Sound

     Sound!  It sounds (please forgive the terrible pun) so easy doesn’t it?  You just point the camera at the subject and the on board microphones will pick up exactly what you want and it will sound wonderful on the finished video.  Well if you believe that one then I have a story for you about a beautiful girl living in the woods with seven midgets and there’s nothing going on between them.  So
just how important is good sound quality to a movie or video.  Well prior to 1929 motion pictures were all silent and then “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson debuted.  Within a year there wasn’t a studio left producing silent movies.  As a matter of fact Howard Hughes epic production about WW I aerial combat “Hell’s Angels” was originally shot as a silent movie, but when Hughes saw the reaction of movie going audiences to the so called “Talkies”  he scrapped the silent version and re-shot the entire movie with sound.

     You could go on and on recalling scenes from movies that were profoundly influenced by their sound tracks, but in my humble opinion the reigning and all time champ has to be Steven Spielberg.  When directing “Jaws” he was saddled with a mechanical shark that looked awful and rarely worked, anyone else would have started exploring alternate career fields, but not Spielberg.  He merely went to his music composer “John Williams” and pleaded on his hands and knees for Williams to come up with something that he could use to signal the shark’s presence without really seeing the ravaging carnivore.  Some time later Williams ran the now famous two note shark music by Spielberg and he laughed at it, but gave Williams the go ahead anyhow and of course the rest is history.  Spielberg learned an important lesson from this and from that point on he demanded things from his composers and sound technicians that sometimes seemed impossible to do.  Examples like the water glass vibration in “Jurassic Park”, or the sound of the humongous bolder rolling down the cave after Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and of course who could forget the musical conversation with the aliens in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
     So, what can the low budget video producer do to compete with Hollywood giants like Spielberg, and the legendary John Ford, well actually a great deal.  You see when Spielberg made “Jaws” the internet didn’t exist, but today low budget film makers can download sound bites and music for next to nothing or even free.  There are any number of sound editors available on the internet that were unheard of just a few years ago.  You can access everything from total sound editing programs to voice altering software that allow you to use one original voice to portray a myriad of characters.  Sound effects are so abundant on the web that I don’t think you could come up with a need that couldn’t be filled.  Even the age old nemesis, background music is available from sources like Music 2 Hues, and Partners in Rhyme for a very reasonable fee.

     Now for the catch, all these things that I have mentioned are great, but they can not take the place of getting good original recordings.  The microphones that come on cameras will do in a pinch, but in general they lack good audio quality.  Almost without exception you will have to use an auxiliary microphone and recorder for achieving any sort of good sound quality.  Boom mics and remote mics that reside just out of the cameras vision are historically the best for recording sound in most cases where you are filming people.

     Outdoor filming presents another whole batch of problems ranging from airplanes flying overhead to the ever present wind noise.  A lot of this can be overcome with so called “Dead Cat” silencers but if the wind is too high I have found that it’s better to just postpone filming. Last but certainly not least, you will need to become proficient at what is called “dubbing” which is the process of synchronizing separate audio recordings with original video footage.
     I don’t have time in this blog to go into the multitudinous array of sound recording devices available on the market, or the many techniques concerning their use but I do know that a very famous director once said “get the sound right and the rest will fall into place on its own.”