Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers

Michael Tierno

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000060690
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Technologie et ingénierie
• Thema: Ingénierie de l'acoustique

This book covers everything you need to know to master the fundamentals of location sound recording and postproduction sound in a comprehensive one-stop guide.

This user-friendly book provides real world situations to analyze the many kinds of location recording configurations and postproduction scenarios and offers easy-to-adopt, budget-conscious solutions to some of the most common issues that arise when working with sound. Chapters cover the theory of sound, preproduction with a sound emphasis, microphone selection, testing equipment, how to boom and mix on set, synchronization and time code, and editing sound while doing a picture cut in a traditional picture software platform. Additionally, the book discusses bringing a project into a Digital Audio Workstation and explores basic sound design, dialogue editing, Automated Dialogue Replacement, Foley, sound effects, music for film, re-recording the final mix, and outputting sound to finish a project. Accompanying examples allow readers the opportunity to try out the various techniques and drills on location, in postproduction, or both.

Aimed at students, early career and independent filmmakers, as well as those considering a vocation in location and postproduction sound, Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers makes achieving great sound attainable for all, and is an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to better understand the art of film sound.

1 The modern filmmaker

You’re directing your first film, and tomorrow is the first day of shooting. Maybe it’s a student film, maybe it’s an indie feature, or even a calling card short. Or perhaps you’re an actor making your own web series pilot, or you are a special effects artist wanting to show off your craft in the context of a specific narrative. Whatever the end product that you are making, I assume you are reading this book because you don’t know a lot about sound, nor do any of your associates, but you are sensing it might be very important to your project. In fact, you might be starting to realize that both location and postproduction sound are crucial to the success of your project, but you don’t know where to begin to make sure it’s done well.

You’ve come to the right place. Take comfort in the fact that you are not alone as a filmmaker faced with this problem. But you very well might be alone dealing with this situation on your project. So I’m here to help you through the sound-producing aspect of your film, not merely the science and theory about sound (although that’s going to be part of it). My approach is to offer you practical information to help you apply some of the theory you will read about, in an effort to help you focus on the key actions and practices you must take to ensure great sound quality on your film projects.

I’ll give you a way to make ready an environment for creating good sound on a set and in postproduction and show you ways to bring whoever is doing sound on your film up to speed. And if you are lucky enough to be working with a seasoned professional, this book will help you learn to communicate with him or her. To achieve this elevated level of sound production, you don’t need to know a lot of theory. But you do need to understand a few fundamentals and practice them over and over until you are fluent with sound technique so you can execute these principles on a set, in postproduction, and/or teach someone how to execute them for you.

When you found this book, online or in a bookstore, you will quite possibly have seen that there are many other books on film sound. Some contain a lot of technical information, some are useful for shooting and posting sound, and many would be useful if you were going to redesign your own sound recorder from scratch. Other books are for those who have their sights set on becoming sound professionals, and some talk about the physics of sound. All of these are worthwhile texts, and I’ve included some of these types of information in this book, but just enough to give you what you need to know in order to produce great sound for your film.

That said, I don’t want to confuse anyone. Location sound recording, sound editing, and sound mixing are rigorous art forms, employing skilled artists as talented and professional as great cinematographers and (often lifesaving!) editors. If you strive to work in the sound disciplines specifically, this book can help you, but I’m writing more for a filmmaker faced with a common scenario: you have to produce a film and don’t have the budget for skilled sound crew. My task isn’t to minimize the role of professional sound practices, but to expose you to what these practices are and help you find ways to incorporate them into your filmmaking regardless of the budget. My aim is to distill knowledge from these masters into precise workable information so you can produce your films with great sound and realize your project the way you’ve been dreaming of!

It’s likely you’ll have a host of willing participants to help in many filmmaking departments – except for sound. You might have people begrudgingly willing to do sound for you, but they aren’t excited about it the way they are about participating in other departments. Sound always seems to be an afterthought for independent filmmakers.

