“What’s the big deal, it’s only sound”
A big problem that many film makers run into (myself included) is we focus on the camera equipment and the lighting and the story (hopefully) but one area that is constantly neglected and puts people right off your film is bad sound.
Good sound people don’t notice. Bad sound is noticed straight away and destroys our viewing pleasure because suddenly we can’t focus on anything but the bad sound.
For my independent short film “I Did” I knew that sound was going to be something I would struggle with. We had a very dedicated skeleton crew but many of them were first timers (we all have to start somewhere) so I was juggling many hats during our 3-day shoot.
To save myself a hell of a lot of agony down the line, I decided to hire out a lot of sound gear (much to the horror of the bank account) from the lovely people at hireacamera.com
Sound Equipment We Used
Zoom H6 x1
Seinhessier, G3 Lavaliere Microphones x4
Rode Link Filmmaker Kit x1
Rode NTG2 x1 & Rode NTG1 x1
Zoom H4N with Fethead and Fethead Phantom.
We shot “I Did” on a Canon 6D and a 7D Mark II so any sound captured from them would just be scratch track audio. For the first two days of shooting we mic’d up the actors with the 4 lavalieres and had them all feeding into a Zoom H6. I knew the preamps from the H6 were lightyears better than the old H4N so we set the levels to around 6 and came away with amazingly clean audio all round.
We hid the lavalieres beneath originally using skin safe tape and felt for the first two days. This helped to minimise any ruffling of clothes against the mics.
Then we had the NTG2 feeding into the H4N with a Fethead. A Fethead essentially provides 20db of clean gain so I didn’t need to push the levels on the H4N anywhere near as high as I used to Normally I would set the levels at 60/100. with the Fethead I could set them at 15/100 and get better crisper audio which ignored the preamps for the most part.
Why the Rode Filmmaker kit then? Well this was for our 3rd day of shooting. The 3rd day was a reshoot of two scenes that happened 3 months on from our original two day shoot and I couldn’t invest the same amount again to hire the same equipment. I had however invested in a Rode Filmmaker kit for my own work and it has a wonderful feature of adding +10db and +20b which again gives me the option to override the preamps on my H4N again. In my opinion the quality of the sound from the Rode Filmmaker Kit compared to the Seinhessier G3 was as good as if not better.
Running dual sound and recording this way was very beneficial. It meant everyone had their own audio track plus any lines that were dropped were picked up on the boom.
Capturing boom sound was something I learnt very early on to do in my film making journey, to get the boom mic as close as I could to the talent with dropping into the frame or “finding my edge” was obsessively something I wanted to get right.
Whenever I can’t get a boom operator, I stick the boom on a boom lighting stand, keep the movement to a minimum and you have a solid sound solution.
“More to sound than dialogue”
So I’ve talked a lot about dialogue recording. What about diagetic sounds? Foley?
The one thing I will say to anyone is record as much as you can on the day. Footsteps. Touching props. Ruffling clothes. The lot. Why? Because it sounds better recording all the sounds on location recorded with the same mic. It’ll also save you a tonne of time later on.
That’s not to say I didn’t record Foley because I did later on but I saved myself a lot of time in post-production recording sounds on the day.
“What’s the point?”
As the title suggests, good sound is sound people don’t notice. Bad sound is noticed straight away and never ignored once heard.
I’ve seen so many indie films and trailers and web series where film makers have just neglected sound. Behind the scenes videos revealing the microphone about 6ft away from the actors face or heaven forbid, just using the inbuilt mic on the camera.
Neglecting sound is a sure fire way to destroy your films chances of being enjoyed by an audience before they have had a chance to invest in the characters or the story.
If you’re not a master at mixing or balancing sound, then find someone who can help you or watch a few tutorials on how to balance sound (at the very least).
“Would I do it this way again?”
The answer is yes and no because in the year since filming “I Did”, I’ve learnt a lot more about sound and how to mix it and how to get it right. With “I Did” I was very fortunate that I never had to do any ADR because of having that boom as a back-up if the lavaliere’s didn’t quite get the line right. Plus having brilliant actors who delivered every line on queue and on the punch line every time does also help.
I’m now a Canon C100 user which has built in XLR’s so whether I’ll use dual sound again for a project will depend on what the project is but I’ve become very reliant on my C100’s audio capabilities and now seldom use my H4N.
While I wouldn’t hire the G3’s anymore (because of the ease of use of the Rode Filmmaker kit’s) I would still say to every film maker invest in your sound, invest in your actors and invest in your production design and invest in catering (heavily with good filling meals and not junk food).
What I will continue to use and have done for a long time is use a program called Plural Eyes, which works directly inside of Premiere Pro and takes about a minute to sync everything up. In the case of ‘I Did’ it spent about 2 minutes syncing all of the footage and didn’t find anything it couldn’t sync. There is a link to find out more about Plural Eyes at the end of this post.
Check out the trailer for my short film “I Did” below.
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Links:
Fethead
Hireacamera
Rode
Plural Eyes
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