So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.
I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.
After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.
Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording
I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.
This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.
Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.
Posted In: Journal Entries
Grace Marie
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That’s tough Rob I’m sorry you’re having trouble! But it’s apparent that you are putting a LOT of work into this! I didn’t know there was so much that went into audio recording, I just read the wikipedia article and it is no simple feat. I’m curious, did you use the dummy head method? That idea is so interesting to me. I’m sure that everything will work out fine, I can’t wait to see your finished work!