This deficiency in sound often extends to how filmmakers prepare for shoots. I’ve seen students do elaborate testing for cinematography for their films that includes storyboarding, shooting stills, bringing the camera to the set with actors for blocking, lighting, wardrobe, furniture, available light, and preparation for visual effects. But these same diligent filmmakers don’t test for sound. Filmmakers should always bring a recorder to the test site and “roll tape” to record location sound as part of any preproduction testing. When prepping any film, go to your shooting environments and test record sound. You’d be amazed how it will help you prep your shoot. When I was an undergraduate, I filmed in my childhood home. There was a highway across the street. When we began rolling sound, we noticed how loud the traffic from the highway was. Now, if we had had a professional sound recordist, they would’ve figured out how to mitigate the noise. But living in the house all those years had caused me to “tune out” the background noise. The Nagra recorder I used, however, was merciless. It heard and recorded everything.

TECH TALK – A prominent playwright-turned-Oscar^®-winning film writer/director I know was interviewed, and he stated that he wished he knew more of the technical lingo about filmmaking so he could more easily talk to his crew and give them directions. As a writer/director, you might know the language of acting, writing, and directing, but some of the technical aspects of filmmaking might not be ready at hand for you to discuss. This book will help you understand the fundamentals of sound as well as be able to talk to and direct your sound crew.

Speaking of machines, it is important to realize that we as humans tend to “tune out” noise and have selective “hearing.” You must always be aware of this trait so you’re not deceived and can learn to override this skill and record good location dialogue. Your ears are selective in the same way that your naked eye is selective. But machines like cameras and digital sound recorders are not. They are stupid – and at the same time comprehensive. You must learn how to listen to dialogue through headphones because your ears will deceive you in this way, too. You must listen with an ear toward knowing whether or not the recording machine is picking out the dialogue in a usable fashion, and this skill is not intuitive. It is a skill that has to be learned and practiced, which coincides with understanding what headphones do to dialogue while also knowing the headphones are cutting off your naked ears’ skill at sifting through noise to pick out desired sound. This is why sound crew must always wear headphones. Knowing how to monitor location dialogue through headphones, however, takes a lot of practice.

Sadly, many filmmakers on a budget only pay attention to sound when it’s bad or not usable, most likely when it’s too late. And fixing sound in postproduction is no joke. It’s difficult to do it right, especially on a budget and with actors not used to “looping” (recording ADR or Automated Dialogue Replacement). That is, if you can even round up your actors again, not to mention matching their looping with their onset performances. Many filmmakers will not budget for sound postproduction funds and will not give ample time for the sound editorial process. How many times have I experienced students making thesis films who spend months editing then turn around and try to “fix sound” in a day! This wrong thinking is due partially to the fact that the ease of digital filmmaking prevents us from understanding sound as a separate process in itself, one that deserves the same attention and focus as cinematography, much as it did in the old days. But more old analog film war stories later.

So if sound is, as George Lucas believes, 50 percent of the effect of the film, why isn’t it treated as such in low-budget projects? Festival programmers have told me time and again that bad sound is the easiest disqualifier of submitted films. That’s why the goal in low-budget filmmaking shouldn’t be to “grab sound” in any old way with the thought of “fixing it later.” The goal in location sound should be to create an environment where the sound recordist is an active crew member rather than a passive technician. This approach will feed nicely into the second part of the sound equation (there’s three), the sound postproduction process, which actually begins on set and extends into sound editing. That the sound edit process is a separate process in itself is something many filmmakers don’t get. And finally, the third phase of the process, the final mix, is a concept many filmmakers know nothing about, yet it is vital to a film’s success. All of these will be covered and demonstrated in the follow pages, including offering filmmakers ways of practicing with accompanying materials.

