Lessons

Lesson Info

Filming Gear: Audio

So we're going to start talking about gear right now we're talking about audio gear we're getting more stuff in the next segment eso audio shotgun like obviously this is going to be your workhorse on production this is your main bit of audio we have josh you want to come up and actually help me so I'm not going back and forth we have a sennheiser m k h with us right now uh this guy's pretty do like a vanna white for me it's so nice way have it in a wind sock which we'll talk about in a second uh this is a great mike but it's pretty pricey it's so small to I use mostly I used the road and t g three much more affordable around six hundred dollars range I think but really, really solid mike very comparable to to those mikes I think then you have the love which I'm wearing right now I use a sennheiser g three they're they're great packs I used them sometimes if I'm doing more of a mellow like some like proximity no loves that would have been impossible oneto hide and two it just would have...

sounded like madness because it was a lot of action happening we didn't have someone on set just focusing purely on audio audio so we're just stuck purely with shotgun bike but when you do love your actors for me it's sort of a backup. I'm not usually using that sound it's more of ah, tight sound to the chest. It sounds a little artificial. It doesn't sound quite like me in the room listening to you speak s so I really like the sound of it from a shotgun once again film language we know what it sounds like. You deviate from that. What does that sound different than what I'm used to? Uh, recorder's zoom h foreign, which I heard somebody talk about, right? Yeah, this is great for indie filmmakers. It's a great little recorder, super solid workhorse. I mean, I've worked with audio guys that actually just use this in a mixer. It sounds fantastic. And if you're just running, gunning it by yourself, you can operate it by yourself. It's really easy just to teach someone else real quick. The things they need to know to operate it themselves you can jump into bigger things like the sound of ices system or ah nagar or whatever, but those air that was a pricey you're getting in the thousands of dollars at that point, some accessories we got a boom pole here. Vana vana, can we see the boom pole? This is from road I really like road gear. Once again, not paid to say these things on the boom pole, you have the different risers you're going to set those up before you started seeing you're not really going to start a scene like this, we'll get into that in a second and what's great about a boom pole like this is if you have the xl are on the bottom, and then we moved to the top to plug into your shotgun mic, so you're not getting that extra wire just draping over, which could be real pain. Of course, you could just gaffe that, but once you're moving the rises around, it could be a little bit of the pain, so that's kind of a time safe, then you have windscreen or wind sock we gotta wind sock here, just see that one which we had on for a second, these air great block sound, but if you want to go a step up, you have a blimp or zeppelin, which actually looks like that. And then on top of this, you'll put a dead cat on and I love that it's a dead cat when you say that to people who don't know what it is it's also a great wig, which I wish I could get someone to put on, but I don't think anybody will mess up the hair. But you put this bad boy out. Uh, come here for a second, actually. Real quick, it's no, bigs. You just wear this for me. So you put this on and his head's not going to get any of the sound of the wind. There we go. This is mrs. He looks like he's from bill doesn't mea little bit if I'm very good from whoville. So with this guy and this guy together shotgun mic inside you're getting pretty much no wind on your mike, which is great for proximity. We had it the entire time because we're whipping the mike around like crazy. Cut out all the wind. It was great. Thank you. Nice job. You get paid a little extra uh dead cat we went through and cam audio I use the juice link when I'm using de solares and things of the like you want to go xlr in that's what? The shotgun mikes have a juice linc's gonna have phantom power so you can power that microphone is also has preempts to bring up the sound for the d s a lark is a big problem with the dea. Solares is pre of suck horrible mean any sound direct into the dslr whether you're doing juice, ling just blink or any other way through the eighth inch with some of them the sandwich is really, really bad you're goingto always get a little bit of that noise from the camera and then when you bring it in later and you bring up the audio the noise floor it's just intense so it's always better if you're doing a big project I've never done a big project direct into a dslr always done external I've done smaller stuff with it but always unhappy without sounds monitoring levels you try to getyou levels as high as you can without them peeking so if you have an actor talking just jack that up as high as you can before it's in the danger zone, the reason for that is is you're getting away from that noise floor the further the closer it gets to the noise floor later on post you're gonna want to bring that up again you're bringing up his audio and the noise floor and that's that hiss that you get you're gonna get some really gross hiss with your audio if you do it that way limiters are awesome this is the c one hundred inside the c one hundred it's got some awesome limiters we also have xlr in which we'll do a little bit later but it's got great limiters one of limiter dozes creates a ceiling for your audio so when your actors talking as they get louder it creates a ceiling that beyond the ceiling is the land of peking and that's when you get the distortion in your voice when you set the limiter the camera knows that once the audio gets here it's going to start bringing it down and beyond like screaming at the top of your lungs a camera with great limiters like this one or recording device with great limiters is going to be able to bring that down and save you from peking because if you peek to distort the voice you done there's no going back from that you got to do a tr hate hate eighty are so much uh booming techniques let's get let's get some somebody up here when I come up here real quick let's get somebody else to be a subject once you come up to be a subject not stand right here come over here uh actually uh you stay here you come on over here and you wanna came up for us real quick let's throw it on your shoulder grab this for me when you left handed nice can't see the cabling get this guy on for you I'm just all over you right now they're basically film hugging we are beautiful and then let me get this out the way josh why don't you move the card a little bit wait the vf on get on make sure we get a signal from this guy josh and then just go ahead and come in this area here. And then you got that where's where's, your get your get the zeppelin for him. All right, then. Just frame him up. However, give me like, a medium close up type shot. I consume you in just a touch. You got the tornado pull. Focus there. So you're gonna grab it