My first time doing audio for a film!

A

AdventMediaProductions

Active member
I am currently a film school student and have been jumping on as many student productions as possible. Since I am only a sophomore I have mainly been PAing but when my producer sent me an email asking for additional hands I volunteered to help out sound department simply because it was a non-PA job. I met up with my producer the next day and when I arrived he told me that I would be doing ALL of the sound for the film. Seeing as how it was less than 24 hours before the film was scheduled to shoot, I was kind of freaked out because I have no formal audio training or experience doing audio for a film (which he knew haha). So I spent the rest of the day reading all of the manuals for the audio equipment that my school owns, and browsing this forum to figure out every last bit of information that I could about audio before the shoot began.

Our first day of shooting came around and things were okay, not great by any means, but not bad either.

We were shooting this film around campus which seemed like a good idea from a logistical standpoint but a terrible idea from an audio standpoint. Since my school is still on semester break, there was construction everywhere and in the first building that we were shooting in they were testing fire alarms for the majority of the day. Needless to say most of the audio that I captured from that first location had quite a few saws/ hammers in the background as well some fire alarms ringing when we were outside.

Some things that threw me off on that first day:
Director comes up to me and tells me that he wasn't thinking about sound at all. This was very evident as he refused to answer some legitimate questions like whether I should be recording for scenes that were obviously going to be MOS and that he did little to react to the fact that I was picking up construction sounds/ fire alarms.
Assistant Director not calling "roll sound" like every other AD on a film set that I've been on. This really wasn't that big of a deal but it confused me at first.
My Edirol-Roland R44 recorder eating through 4 batteries every hour. I was told that this recorder could record up to about 4 hours continuously but I was getting no-where near that. That thing was eating through batteries like crazy and it got to the point where I was turning it off in between takes and lowering the display brightness, contrast, etc. as best as I could to save power.

Some things that I did right:
Added a wireless transmitter/receiver to my boom microphone so that way I wouldn't have to worry about the tangle of an XLR cable. This totally saved me considering that I had nobody else to help me in the sound department, and that my director/ AD weren't very helpful or considerate of my position.
Recorded a lot of scenes which sounded pretty good and at least provided acceptable audio to some degree.

Things that I did not do but should have done:
Use lavalier microphones. Since it was my first day ever doing audio I was kind of scared of using lavalier microphones simply because I felt that it was more components then I could possibly handle. Also, we were running tight on time and I doubted that my director/ ad would be understanding if I had to take the time to wire people up.
Push my levels a little more. When I was figuring everything out an audio teacher came in and gave me a crash course. He said that I should keep my levels at around -18DB just because it was a healthy level and would give me plenty of head room. I was a little shy of -18 on most of my takes and was closer to -22 so it sounded a little quiet when playing back over laptop speakers, though it sounded fine through headphones.

Day two was easily our worst day. I think the production was a little over-ambitious with the shots that we needed to take and the time that we had to take them. For instance we had well over thirty takes for scenes that amounted to a total of 1 minute of dialog but only had 7 takes for a rather large conference scene with a ton of extras and a lot of other different elements. It was obvious that we missed the mark for what we wanted to shoot for that day and everyone was very tense.

Some things that threw me off:
Asking director to listen to the audio feed from the house microphones to see if it gave him the feel that he wanted. He refused to listen to it even though it was only 30 seconds long.
Asking camera crew if my boom microphone was in their frame only to have them not respond to me at all.
Getting weird sounds from my boom microphone towards the end of the day when doing wild lines, even though I swapped out my wireless boom microphone setup upon hearing it and went wired.

Some things that I did right:
For our big conference scene I figured out a way to tie in to our conference room's microphones. I was honestly pretty proud of myself for that and they sounded pretty good despite the fact that they would cut in and out when people weren't talking directly into them (though I think they were meant to do that).
Used lavalier microphones. They sounded much better and were closer to the actors which was very helpful. It was hard to manage to manage all of the devices by myself especially because I had to mix/boom op at the same time but it was worth it.
Used stronger levels. Since my audio from day from day one was a little weaker than I wanted it to be, I pushed the levels a bit more which was very helpful.

Some things that I could have done better:
Wired up the lavalier microphones better. I think this a challenge for many first time sound guys but I had some issues with a few of the actors' clothing. Other actors sounded perfectly simply because they had cotton/ wool costumes on.

