With all the sounds recorded I edited them into the scene using Final Cut.
I used two audio tracks for the dialogue, one containing all the sound for Bunk, and the other for McNulty. I then used a track just for the distant background sound of cars as this sound needed to play through the whole scene. I then used various other tracks for all the foley sounds.
When putting the dialogue into the scene I used markers so that I would know when the lines started. To do this I watched through the scene and looked for the start of a line, this was signified by the lip movements of the two characters. I would then try and find the exact frame they start talking and press the ‘M’ key to put down a marker on the timeline.
Even using the markers it was really difficult to put all the dialogue in. The main reason for this was that I had to go through all the takes we did to find one that matched the speed of the lip movement. The second reason was that a lot of the lines are spoken with the characters mouths off screen, meaning I wasn’t sure when the lines were supposed to go. I ended up just placing the lines roughly where I thought they might go, and in the end this probably doesn’t matter because there is no visual mouth movement it does in fact fit. It may not be exactly the same as the original scene in terms of timing, but watching my version on its own you wouldn’t notice if the lines weren’t in their original place.
I didn’t have much time to adjust the volume levels, but generally I tried to make the sounds of distant cars the lowest sound, and the dialogue the loudest, keeping the foley sound somewhere in the middle. However if the foley was the focus of the shot e.g. a close up of turning a sheet of paper over, I would turn that sound up slightly just to emphasize it.
PHOENIX'S MEDIA 