LO3: Panning My Mixes

While mixing, I’ve had to consider a few different ways in which to pan sound effects. I’ve found that sound effects are usually panned in one of two ways:

1) From the camera’s perspective

2) From a character’s perspective.

Most of the time, I try to pan from the camera’s perspective to keep the audio simple and consistent. However, I’ve found a few ways in which a character’s perspective might be more suitable and entertaining. For example, in my Heavy Metal project, there’s a scene in which a giant bat flies past the main character while staying in the center of the shot. Visually, we can see that the bat is moving left to right but the audio would contrast with this if it was to be panned from the camera’s perspective. From the character’s perspective, however, we could get panning audio that nicely fits with the visual.

However, when it comes to background/atmosphere tracks, I wasn’t sure whether to pan them from the camera’s perspective or the character’s perspective. I couldn’t find much information on the subject but I did find a forum with a similar question (StackExchange, 2011). In it, a person said that automated panning could distract a viewer entirely and that, unless it’s meant to help give listeners clues on a change in location, it’s best to just pan it center with an equal stereo spread.

References

https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/3392/best-approaches-to-panning-backgrounds-when-camera-angles-change?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa