Sound is broken up into key elements. These elements include dialogue, music, foley, sound FX and Atmos.
Dialogue – This will be recorded on the day of shooting with the Marantz and gun Mic. This is probably the most important element to the soundtrack of the documentary. Along with the camera it captures the feelings and opinions of the characters we film.
Music – Music can add emotion to manipulate the audience’s feelings. It helps fill the sound scape and make our piece more interesting.
Foley – Foley is added sound to enhance the on screen world’s sound elements. It allows us more time to record key sound that we may wish to emphasize on screen.
Sound FX – These sounds are added in editing and they are sounds that we are potentially unable to collect ourselves. These may include explosions, crashes ect.
Atmos – this is recorded on location and acts as a bedrock for all other sound to rest on. It also acts as a plaster for any damaged or poor sound.
Sound -
5 Key
Elements
The Below image gives an idea of a complex soundscape for a 15 minute radio drama. It contains all five key sound elements.
Mixing Voices in Audition -
This is a very informative video from you tube and shows some skills and techniques I use as a sound editor. When recording vocals for the documentary or overdubbing when the original track is of in sufficient quality we try collect the cleanest sound possible. When mixing vocals most people use several FX to clean up the track. These may include Noise reduction software, EQ’s and compression.
Something that the video does not speak about is the use of reverberation. I use reverb to set the location of my voice recording. As we try to collect audio that is clean as possible, we don’t have the right level of reverb. I add reverb to make the track seem more realistic. If someone were in a large hall I would add a fairly large reverb. If the setting is a tiny office room I would use a very small reverb.
These are just a few of my thoughts on sound mixing.
When describing the different microphones available we can look at their dynamic ranges, I will use three categories to describe these. They are omnidirectional, Cardioid, and hyper Cardioid.
All three have different uses and there are more types other than these but these are the three extremes of the scale. Omnidirectional picks up sound waves in a 360' range. These types of mics are ideal for use when capturing ambience as they can be placed in the centre of the room an pick up an almost full scope of the room.
Cardioid microphones are the middle of scale as these collect sound from around 180' range, making them directional. This means the microphone needs to be facing the action. These types of mics are great as handheld mics usually found in interviews or singing. By having a smaller range it allows the cancelation of some background sound but still allows for some dynamics for the user as they can pull away from the microphones and the volume/intensity is decreased.
Hyper Cardioid microphones are the other end of the scale. They are completely directional and are required to be facing the action as best as possible. This has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages being, even in noisy locations we can cancel a lot of unwanted sound by targeting our microphone to pick up just a selected sound. This application is great for interviews in loud locations.
The gun mic we use sits somewhere in between Cardioid and Hyper Cardioid. This makes it versatile and a good all round microphone. When capturing ambience however we must choose a good location from which to collect the audio. This is usually at the end of a room or high up looking down onto a room. This is made easier with the use of a boom pole.
- Technical Design -