but has to be right.
With all due respect, shooting to dialog, even vo, rather than on camera, can effect the visuals, if your not 100% prepared.
Saying that, don't be afraid of sound, embrace it as a part of production equal to lighting and framing.
It all is in the direction and final anticipation. Most photographers look at sound as a necessary evil, most directors believe dialog is the reason for being there.
What seems like the easy answer is to hire a sound tech and I agree to some point, depending on the specialists.
Even with the best sound techs in the world the visual crew is there to work in concert with the sound crew. It has to be a two way street.
To me nothing looks more lazy than to see action in a scene and then when it comes time for the dialog, all the actors stop, stand still, say their lines then go back to action.
We work with sound techs, assistant sound techs and have actually done it ourself.
Out of dozens of sound techs there is probably only one I've worked with that wasn't obtrusive and was very, very good. Good is great, less than good sucks, no way around it.
If we do it ourself, we have 4 Senhauser radio Lavs, two audio-technica dual channel lavs and always use the Seinhuser's as the quality is equal, but the technicas are more difficult and larger to set up.
One thing I have to stress, even if your using a sound tech is be totally prepared.
1. Have sound blankets (furniture pads will work).
If you have noise coming from one direction hanging a pad on rollers like flying a vertical silk will kill a lot of bad ambient sound,
especially in a room with bad acoustics, that bounce.
2. If you use radio lavs, buy the rubber straps that go around the subjects chest and the little pads that go between the skin to mic to under the clothes.
This will stop that skin chaffing sound and cut down on the mic rubbing on a blouse/shirt.
3. If not Lavs Sony makes some very good inexpensive hard wired mics that can be directional or broad and work very well with good sound suppression.
Just keep the mic isolated with rubber from any mounting arm or clamp and always use solid tubes, like a C stand arm, or a boom, because solid produces less resonance.
4. Also if the subject is walking we have rubber sticky pads for the shoes that work wonders for walking on hard floors and should be part of your kit.
4. A good recorder works well and they don't cost much, though you obviously have no visual reference.
To me visual reference is important because a session with real people can be difficult for the subject if you cut every time there is an issue, because it implies to the subject they did something wrong.
I usually keep running and always give the subject(s) positive direction saying " that was great let's try . . ." . When you clapboard every take, you can see the subject tighten up as you go rolling, speeding, mark, action.
5. Have an assistant collect ALL mobile phones and turn them OFF. Everybody says, they turn their phone off, but they never do and nothing screws a shoot like a phone ringing.
In America everyone chews gum. All gum goes in the rubbish bin.
6. Keep a fresh water bottle for all the speaking subjects. Nothing is more non fixable that a scratchy voice and have the subject take a sip between sets. It also calms the subject.
7. The line Quiet On Set is the most important word for the day. Keep all background speaking to fake talking (no noise) and put that in later in post as foley sound.
8. Foley sound is very important. Never think a car door slamming, or background dialog or anything happening while your working will sound professional during the take.
9. Just like shooting footage, you can never have too much foley sound options.
10. Be prepared for looping the voices, if the location sound doesn't work. This can seem like overkill, but finding a small room, with some blankets and a set of headphones and with a small lcd and headphones for the subject they can get very close to looping the dialog, even subjects that have never been on camera.
This means you have to have the imagery available and obviously a sound only recorder won't do this, but there are options. Few people want to loop, consequently few people get great sound on challenging locations.
11. Buy two sets of headphones. Very expensive which have rich deep sound, but also suppress a lot of issues like a small hum, or echo. I use a cheap set of white panasonic htx7 I 90% of the time, because they're not rich and deep, but they pick up everything and I mean everything.
They saved me by letting me hear a hum (which was a hmi ballast on mains packing up) where the sound tech never heard it.
12. If you hire and on set tech, make sure you give him/her an idea of how you work, the time involved per setup, if you shoot multi-cam, or wide, etc. etc. etc. ALL sound techs will tell you something can't be done. It's their nature and they want to capture pure sound (which is why they are hired).
But for every time I've had a tech say it can't be done, in the end they always get it. Sometimes it's just difficult and usually takes some level of compromise from the director/dp to the sound tech.
11. At the end of the edit, hire a sound sweetener/tech. The difference of great post mixer is just amazing and not that expensive and will up the level of your production 100%.
12. Now this is a wildcard and nobody on this forum will probably agree, but one way to speed production is to buy an old (but in good shape) Canon xl1 SD camera and the Canon xlr adapter.
This camera had one of the best on camera mics and sound preamps. In fact one of Hollywood's largest film studios still uses the xl1 for some foley sound.
The beauty of placing a camera like an xl1 is you have a visual reference of the take, even if you use pluraleyes to sync up, having a visual saves a lot of time in post workflow and makes sorting, scrub and cut.
The xl1 shoots tape and most people go ugh . . . tape, but tape is reliable if you know how to set it up and collecting it is a breeze in old fcp7, or other non linear editors, even an older i movie.
Or find a good smaller eng style camera with great preamps and adjustments that shoots to cards.
13. Sorry for the long post, but most of this I have learned the hard way.
IMO
BC
