Pages

Thursday, 27 February 2014

Research into Recording Ambient Sounds and Dialogue

Recording Ambient Sounds
Ambient recordings are the background noise in everyday life that we don't respond to or notice, an example what be conversations in a classroom or footsteps in a hallway. Basically its the environment at work in audio form.
An example would be in the hunger games: catching fire, in this there are a variation of city and jungle scenes,  so a lot of ambient noises are required to make each scene area more immerse and realistic without it being ruined by the differ of location.

An example of this would be in the jungle when there are tree's swaying in the wind, frogs croaking in the forest, birds calling, wet muddy footsteps when the characters are moving on foot. Also, in the city the ambient noises would be very different, for example; there would a humming of electricity and lights around, people possible talking in streets, concrete footsteps in rooms and city buildings, doors opening and closing etc., there are many more examples of this, ambient noises are just the environment you are in.
In a film some scenes maybe be hard cuts, which is when a scene changes location without a transition, this can be bad for the mixing of ambient sounds because transitioning from one environment to the other without a moment or two to smoothly add them together looks bad because the sudden cut would totally disorientate the viewer make the audio jump, it completely ruins the experience. It also looks rough so audio mixers try to avoid using hard cuts because it looks rough and unprofessional. With transitions this can be avoided because it gives a smooth feeling and allows the viewer to understand that there is going to be a location change without the sudden cut. It's best to record on set of the environment because when you record on set you can get the sound that you need from the audio and you can rely on it instead of going with sound that doesn't sound like the real thing
Some examples of this are; fire, its better to record a real fire, particularly the fire that is being shown on screen, because fire can have so many different sounding variations, it could be a roaring fire you need or a forest fire not all sounds are going to be what you want for the sequence so by recording it yourself the sound is authentic and realistic.
Recording Dialogue
Recording dialogue can be extremely difficult because many factors make recording crisp nice dialogue hard to achieve, even harder without good equipment. When recording on set there are a lot of sounds going on around the camera so ambient noises would be conflicting with the dialogue making it hard to hear, so every element of audio needs to be individually recorded.
You could record the dialogue independently and then place it on top of the clip, however this can be difficult due to the lip syncing might no match. A problem with dubbing the dialogue is that it can sound very odd at times and doesn't sound like its from the scene so it is a hard skill to obtain.
Another way of recording dialogue is to have a microphone on the person's body,but this can get muffled in walking scenes or sound like the character is too close or too far from the camera.
The importance of Ambient noises in dialogue scenes is so important because the sounds make the conversation flow much easier and gaps of silence are filled in and make it more smoother when shots changed and when someone new speaks.
the best way to get around recording dialogue is by using an external boom microphone to pick up the dialogue.


http://www.askaudiomag.com/articles/tips-recoding-sound-location
http://www.lavideofilmmaker.com/location-sound-recording/location-sound-recording-shotgun-microphone-placement.html
http://library.creativecow.net/cowdog/ADR/1

0 comments:

Post a Comment