Maybe now it’s time to discuss the cringeworthy term “audio.” Many of you are used to the concept of “audio” and the idea of “audio capture” rather than of “sound recording.” Am I merely picking a fight over semantics? No! Audio is just that “on” switch on a camera. It’s an add-on, an afterthought, and it suggests passivity on the part of the recordist. We have a course in our Film and Video Production area at East Carolina University called “Cinematography and Audio Capture,” much to my chagrin. At the time of the course’s creation, there was no stand-alone sound course, so sound got rolled into the camera class. This leads to (or enables) “audio” recording to be treated as a passive endeavor rather than an active filmmaking job for a crew member to contribute. Sound recordists, sound editors, and sound mixers must be active cocreators in a film for it to be successful. Thinking of sound as “passive audio recording” is pervasive in a lot of low-budget filmmaking, so it’s good to start thinking that the sound recording (and posting) in your film should require the respect and attention that cinematography gets. If you don’t do so, you’re headed for failure.

There’s another explanation for the hierarchy of picture over sound. Films conspicuously have a “look” to them, but it’s harder to think of films that have a “sound.” If you research, you’ll see that some great cinematic films have specific kinds of sound design, and there are notable sound masters with whom you can identify because of how they handled their soundtracks. David Lynch comes to mind on the sound/directing side, and Walter Murch does on the sound design side. Yet, when we think of a film we liked or disliked, we tend to recall visuals before sound. It’s how our brains work; we’re visual creatures.

That’s because sound is invisible. You can measure sound, but you do not see sound, and sound technique is often meant to be “invisible” to the audience, as is most editing in commercial cinema. In fact, as you’ll see in our sections on dialogue editing, painstaking work is done to keep attention away from the dialogue track and the changing shots, and a lot of work is done to make shot changes (and by extension) microphone changes inconspicuous, otherwise you’ll be taken out of the story. If you notice the dialogue track as a recorded element in a film, the dialogue editor, and in some ways the sound recordist, have failed.

On a related academic note, there’s a branch of film theory called “suture,” which postulates that Hollywood movies are designed to “suture” the viewer into the psychological experience of the film so that the audience forgets itself and is “entertained.” Audience members, myself included, pay to hand over our brains to movies for the time the film runs; we want the filmmakers to suture us into the experience. If bad sound takes us out of the experience, we become bored, distracted, and frustrated. There are instances when sound is designed to call attention to itself, to be a “character” in the film, or to be mixed conspicuously, as in the case of Jean Luc Godard, who sometimes mixes his films so that even though a scene is indoors it sounds like we’re outside listening as the traffic noise is loudly intermixed with indoor room tone. Sometimes Godard will even turn off the sound completely for no apparent reason. These techniques cause the film’s sound to bring attention to the artifice of the film itself and takes us out of the fictional experience of the story to remind us we’re watching an artificial world, a technique called distanciation. But the fact that he’s turning off the sound in the middle of a scene to break the spell of the film underscores how important sound design is to the overall magic of the cinematic effect on an audience.

Toward the end of this book, we’ll talk about different ways sound can be used as a character and used to produce the many different effects just described, to go beyond using sound to invisibly serve the story. But you must first understand the basics of how sound serves picture and story and how to make sound invisible to the viewer before you learn to make it conspicuous or “visible.”

Let’s return to the issue of why sound isn’t treated with the seriousness that cinematography is. Send ten cinematographers to shoot a scene, and you will get ten distinct looks/shots, etc. Send ten location recordists to shoot the same scene, and there might be variances in how they record the dialogue, but the objective would be the same for all ten recordists: come back with clean intelligible dialogue with good signal-to-noise ratio, recorded “on axis.” Period.

TECH TALK – To record sound “on axis” means you record it directly into the front capsule of the microphone to ensure the full range of vocal frequencies get recorded.

The sound editorial and mix process of the scene to follow will have conspicuous differences in how they turn out, depending on the artist doing the sound editing and mixing. But, as a whole, the differences will be fewer and less conspicuous than the different ways cinematographers handle a scene. When a cinematographer shoots a film, his or her visual style is immediately apparent to anyone who screens the dailies. But a location sound recordist is just recording a foundational sound element that will become a strand in a postproduction process, a raw piece (dialogue) that will be a key part of final mix. The recordist has no other goal but to record this very critical element of the film correctly, and the results won’t vary much from one recordist to another. But if the recordist gets it wrong, he or she has seriously compromised the quality of the end product, ruining 50 percent of the movie’s effect, the sound. And with bad sound, you have no movie!

