Making Films Quick Start 1 - Audio
The Most Important Part of Your Film
The importance of components for your film are to be organized with this prioritization:
Story
Sound
Visuals
If you have bad visuals, your story and sound-if good enough-will keep an audience engaged.
If your sound and visuals suck, but your story is incredible, you will hold captive the attention of your viewers.
If your story sucks, and your sound and visuals are incredible, people will say “That’s neat.” and walk past your film in an art gallery.
Story then, is king. If you have a bad story, stop here. Get a good story, and come back to this post later.
To get good sound is difficult, and depends on where you are. If you are inside, and recording only yourself speaking, you can buy a Rode Lav Mic for $50 on amazon, which will connect to a headphone jack. Use the voice recorder app on your phone to record your audio with the Lav.
If you don’t have any money, use your phone as the microphone, and hold it like you’re on a stage. Which is to say, hold it upside down, slightly under your chin, pointed towards your mouth.
Before you start your main recording, say “Banana, Banana, Banana” and clap as loudly as you can.
If you are outside, put something fuzzy over your microphone-this is called a dead cat-to stop the wind from making your audio terrible. If a dead cat is too expensive, take the hair from a hairbrush, and glue it to a rubber band. Attach that rubber band to your mic for a makeshift dead cat.
When recording, watch the waveform to make sure you aren’t ‘peaking’ your audio levels. Peaking audio looks like this:
With the tops and bottoms of the waveform being cut off. If you had an old mic, it might sound cool, and you’d get that nice sound that screams in old horror movies have. But you don’t have that mic, because we just don’t make mics like we used to, so don’t peak your audio, it will sound like “ear rape“.
Generally, record your audio a little quieter than you’ll be playing it back later. This will stop your mic from picking up some far away background noise that’ll sound bad, and you can always increase the volume later, but you can’t always decrease the volume later.
Before recording, spend 10 seconds in silence, with your breath held. This ambience can be used to hide cuts in editing, and be used as a sample for background noise when cleaning up your audio in post.
Editing audio will come later in your process, but I’ll include it here for the sake of keeping things together.
Editing Audio
After importing your audio-Let’s assume in premiere pro-you’ll probably want to use the AI enhance feature, because it is amazing and a feat of engineering. Don’t over rely on it though, because it has a ‘smell’ to it, that you’ll start detecting the more you use it. Use AI enhance as a foundation to build the rest of your audio edits from, but don’t expect it to output a final product for you. If you have a weird accent, or speech impairment, AI enhance may ruin your audio, in this case, probably don’t use it.
Auto match your volume. Do this with the button that says “Auto Match Volume”.
Use the slider at the bottom of essential sounds, to increase the volume, until the levels meter is staying at around 0dB. The levels meter looks like this:
You can probably hear some fuzz or background hum. We just call this ‘noise’, and we use the “Reduce Noise” slider to eliminate some of it. Keep this slider low, higher levels will wreck your audio. Having some noise in your film is normal, and you should not obsess over removing all the ‘noise’ from your audio, this is how people become crazy, and if you are taking ADHD meds for any reason, you are at a greater risk of falling into this trap than most people.
If you recorded outside, probably don’t touch the “Reduce Reverb” slider. If you recorded indoors, probably don’t touch the “Reduce Reverb” slider.
Increase your “Dynamics” slider until it sounds good to you.
If you want your voice to sound powerful, you can use the creative drop-down menu, and add cathedral reverb, then slide the scale to something like 0.2. This will give your voice a resonance that will naturally command attention.
Tomorrow, we will talk about how to film.
