Indie Film Sound Guide
Episode 0: What to get better sound?
The Indie Film Sound Guide is a step by step series teaching you all of the basics to achieve better audio for your films. This includes preparation, recording, and mixing.
The Scene
The guide uses a scene shot specifically for the guide, and follows a proper workflow from start to finish. This is everything you will need to know to start recording great sound for your short film!
Episode 1: Position is Key
The position of your microphone is the most important element to achieve good quality sound.
Episode 2: Dialogue is Priority
There’s a lot of sound going on during a shoot. You might be wondering what you should be recording first.
Episode 3: Minimise Noise
As the sound recordist, you have the power of the microphone and headphones. If you can hear any unwanted noise, such as the air conditioning unit, a clock ticking, or a plane flying overhead, you need to speak up and get it shut off.
Episode 4: Gain & Room Tone
Most audio devices will have a way of manually choosing how sensitive your microphone is to sound. But where do you set your levels?
Episode 5: Wild Takes
Let’s talk a bit about recording sound effects for your film. In particular, wild takes!
Episode 6: Foley Art
Foley art is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that we are going to mix back into the film. For the scene we are using, these are things like clothing movement, Frank tapping on the table, coffee cups and saucers clattering, and hats coming on and off.
Episode 7: Organise and Sync
So you’ve finished shooting your film. You have a bunch of cards you need to unload onto the computer which contain the picture and sound elements for your movie. But before we start editing the footage and mixing the sound, let’s get all these files into a clear and precise structure, and synchronise the production audio to the shots.
Episode 8: Mixing
In this video we talk about what you have to do next once you have finished editing your film and you have a picture lock. This is when you start to make the sound of your film sound just as good as the look of your film. We are by separating each actors dialogue with in Adobe Audition, and set there level between -6dB and -24dB. Adding room tone will help to fill in any silence between dialogue.
Behind The Scenes
Now the Indie Film Sound Guide is over we wanted to share our thoughts about what went well, and how we messed up.