At first, good location recording technique is counterintuitive to untrained ears. And the concept of “audio capture” has hurt filmmakers because “capturing” infers that the craft of recording sound is passive. “Audio” is a term that should not be used by serious filmmakers because “audio” is something I record at a wedding or my softball game. There are no Oscars^® for “best audio” or “best captured audio.” Most film students I’ve taught don’t care as much about sound as they should. It’s an afterthought, a burden, a grunt job. It’s not completely their fault; many film academics don’t know how to give sound its due attention. When I was making the web series The Smart Rocks, I asked a student to operate boom, and he complained that he wasn’t going to “be a grunt.” It was as if I asked him to sweep the floors! The truth is that booming is a craft that should be treated with as much respect as cinematography.

FOSSIL RECORD – As a teenager, I worked for Magno Sound in New York City. This production house did a lot of postproduction sound, including Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Manhattan. I worked in the sound transfer department. Try and imagine what this was like … there were rooms where transfer technicians would take magnetic sound recordings (¼ magnetic tape) and rerecord or transfer it to 35 mm sound stock so editing could commence. It was an expensive process and it took time and a skilled transfer technician to do it right. I would sit in the messenger pen and listen to Woody Allen dialogue being transferred take after take. It was exciting. But my point is that there was something about the entire process of analog filmmaking, especially how it created the need for separate, special attention to sound production, that made you automatically take it all the more seriously. This tedious workflow, along with shooting negative film and waiting for it to be developed by a lab (not to mention the expense of it all), was a part of the rigor that went into making a film that is missing today. It’s easier to make films now, and that’s mostly great, but with this ease of production the care you should take with the sound process is often overlooked. The task of this book will be to help guide you in mitigating this deficiency and to focus on creating an environment to produce great sound in your film.

So back to the film you’re about to shoot. You definitely won’t have enough time to do what you need to do with sound in the traditional way. You might have a wide variety of levels of experiences in your crew members, different levels of actors, good and bad locations (not to mention ones you’re stealing), and on various days different crew operating sound, even at times using different sound equipment. None of this is ideal but none of it means you have to come away with bad sound. But you, the filmmaker, must be in control and have oversight of the sound element in your film, probably more than seasoned master directors with funded Hollywood films have to worry about, because they will have monster sound recordists on their shoots and a skilled, well-paid sound postproduction team to finish. And this control that you as the filmmaker must have starts with working sound into preproduction, all the way through to the final mix. You can produce great sound on your film as a low-budget filmmaker, and I’m here to help you understand how to look at and approach film sound differently and bring it more front and center stage without losing focus on everything else you’re trying to concentrate on to achieve your vision.

To be a filmmaker these days is not to be only a director because usually you’re wearing too many different hats to just direct. Don’t get me wrong, you still have to direct … you just have to do a lot of other things as well. Today’s low-budget filmmakers are producer/director/editor/sound editors and mixers – in other words, consummate filmmakers: they have to get the production ball rolling, direct the film, and wind up being the sole filmmaker having to finish the postproduction process including sound. It’s literally 50 jobs rolled into one. But it doesn’t have to feel like 50 jobs if you have a realistic map of the process, designed with the independent filmmaker in mind.

Most films we go to see are made by teams of skilled artists and technicians and the director functions more like the conductor of an orchestra. As an independent filmmaker you might find that you’ll have your hands filled with every aspect of filmmaking in a way a Hollywood director doesn’t.

For example, picture editing in today’s modern digital world involves knowing a lot about sound and, in fact, doing some baseline sound editing. I spoke to one picture editor who said that films often come in with some of the sound editing work already done. This can include setting up the dialogue tracks, the cross fades, etc. Panning might be done as well as equalization.

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