right on the edge. Here. There you go. So holding this. We'll talk about this a little later, but this ring is awesome because if you hold it right here on the horn, you could just move your hand around it's not going to change the focus. But once you put your fingers right up to there, it's going to change the focus for you, it's. A really, really great rig. Josh, you want to wrangle this cable with pull out a little bit more of a, uh, yeah. That's. Good. All right, why don't you frame him? Right? Right. Want to come over here and go ahead and boom on real quick and what you're gonna do as a boom operator is you're gonna work with your camera up and you're gonna, you know, ask where your frame linus down there, there's your line right there. Once you have your line, you're gonna try to get as close as possible if you're shooting anamorphic or fake anamorphic in you've got the guide's you're gonna be maurine this land like pan up a little bit more gonna beam or in here and you'll have the guides, which means we can bring that mike in because with the guides, you know our frames actually right here, so we're going to use the guys and we can bring this in frame because we know we're not going to see it. So the idea is to get close to the mouth of paul possible have you boom before? Yes, thank you. Making my job difficult. Okay, so he's doing it right instead of rock so we're get were pointing right in front of the mouth like right around here that's where the sound's coming from? Not necessarily directly with the mike uh, some people come on over here and boom from this and so were our lead room's. This way it makes it more difficult for him if he's over here and we have our lead room over there, so really, he wants to be over here he's frames, right? We're gonna come over here that means I could get a lot closer to him sometimes when you hold it down, bring your yeah, there you go so the problem of holding it like this is this this is the first way somebody who has never done before is going gonna hold it moved this way for me good and I'll step in a little bit for me all right see the coal so that's why we don't hold it like that now hold it proper and now we're out so if somebody is holding it like this we're gonna want to get it up there the frame's going to move around a little bit even if it's out of frame all he has to do is just move a little bit we're getting that pole but if we're holding it up here we're not getting that pole so that's the reason we're getting this you'll see a lot of guys who want a drape it over your shoulder but a lot of guys doing that because it does get very tiring as a perfectly fine way to do it but that's basically the basic booming technique is really, really simple the one thing about boom operator you can relax is it's one of the more difficult jobs on set you're doing that all day long it's exhausting so keep that in mind sometimes I'll have one or two boom ops so I can flip him out that way you know it's not too difficult for another way that you could do it is you want to go underneath I love this you just know how to put all this stuff is great so you khun boom from underneath the difference is so right here he's booming from on top so what do we have? We have the floor with rug on here which is going to dampen a lot of the sound we're booming from on top of him now so the sound that he's projecting from his mouth is bouncing all around I mean, you guys can hear the echo right? So this echo is coming from all this concrete were bouncing it up so this is going to get all that echo coming right back at the shocking like so with shotgun mic works is everything in the front is what is picking up everything in the back it's not getting so if you're talking we might get a muffle but we're not really getting it we're getting whatever it is it's focused on so if you boom from below you've got to keep in mind what's behind him what's action in behind him and I think we're good to go there uh and go ahead and put that down thank you waken relieve you from your duties as cam off thank you sir you got it but booming is is very, very basic if you know the tricks of it you'll get solid sound it's not difficult the problem is people don't really think about it or focus on it and that's when it becomes a problem in shot boom up is getting tired, or you're not framing how you're supposed to frame, uh, your shots with the boom, but recording for post thirty seconds of silence. You guys all know what thirty seconds of silence is when you're in a location and not just if you're in a house, you record it once we're going to record it in every location you're gonna record thirty seconds to a minute of just pure silence because there's no such thing a silence, there's always a sound if we all go dead quiet right now, we're going to hear the air conditioning, we're gonna hear something happening outside, whatever that the noise that is happening, that room there really cite noise that you never really think about. You got headphones on and you're worried about audio those birds chirping and didn't exist in your mind two seconds ago until you're thinking about audio, so you want to grab thirty seconds of silence and every location that you go to before in the living room thirty seconds science, we moved to the kitchen thirty seconds of silence because each of those are gonna have a different character to it there's no refrigerator in the living room there is in the kitchen that has a very specific home usually want to shut that off, but you get the point and the other thing is is keeping everyone preferably in the room that was there when you were shooting it, because all of our bodies in here is changing the character of sound in this room. So if we're all in here for the shooting, when we get thirty seconds of silence, everybody clears out character of the room has changed, so you want to try to keep everyone that was in the scene? They're all usually do it for the last shot of the last scene just call thirty seconds science everybody just sits where they were to our thirty seconds science moves on some reason it feels like thirty minutes of silence whenever you do it. Everybody just awkwardly just sitting there. It's awful uh, grabbing fully on location. I did this a ton for a proximity and a little bit for teles. Well, because the dead girl or the girl in his mind until it speaks in different points, these little whispers and I got those whispers in those my voice just cracked like a twelve year old in those moments, I don't know it just it really helps it to be in that moment when you try to do a tr later in a studio in this battle mixing it to be quite right, even on the pro level, could be problematic at times and in proximity in the forest that we're working in a wooded area. Whatever you wanna call it, I would just run around with the zeppelin, because it's, great. These are great because of the handles. And if you're running, which I was doing, uh, you know, it's not picking up that wind. And I'm just running, pointing it at my feet, looking like a psychopath with a nature. Warren, just like this in the forest. But you're grabbing all that stuff that I can then give to my audio guy for later to mix in and it's all the character of that actual environment.