getting "Altman-esque" multi-track audio on a budget

T

TeN

New member
I'm a huge fan of the films of Robert Altman, and in particular, of his complex use of sound in films like California Split. For a long time I've wanted to try experimenting with "Altman-esque" sound in my films - using many lavalier mics, placed on both central and periphery actors, with lots of overlapping dialogue, and then raising and lowering the levels to "weave" between different strands of conversation in post. With the short I'm just starting pre-production on now, I think I'm finally willing to give it a try.

Some more about the film: ~12 minutes; budget in the low thousands; probably shot on a DSLR; estimated 5 to 7 day shoot schedule (spaced out over the course of 3 or 4 weeks); between 2 and 6 dialogue tracks being recorded simultaneously in a scene.

Is it even possible to achieve this sort of effect on a low budget?

I've tried to break down my concerns...



EQUIPMENT

Should I rent or buy? (I currently own no audio equipment myself.) My hunch is that it would make the most sense to buy the recorder (been looking at the Zoom R24 and Tascam DR-680) and rent the lav mics, however many I need on a particular day. But might it also make sense to buy one or two lav mics straight out? My thinking is that the advantage of buying is it gives me the ability to test things out in advance, as well as gives me something to start with for when I want to try this approach in the future (I'm intent on keeping at it until I get it right).

What I'm thinking I'll need: recorder that can record 8 separate tracks simultaneously, with XLR inputs; between 2 and 6 wireless lavs depending on what scene we're shooting that day; shotgun mic with windscreen and boom. Anything I'm missing? Any hardware features that become super essential when using this type of approach / style?


CREW

Is it enough to have just one sound person on set, or is having an assistant absolutely essential?

What should I look for in particular when hiring?

Is it reasonable to expect to find one person who can do both production and post-production sound? (And is this even desirable?)


WORKFLOW

What should my on set audio workflow look like? How do I monitor sound in a way that we can identify and address problems as they arise and not have it be a chaotic, confusing mess?

How about in post? One thing I'm particularly worried about is mixing the various tracks. All the advice I've read says that if I'm primarily using lavs, I should also have one track recorded with a boom and a shotgun. But how do I mix these together without it sounding weird? My fear (which may be totally irrational), is that if I'm shooting wide and can't get the shotgun mic very close, that mixing that track together with the lav tracks will make all the voices sound "echoed" or "doubled" (like there's two voices, one close up and one far away). Conversely, if I forego the shotgun mic track, all I'll have is the dialogue, and things will sound weirdly dead unless I do a bunch of foley work (which sounds like a nightmare).



There's probably a ton of other issues that haven't even occurred to me yet. Advice regarding any of these areas or anything else, or pointers to resources elsewhere, would all be enormously helpful! Thanks.
 
Typically a sound mixer, boom op and utility. However if the 'boom op' is inexperienced, you may be better off doing it ENG style, ie; an experienced sound person with bag set-up. There's a whole lot more to being a boom op than just 'holding a pole' and the inexperienced can make a mess of things, not to mention damaging an expensive boom pole and/or mic. (and other gear which may be in the way)
Most experienced sound mixers will have gear, so I would recommend not buying much. And most will not work with toy-grade gear anyway, if that's what your thinking. A sound assistance usually good to have around to hold things, keeping track of sound report info, fetch water, tools, ect... if they don't tend to wander off. They may even be able to second boom a simple shot.
 
Last edited:
Lets see.

This will be complicated for the sound people compared to a more normal shoot and I would say you should count on two people as your minimum. And figure your going to lose some time with set up and problems.

With eight channels to track I don't think having your mixer work out of a bag is a great idea, unless they have done this kind of thing before and are fine with working that way.

eight tracks on a budget is hard. The Tascam you mention only has six analog in's you have to get a A/D converter front end for the last two channels.

I would personally go with BoomRecorder on a Mac laptop and an interface. But again that means your mixer is sitting someplace not walking around.

Production and post are different skills. Generally there is not a lot of cross over, though I have done both. Personally my first choice would be different (experienced) people. Second choice would be a post person with some production experience. My logic is that you absolutely need someone who can hack the post and if they are doing production they will be thinking of what they will need in post. The risk of having a production person with a little post experience is that they may not be used to thinking of post needs and then in post they may not have the chops to work around what they missed in production.

