Dialog + #@!% raging river noise?

[Randall_Oelerich]

I will be filming a short film this summer, recording lots of dialog of several actors on a small pedestrian wooden bridge over a river (about 20 feet wide), and also in the river and along the river banks. Well, right now the river is raging, noisy, spring thaw (northern Minnesota). It will quiet down some by summer, quite a bit actually. But my question is-- what tricks can I do to capture clean dialog, as clean as possible?

I do have a Zeppelin blimp wind cover for my mic, well actually I have to build that in the next few weeks from parts I bought to make one. It will go over my Rode NTG-2 shotgun condenser microphone. I have a long carbon fiber boom pole. I know to get the mic as close as possible to the actors mouths, but there are limits of course, and then there is the noise of the river. What else can I do?

Should I take the actors out to a quiet section of woods away from the river, record the scenes/lines for later dubbing, along with foley sounds of recorded river noise? Should I use software to try and subtract the river noise from the audio waveforms? Should I just embrace the sound of the river as part of the film and take the river noise along with the dialog, just get the mic as close as possible to the actors? Should I use wireless lavaliers? How do the audio professionals get clean audio for scenes of actors along raging rivers?
~randall

 

[Noiz2]

Should I take the actors out to a quiet section of woods away from the river, record the scenes/lines for later dubbing, along with foley sounds of recorded river noise?
~randall

First it's Foley and second Foley is performed on a Foley stage. So unless you were planning to recreate the river on a stage you were talking about FX recording.


OK now back OnT.
Getting close and directional is about all you can do. Getting wild ADR (there is also Wild Foley, but you were still talking FX recording) is a good idea. And I would also get a bunch of river recordings to smooth it all out in post.
Noisr reduction "might" help but I doubt it. The river is going to so broadband that you will get a lot of artifacting before you get much river reduction. Do more than one take so there are some alts you can pull a word out of if one gets nailed by the river on your chosen take. Mosquito Coast has a big river scene, with water lapping the canoe all over a very important scene. The dialog editor pulled it together from words from a bunch of different takes. It sound really good, but the original was almost un-understandable.