Ep. 59 Mastering Documentary Sound: All The Gear You'll Need For Your Film

Though capturing the moving image is a key part of movie making, so is capturing sound! So on this week's episode of Moonshine Moonshot, we'll be talking all things microphones, boom stands, and the importance of recording the best possible sound on shoot day. 

We'll cover lapel microphones, boom microphones, the zoom recorder and all the little neat gizmos and tricks that can help make your documentary the next Grizzly Man. 

So grab your microphone and let's get recording!

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey there filmmakers! I'm wondering, have you ever tuned in to watch a doco or a show and found that it was really hard to hear the dialogue because of wind noise or a distracting rustling sound? I'm guessing probably not because most broadcasters and streamers simply won't air a program which has poor audio. So this blog is all about digging into production sound recording. And you know, I've got to say, go you for even clicking into this episode because sound recording is a pretty specialist area, and learning how to do it for documentary when you're not a soundie is a feather in your cap that is gonna serve you really well in your filmmaking career. It is another skill to master. And even if you're not actually doing the sound recording yourself, having just an overview of what sound recording is about is just gonna put you ahead. It's just like everything, you know. You the more you know, the more skilled you are, and the better your filmmaking will be. So just wanted to acknowledge your brilliance for listening in on this podcast because, you know, it sound recording is not the most interesting thing you could listen to a podcast on if you're not actually into audio. Now, why am I the one to be telling you about all this? I am so glad you asked. I am Sue Collins, your host on the Moonshine Moonshot podcast on making movies that matter. And I'm part of the team behind Moonshine Agency, which is an impact film production house producing multi-award-winning films that have a positive social impact. Impact films are films that are designed to take an audience from passive viewing to being an active participant. It gets them doing something, getting involved, and being part of a solution. Now, I have realized that learning how to craft films is a very challenging process. So when I was just starting out, it was really hard to find information and learn about filmmaking without formal study and without being under the wing of a mentor. Because avoiding the pitfalls, being pigeonholed, running out of funding, or simply not understanding the business side of the industry has meant that over the years I have seen many people with a lot of talent give up or simply move on to more stable work. So my hope is to see the industry thrive here in Australia and beyond. And I recognize that to do that, I've got to be more open with skills sharing. So that's why I have decided to share more of what I have learned through many years of filmmaking through this podcast, The Moonshine Moonshot, and with online courses at the Moonshine Communications Academy. So make sure you check out the Academy, particularly the resources section, because you can find and access free downloads like check sheets and ebooks. And if you haven't come across them already, there are some really great online courses on the Academy as well, such as Define Your Ideal Audience, which is a course that helps you figure out who your project is best suited to well before you even roll camera. And that is such gold for any marketer and just essential knowledge for actually putting your film and your project together. So it's an often overlooked area. And, you know, I hear a lot of marketing people talk about finding, you know, avatars or things like that. And what they're really meaning is you're taking a very big picture view and pretending that you're making up one individual person and they're the embodiment of the perfect audience for your project, but they're just made up by, you know, socioeconomic status and age and how many kids they have and what car they drive and where they went to school. It's not a real person, not very helpful, because for film, you've got to know much more around worldview and understanding and defining a worldview of real people is actually where the value lies. And that's what I teach you in Define Your Ideal Audience. So I do recommend you check that out on your filmmaking journey and uh it'll be really helpful. But today you can tell I'm stalling, I'm procrastinating because sound's not my bag. I I mean I do a lot of sound recording on our films because when you're a smaller crew, it's pretty essential, you know, someone's got to do it. And if I'm not doing the interviewing and I'm not directing, then I'm most likely going to be operating the camera or the sound. So that's how I have a background in sound, and I'm gonna share a bit about how we do it over at Moonshine Agency to help you understand what you could do to make the sound quality as good as it can be on your own documentary films. Okay, so capturing high-quality sound is essential for creating an immersive and memorable documentary. Sound recording can make or break a film's impact. And as I mentioned right at the start of this podcast, you rarely watch a film or documentary that has poor sounding dialogue audio. Sure, there are some tricks that can be done in post to improve poor audio, but sometimes it's just not possible. And the rule of thumb is the better you can capture audio at the time of filming, the better the audio