How Will Our Audio Be Recorded?

  Sound is a very very crucial part of a film as it can heavily influence the feel of it. For example, if I showed you a video of a dim hallway and played a creepy light humming noise over top of it, and another video of the same hallway with complete silence on top of it, which would be scarier? Sound can do wonders in terms of creating the mood and feel of a film. For our film, Lucid Elucidations, we will heavily employ ambient sounds and sound effects to help build to the tension on the scene, and we plan on having minimal dialogue, with the only dialogue being a few lines over the phone being said to the protagonist. We plan on obtaining sound from a few different sources. Firstly, since most of us in the group have iPhones, there is an app that comes with the iPhone called 'Voice Memos' which allows you to record sound for as long as you'd like and export it to whatever media you want.

 As seen here, I have already recorded certain sound effects for the film such as the AC and the water dripping on water and water just dripping normally. As you can also see, there is a record button on the bottom that allows you to record a new clip at any time while viewing your already recorded audios, and there are options allowing you to export the audio.

  Voice Memos also allows you to trim and edit the audio you record so that if you record for too long you are able to cut the extra bits out and simply save the revised version immediately. This will help a lot during production as we are able to record for longer than we need so we can get as much audio as possible, giving more options as to which audio would sound best.

  On top of using our phones to record sound, we have also decided to try to use Mr Engle's condenser microphone to record certain sounds that are more loud and "blaring" (example, high pitch frequencies), as there is a pop filter on it and condenser mics are specifically sensitive to picking up loud sounds. On top of this, condenser microphones have a much wider range of frequencies and are able to reproduce the speed of an instrument or voice. Lastly, sounds can also be found online when they are hard to access or get a quality recording of your own. I have already done this with the light humming sound effect, as it is difficult to find a light that really hums that loud in person, and let alone have the surroundings be quiet as well.

  After recording the sounds, my job as the editor is to be able to take the audio and video and put it together and blend it just right to make a coherent film that tells a story. Of course part of this is making sure that the noises are realistically leveled so that certain noises that should be quiet are overpowering, which would take away from the realism effect of the film.

 Seen above is a random project I opened in Sony Vegas Pro 13 to use as an example of how sound will be inserted into the film and leveled. As you can see, there are three different tracks, the video, the red audio bar, and the blue audio bar. The red audio bar is always the audio that is attached with the video, however if you do not want this you can simply click on the video and press U and it will separate the audio and video so you can then delete the audio track. The blue audio track is a separate music track I put on top of the video. So how can one overpower the other?

 As you can see, every rack has a small control panel off to the side, where many things can be adjusted. However, in terms of leveling the audio, certain things can be done. For one, if you click the blue circle-cross symbol, then it will mute that track entirely. Or, to make one track quieter than the other, there is a slider bar that lets you adjust the decibels (dB) of each track, and can ultimately level out the audio and make the sounds that should be more subtle and quiet be more subtle and quiet, while allowing the sounds that need to be emphasized to be louder. The slider that says "center" next to it allows for the sound to be more concentrated to the left ear of the listener or the right ear. Although this may not be necessary for our project it is something that could be put to use in different scenarios.

Sources

https://www.thoughtco.com/condenser-vs-dynamic-microphones-1817725