Though of course the risk the other way is that the post guy will blow the production because it's more complicated than they have experience with so.... YMMV

The WORST choice is to get a production person and then try to find a post person later to sort out stuff. You want your post person on board BEFORE you shoot.

If you are doing post sound in a sound program with a person who knows anything (you better be) then slipping dialog into sync is not a big deal. But if your shot gun is that far away then it's a waste anyway so... Boomed mics do generally sound "better" than a lav, but that is very dependant on the boom op and the lav, placement, etc. I have done show that were basically all lav because the boom sucked. You will need to edit the tracks and if you really want to get "that sound" you will need to do a real sound post. Figure at least 30 tracks of FX and backgrounds etc.

That very layered sound track is not just a lot of voices it is also all the other sounds those people make, none of which you will be recording. So you will need to do heavy coverage and probably a bunch of Foley to add all of that in ( the shotgun won't help there really at all). And you will need someone who knows how to mix so it doesn't become a wall of noise.

I would take a read through the section on post sound in the stickies. There is a thread that starts with a post I made called "making your film sound like it had a budget". Altman has a budget and you will need to do all o the rest of the work or you will just have a short with a lot of talking heads.

It's kind of like wanting to make a great chocolate cake and reading that the key is the chocolate. If you just get some chocolate and stick it in a pan in the oven you don't get a cake. You need all the other stuff that doesn't jump to the front when you think chocolate cake, like flour and eggs and salt and beating and...
 
Thanks for all the advice! Securing both a production and a post person before starting makes a lot of sense. It's looking like no matter what I'm going to have to end up doing a lot of foley, which is intimidating, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
 
As long as you are getting into this a few things. First Foley is always capitalized. It can really piss some folks off if you don't, and it's a proper name so...

Second Foley and FX are different things. For some reason a lot of people think all sound FX are Foley and they are almost completely different things.

Foley is a process developed by the man it was named after for creating all those live sounds that the production would normally pick up. Think of it more as ADR for non dialog sounds. Like ADR it is recorded live to picture.

Anything that is recorded and then put into sync with picture is FX.

It gets muddled because FX can do basically anything Foley can but Foley is a LOT faster for things like footsteps etc. And it injects a bit of natural randomness that helps. Foley doesn't generally do large sounds and often any one-shot sounds (like doors and gunshots, etc.).

The "Altman style" is often talked about like it is a wall of sound, but while there is a lot more in the mix than many films it is very planned out and "designed". You have to keep in mind that humans hear what they are interested in and tune out everything else. A "normal" film is kind of one extreme of that whee you really don't hear anything that isn't of interest. What Altman (and I was going to give some credit to "his sound person" but there doesn't seem to be "a" person that is a common thread so may be it actually is his thing?) does is give you some more context you can mostly ignore. BUT an audience is not IN your film so they don't really know what to ignore and what to pay attention to so YOU have to do that for them.

The short version is you do not have to cover ALL of the action. You need to fully cover what YOU want the audience to pay attention to (that is how there brains will know, it's what they are getting more of), and then just a touch of the rest. Basically you cut it like a regular film then you add small distractions whee it won't get in the way of what you want the audience to be following. The switch ing of focus if done well will still let your audience follow the story with minimal confusion but add enough unimportant distractions to make it all feel more "real". Watch MASH you don't ever loose track of the dialog thread. everything else weaves in and around the dialog so it "feels" random and almost overwhelming at times but you never have to stop the DVD to try and figure out what was said. It is VERY orchestrated.

BTW this is the kind of complex planned sound scape that a real sound post person will LOVE to help out on. If you really are willing to go there you should be able to get someone who knows what they are doing to work on this cheap. A) it's a short so there is never a lot of money and B) if you are willing to take the time to do a really layered and interesting sound track then you are one of the few folks who are doing something that a sound person could use for a resume piece.
Seriously if you can't ind someone who wants to do that then drop me a line I can probably find someone interested.

BUT that kind of thing takes time. Figure ballpark of 10 15 man hours per finished screen minute. Maybe more. Also if you don't have much money then you are going to have to be in there spare time so don't figure straight 12 hour days.