quality is gonna be. So just simply cannot assume it's gonna be able to be fixed in post. Take those words out of your dialogue, fix it in post, just remove them. Never assume that when it comes to sound. So, by way of example, I'm gonna take you through the sound equipment we use here at Moonshine Agency, and that's gonna help you understand what you might need for your own project. First but not least is the lapel or lavalier microphone. A lapel mic is an essential, it is a must-have for every Doco maker. They're easy to use, they're small, and you can actually hide them under clothing reasonably well depending on the quality of the attachments and the microphone that you have on it. And you can clip the lapel mic onto your participant's shirt, and you know, pretty much there you are, away you go. You know, if you've ever seen news readers and things, you can often see them sitting on top of their outfit. So often they're not hidden, particularly on factual programming. It's very common to see the microphone on someone's clothing. But be warned because they are fidgety little things. So you've got to be really careful that they aren't rustling up against clothes or getting lost down someone's shirt. You have to monitor the sound the whole way through the recording, because even though they might sound great for, you know, you could be rolling camera for 20 minutes on an interview, and then all of a sudden someone moves their hair or they their their jacket collar moves, or, you know, something happens and you start getting this really annoying rustling sound. If you're not listening, you're not going to pick up on it. So you have to monitor it the whole way through. And also I find that people's voices change levels a lot. When they first start a sentence, they can talk really loudly and then it sort of quietens down as they relax into the conversation. So there's all sorts of reasons that you need to monitor the sound as you go. So a helpful hint always have a spare lapel mic in your kit. Because as much as we try and control technology, sometimes it just will not work. For some reason, you know, they don't sink, they don't, they just won't do what they're meant to do, and they won't connect to the camera, or they just get some weird humming sound, or the battery goes flat, or there's just so many things that can go wrong with lapel mics on a shoot day. So always having a spare pair is going to help you get out of a jam pretty quickly. So that would be my advice. Now, if you're looking for a prime example of how to use a lapel microphone, you could check out the companion video of this episode over at YouTube at the Moonshine Communications Academy channel because we do a companion video, my co-producer Mike Hill and myself, and you can see the lapel mics that we're wearing in this episode if you'd like to see how they look. So lapel mics are really good for recording dialogue, but they're not very useful for anything else, which means you're gonna need a few more devices. And one of those is the boom microphone, which is often the one that you see at the end of a pole. And if you didn't know the name, you would definitely have seen this microphone. It normally sits at the end of a long pole that's been held just out of frame by a person, usually with pretty impressive upper body strength, or you can also put it on a mic stand. Just got to sort of position it so it's out of shot. So whether you get someone holding it or whether you have it on a mic stand, depends on the chute and the location that you're in. So boom mics are a directional microphone and they're a fantastic way to capture audio as long as you position it well. If you have a boom operator, they are very handy because you can move the mic throughout the chute to make sure it's pointing in the right direction. So if you've got an interview with two people, for example, you can shift the boom mic using the pole to point towards the person who is speaking. But you can also put them on a stand. If you do that, you obviously don't have the flexibility of moving them, so you need to position it well at the start of the interview. And that can really save someone's arms from the physical exertion of holding it in place. And if you're doing a long interview, that's really unfair on your boom operator to have to hold it high and up over their head. So just have a think about that when you're setting up your shot. So it's a good option if you're a small crew and it's a stationary scene. Definitely put the boom on a microphone stand so that you don't have to hold it at the end of a pole. So if you've got, for example, an interviewee sitting on a chair, you could have alongside your boom and your pole. And there are a few tools that you're going to want. Firstly, you're going to want a pistol grip handle, which you can hold firmly, and it's really a bit of a lifesaver to holding that boom pole if you've got one of those. Uh, and it depends how close you can get to the person that you're holding the mic up to as well, as to whether that's practical. But another thing that's really helpful is a wind shield, and they're sometimes called a fluffy or a dead cat. Um, and they're those big sort of fluffy covers that you see on top of the microphones, and they can keep the wind from distorting your audio, and they're also very, very helpful. Highly recommend any time you're shooting outside you have the fluffies over your microphones. If it's going to be a long day, definitely investing in a stand for your boom mic is going to save your audio engineer a lot of sweat and tears. And you know, boom mics aren't that expensive. They are