Audio in Bar

N

n1c02

Well-known member
I am going to be shooting a scene on a bar/club.... There will possibly be a band there.. What would any of you recommend as far as getting good sound not only from the music at times but from the dialogue inside the club. How can I get this clean and sound good..

Thanks
 
If you're talking about a live event where you want the music of the band... plus whatever is said from on stage then get a board feed... a line from whatever mixer feeds the house sound (like an extra headphone out, if not a line out)...

If you mean dialog from people in the club... "dialog" meaning talking... not dramatic dialog for a film... then you want a stick mic like EV re50 and it will have to be very close to the speaker's mouth.

If you're wanting to shoot some kind of "scene" that happens to take place in a bar... and you think you can do it on an ordinary night with other crowd noise and live music... forget it. All those scenes where you see that are carefully controlled environments with independently recorded audio...

You might want to elaborate on what you're going for...
 
Being more of a post guy I will add to Matt's comment that IF Your are trying to record dialog, DON"T. You won't be able to edit worth a damn and whoever does your sound post will hate you. I have done many "club" scenes. I even worked on "Studio 54" (not a good film but plenty of club scenes) and the dialog is recorded with everyone else just moving their lips and not saying anything. There is no music or crowd sound at all. In post we added all the ambiance and non lip sync sound. A lot of new filmmakers think they are going to save a lot of money/ time by capturing it "all". That ONLY works if you use one take start to finish and you can be happy with whatever happens to get picked up. The chances of extracting dialog from a "real' bar are close to nil.
 
And then there's the whole issue of releases from everyone seen in the background, releases from the band, clearance on the rights for whatever music they happen to play, etc, etc, etc. Popping in on a working club with a couple of actors in tow, even with permission of the owners, and trying to film a dialog scene just ain't gonna work...
 
This might not even be what he's asking... However I'm assuming it's likely... as we all are.



Dear OP... be a gentleman and follow this up please. One of my biggest pet peeves with a forum like this is how helpful the experienced members can be... with no follow-up by the OP.

This place is a wealth of real-world knowledge that is shared for the bargain price of FREE...
my favorite thing to see (especially in the TECHNICAL parts of the forum) are good answers pertinent to the OP's question and situation... followed by the courtesy of the OP to post the resolution... thereby creating a valuable, searchable answer for the archives.
 
MattinSTL said:
This might not even be what he's asking... However I'm assuming it's likely... as we all are.



Dear OP... be a gentleman and follow this up please. One of my biggest pet peeves with a forum like this is how helpful the experienced members can be... with no follow-up by the OP.

This place is a wealth of real-world knowledge that is shared for the bargain price of FREE...
my favorite thing to see (especially in the TECHNICAL parts of the forum) are good answers pertinent to the OP's question and situation... followed by the courtesy of the OP to post the resolution... thereby creating a valuable, searchable answer for the archives.
Click to expand...

I couldnt agree more.
 
Sorry for the delay..

I am wanting to film a scene in a club. I guess you are right. everything should be done in post.. The club we will be shooting in has given us total freedom and we will be using extras for the crowd. and the band playing will be performing original music so that wont be a problem there.

Having never done this before. I think it might be best to film a few takes and do a little testing work to see how hard it might be to get it right.

I do appreciate all the posts here and this forum here has helped me learn alot even jsut reading through everything.. So I want to thank everyone here
 
During recording of dialogues....the band MUST pretend they're playing.

Other wise you will have problems with cuttings and sound. If a dialogue level is to low, and you have to bring it up in post...Well, if the band was playing...the level of the band wil also go up.
 
One other note, the band can play for real when there's no dialog in the shot and it's best to shoot these first so the extras know what they're "pretend" dancing to later in the dialog shots.

Otherwise you get all the extras dancing at different speeds and no one matching the music when it's put in later.
 
It's not just level changes in the music, it's editing in general. You are going to shoot different angles (that's just a guess but if you don't your stuck with doing the whole scene in one and that is a very boring shot. So every time you cut the music is going to hiccup or be in the completely wrong place in the song. You just tie yourself to a post with that choice. You can't remove the music afterward. I was writing to a director earlier today and used a pretty good analogy. Sound is like paint. If you have the primary colors in separate buckets then you can mix any color you want. But if you mix those buckets up first you have brown and there is no way to get a nice red or green. You have brown and you better want brown because that's all your ever going to get. Keep your sounds in separate buckets so you can paint in post.
 
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