Sound Detail

As promised to Helge, a long time supporter of our blogging exploits, I have been talking to Peter Brill (pictured left) about our sound and some of the technical details that people might be interested in.

Peter will be the head of the sound department on location, in charge of getting all the necessary location sound for the film.


The brief exchange went like this:

C: I am about to write a post about the sound department and just wondered if you would be happy to comment and suggest some inclusions in the piece.
e.g.  what do you record on to these days, do you sync up with a timecode generator or is the board still the most brilliantly simple and effective way of achieving sync sound, how many people are in your team, how do you relate to other members of the team - camera dept and editing dept in particular.

 

P: I will record all location sound to idented WAV files, with time of day time-code, on to a 40 Gb hard disk recorder, delivering to the Editor on 4 Gb Compact Flash cards.

This way I maintain safety back-ups of everything recorded.

I shall confirm with Savalas that my recorder is set to their preferred formats for post-production work.

The simplest and easiest way to sync the sound to picture is still, thankfully, the old faithful clapper board, so long as one can both see and hear those two bits of wood banging together! The board clapping tells everyone in the vicinity of the film set to be still and shut up!

An ideal location sound crew would be 3 people, with the mixer concentrating on acquiring the cleanest dialogue, effects and atmospheres to match the pictures, reducing unwanted noises by whatever means, and through a mixing desk, saving to a reliable recording medium.

The audio is also transmitted from the desk to various members of the crew with radio headsets. The sound mixer logs all the shots with notes for the Editor, detailing and identing all "wild" tracks recorded without picture for use in the sound editing and track-laying process.

The boom operator quietly concentrates on getting the microphone into the ideal position to capture the actors speaking clearly, maintaining the perspective that matches the lens, but without causing shadows or letting the mic dip into the frame. Not an easy task!

The sound assistant helps route cables, replace batteries in headsets, and generally look after all the equipment. When radio mics need to be used, they must be concealed from the camera lens but still maintain optimum speech quality without any clothing rustle from the actor. The sound assistant and costume department normally take care of this. Extraneous unwanted noises are invariably the ones we bring with us, be they squeaking asthmatic cameras, humming and buzzing lighting ballasts, rustling waterproof coats, mobile phones left on, unit vehicles needing to move just as action is called, the list is endless............but all can be anticipated and almost silenced!
 
Enough waffle for now Colin.

Many thanks Peter.  I hope this is helpful to people out there trying to make stuff.  I am often surprised to find that most people don't know what a clapper board is actually for or that sound is recorded completely separately.  We are obviously going to be using fairly sophisticated equipment but the principles would be just the same even if you were using rudimentary kit.  Robert Rodriguez recorded all the sound for El Mariachi completely wild on an old Marrantz tape recorder.  As soon as they had finished shooting a scene he would ask the actors to gather round and repeat the dialogue into the little mic as close to the way they said it during their camera performance and then he would sync it up later.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.  He just cut round the problems when they came up.  His book, Rebel Without a Crew is fantastically inspiring as wellas full of helpful practical info.

If you really are nuts for sound then you should also read anything with Walter Murch in it and you should try and see a doc made by Vincent Hunter, the Colour of Sound.  I'll go and find out a bit more about that and how one might get to see it.