a bit of heavy weight, so not so practical if you're traveling. But if you can stick one in the back of your car for any shoot, definitely going to be helpful. The next one I'm going to talk about is the Zoom. And no, I am not talking about the one you speak with on, you know, the relentless Zoom calls we all do these days because no one likes to meet in person anymore, which is a bit of a shame, but also time saving. So I'm not talking about the online Zoom communications tool. I'm talking about a fantastic little device known as a portable recorder. It's made by Zoom, so that's why we call it a Zoom, but it's essentially a mini audio mixer and it allows you to capture sound from various microphones. It's extremely helpful if you can't connect the lapel or boom mic directly into your camera to record the audio. The one we use has four audio inputs, so you can connect three lapel mics and a boom mic, and you can also play back on it because it has gang control knobs, so you can monitor the sound, you plug your headphones into it, and you can adjust the audio as you go, and it also runs on AA batteries, so it's really portable. So if you've got a camera that can't have the lapel mics or the boom mic plugged in directly, something like a zoom portable recorder is going to be really helpful. They also record to a card and you can then sync the audio and visuals in post-production. So I feel like this is very dry. Sorry guys, not much ways that I can dress up sound because I'm definitely not going to start singing to you. So bear with me. This is the one I touched on before. We'll fix it in post. They are words of doom, I've got to say, just take them out of your vocabulary. Just it's terrible. And you know, any post supervisor is gonna be like, thank you for saying that, because you can't always fix audio in post. And I just don't recommend subscribing to that theory. So fixing audio in post-production can be incredibly intricate and time consuming and costly. So sometimes it's simply not possible. The best audio is captured on the day. So the best strategy is to just record the best possible audio you can on shoot day. And you know what? If you watch some films, you can actually tell that the audio has been dubbed back into the scene, probably because the audio they captured on the day wasn't salvageable. You can't do that so easily in documentary because it's not scripted and not that easy to get your talent to do something like that. So make sure you're protecting your mics from the wind, position them well and monitor the sound as you go and adjust as you need to. If someone's mic is rustling during an interview, pause the shoot and adjust it. Do a pickup if you need to. But it's a little inconvenient and sometimes a bit awkward, and no one wants to stop a great conversation. But remember, even the most brilliant dialogue may not be salvageable. So if you pick up a problem, you've got to stop the shoot at an appropriate moment as quickly as possible, adjust the microphone and then keep going. So lastly, I'm gonna leave you with one last helpful hint. Invest in some high-quality noise canceling headphones because being able to listen on shoot and pick up any audio issues as you go means you can fix them right away. And the sound competing outside of your microphone, oh sorry, your headphones can be really distracting to you, really picking up on the quality of the sound. So high-quality noise cancelling headphones are a good investment and they're not that expensive. So if you're starting out and you don't have the latest gear or the budget to buy the best available, don't stress. Just use the best that you can get your hands on because just knowing that you need good clean audio is a really big step in capturing good audio. Good microphone positioning, monitoring sound as you go to avoid windy and noisy environments are some simple and easy-to-employ techniques that will improve your production's value right away. Use fluffies, use wind protection, all of those tricks, employ them and it will make a big difference. Look, I have come a long way since I started working in film, and the tech is always improving. So there is always a new way to make things run more smoothly. So just keep up to date with the latest and greatest. And you know, you've come this far. If you're following along and you're, you know, enacting this or implementing the things I'm teaching you as you go, then you are well into production and you're probably being met with some new questions and challenges every day. It's really exciting, very challenging, but it's a load of fun. It can also be stressful and daunting at times because it is a really big job. Tenacity is your best friend when it comes to filmmaking. So it's also why myself and everyone here at Moonshine Communications Academy are aiming to support you as much as we can. One of those daunting tasks can be working with your participants. So if you're in production, chances are you're already in the midst of working with those participants. So I highly encourage you to check out our course on finding the participant voice because it breaks down everything you need to know about getting the most out of your talent. So it's never too late. You can head over to the Moonshine Communications Academy and check that one out. And I would love it if you could subscribe to this podcast because I'm back every Tuesday and I am sharing more and more of what I know about how to make great films. So love you to join me next Tuesday when I will be back to tell you more about production for your documentary. All right, look forward to speaking to you next week.