In other words don't make the classic "I love sound and I want it perfect, but I need it next week for Sundance". You need to be in the It takes what it takes and that may be a year. Could be a lot less but... "Never Cry Wolf" took three years in sound post. And we are talking a crew full time not a guy part time.
 
Thanks again so much for all of your advice! This is all incredibly helpful.

I hadn't thought about this as being the kind of thing that would be appealing to a sound person, but that makes a lot of sense. It's both an interesting challenge and something that they could use to showcase their talents. That's good news for me as well because besides just the cost, obviously the ideal thing is to work with someone who's really invested in the project and in getting it to turn out right.

Giving me a ballpark estimate of how long the work will take is very helpful as well. I'm able to get a better sense of how ambitious the project is (after considering it further, I'm going to be cutting back significantly on the length) and how much it's likely to cost.

Just one more question: when you say you think I'd be able to find someone willing to work cheap, what's the range you're thinking of there? Obviously it varies by experience and by city. But I just want to make sure I'm not offering anyone an insulting low wage.
 
Well cheap is a very relative word. I have clients that I can bill at $750 a day. That is a lot more than I was billing on big budget films but those were also much longer gigs. In that world $400 a day would be cheap.

You are not in that world. So when I say cheap I mean cheap by your standards which I figure is someplace between free and maybe $1,500. I used to get $1,500 for student shorts. Sounds like a lot till you look at the hourly.

Even big films are bid on a "flat rate", but if things change you get to do add ons ;~)

I'm not sure it changes much city to city. What the "going rate" is changes but I figure that has very little to do with this project because unless I am WAY off you are not going to come close to anyones going rate. What you are going to be able to offer is some cost offsetting.

So in a very real way you would not be "hiring" someone so much as partnering with them.

This is a short so there is really no direct profit possible, nobody is going to get rich or probably even recoup the cost of production.

The reason I think that if you seriously are willing to go for it you could get someone decent to do it for the cost of coffee and a few dinners is that a lot of folks spend a LOT of their time working on projects that are run by folks who really only thought about sound when they finished editing and couldn't understand the dialog over the hiss and now want you to "clean it up" and don't want to pay much since "it won't take long" and they want it to sound like a Hollywood film because "they really think sound is important" and well you can take a day or two because they have that Sundance deadline they need to make.

and the $$ clients are usually things like advertising that can be fun and creative but often isn't.

So you have something you can sell. You have an opportunity for them to work on something that will take the time to really do a sound track that will surprise people. That you can put on a reel for those advertising clients and maybe get a gig, or maybe a low budget film that isn't SO low budget.

A LOT of low budget films are really depressing to work on. Poor acting, poor script, really bad production sound, and often when they get to post sound the only thing they are thinking about is how to get by spending the least.

When I get a show like that I want a decent rate because what I get paid is all I will get out of the experience.

If you bring me a project that I get to have some fun with, or that has a script that is good AND you are willing to spend the time to do a good job on sound and let me learn something then I don't need my rate. As long as I have enough other things coming in and I can work your non paying gig around the less interesting paying work.

Most folks doing sound do it because they really enjoy doing creative work. A director saying "it shouldn't take long" usually means they don't care and are not going to let you do anything interesting. I hate cleaning up bad production. Why would I discount doing something I hate?

But if you are offering me something fun...

So how "cheap" really depends on the project and how seriously the sound folks take your commitment.

People work for free all the time as a favor or because they like the project. There were a couple that came through Skywalker while I was there and SZFC had a couple. I got a mix for a feature on the off days on the stage they were doing the Godfather REDUX mix on for free back when.

At your budget level cash is the least effective compensation you have.
You are the biggest factor. You have to sell the project AND yourself. If I don't believe you really mean what you say it doesn't mater what you say.
The second is the script. You should have your sound person before you shoot so the script is what will sell the show.

You do have to shoot a decent short or interest is going to wane. But you need to do that anyway.

OR you might get someone on an interesting script and the post as a "proof of concept" project. That wouldn't nec. demant decent acting. But why go through the trouble. Though along those lines you could maybe do "a scene" from a longer film as a shake down test to see if you can get what you are looking for?
 
All of that makes perfect sense to me. And the $1,500 figure you give is about what I had in mind as well, so that's good to know.

This is all invaluable, so thanks again for sharing your wisdom :smile:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top