Anil Tümkaya // Interview by Steve Neal & John Lee Taggart // Assistant Producer Rares Danciu // Produced by Niemann-Pick UK // Special thanks to Sue Terry Voices
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If you’re interested, you can vote for this project here: https://smileycharityfilmawards.com/films/beyond-the-stigma