Day 3 was very antipodal for me as a sound guy. Our first location shooting was outside and in VERY gusty winds. To be honest I'm not sure if I could have done anything better to prevent the wind from being picked up by the microphones but I tried my best. The other half of the day was basically MOS stuff so it was very easy for me.

Things that threw me off:
The wind. Holy crap it was windy outside. I used my lavalier microphones on the actors and put cotton balls around almost everywhere with the microphone to help absorb the sound but I was still picking up the wind and was getting some weird interference with the microphones as well, even though I was using clean frequencies. My boom microphone was basically useless because it was catching the wind like crazy. I tried to lower my sensitivity/ gain levels as much as I could to prevent catching the wind but it was pretty bad.
Double checking with the director/AD that they did NOT want me to film an overcranked scene but getting no definitive answer.

Things that I did right:
Doing everything that I could to prevent the wind from hitting my microphones (even though it didn't help very much)
Insisting that we do wild line takes from the wind scene inside of a car.

Things that I could have done better:
Not really sure considering that the wind was the only thing that I had trouble with.

All in all I had a good time being a sound guy. It was a lot of fun actually having a viable part on set as opposed to my usual PA duties, and I think that I did a decent job considering that it was my first time. I honestly didn't agree with my director/ AD on a lot of things simply because they made decisions that didn't make sense sound-wise and they did very little to support me overall. All in all I think I can keep doing sound work until I take some cinematography classes and get into what I am going to school for ( to be a DP/ Cameraman).

Does anyone have any additional comments and advice for things that I could improve on, and does anyone have any recommended reading for me?
 
If you haven't already read the stickies at the top of this forum, highly recommended.
And study thoroughly the "Open Letter from your Sound Department"
http://filmsound.org/production-sound/openletter.htm
Given that your director and AD seemed to be totally clueless about audio (at best),
and openly hostile at times, and that the production schedule was so poorly planned,
it sounds like you did as well as you could have.
If you have access to the equipment, suggest that spending a few hours experimenting
with it would improve your confidence and experience.

You did a great job of keeping track of what went right and wrong and what kind of
improvements you could have made. Congratulations on that. It will serve you well
in any sort of job or task.
 
Each gig you do as a sound guy will have it's own unique challenges, so your knowledge on how to handle those challenges will grow each time. The biggest asset that you have going for you is your attitude to improve and be flexible when plans go wrong, from the sounds of it your attitude is great... when others in the crew were unresponsive or ignoring you, you didn't make a big deal about it but just held your position and kept doing your job. Good for you, sometimes you work with really competent people and sometimes the opposite. A great sound guys learns to work in both situations.

For more sound hints order Barrys Sound DVD. http://dvxuser.com/articles/dvxshop/SoundDVD/
 
sounds like they don't give a s**t about the sound. that's their mistake, not yours, and at least you can rest easy knowing there's no pressure, so use it to your advantage. if they want good audio they should plan for it-- this doesn't mean do a bad job or don't cooperate, but what it means is do the best you can and don't kill yourself if you can't get perfect audio... because you WON'T get perfect audio, so all you need to worry about is doing the best job you can. a lot of people stress and freak about doing poorly in situations they can't control... don't do that.

given that, i'd bet you're not going to learn a lot from this for how to actually run sound for a set... so my advice would be to get through it however you can, experiment with whatever you want as a learning experience, and then don't take a job the day before and agree to handle all the audio. i assure you, anytime you're handling all of the audio, no one gives a s**t about it and it will not be a good experience... but you do still have the opportunity to make it one.


if you want more specifics on how to really do the best job you can for this... which i think is silly, because you're obviously getting the short end of the stick, but regardless... I would say simplify EVERYTHING, which probably means getting the levels to a point you know won't peak during rehearsals, then just boom everything. they won't be able to tell when something is on or off axis anyway, and it'll make your life much easier and allow you to focus on doing one thing well than several things mediocre. you won't REALLY be able to learn if you spread yourself too thin.
the other option is to put lavs on everyone, skip booming and monitor the board, but i imagine this would end up being more hassle than just booming everything.
 
"sounds like they don't give a s**t about the sound"

Which means there is a 99.9999999999999999999999999999% chance the film will suck perhaps even be totally unwatchable..
 
Thanks for the links and advice everybody.

I do agree that it was a very tough situation given the lack of support that I had and my relative inexperience, but part of me is saying to myself "well you survived that so you can probably do a much better job with a little more support, experience and knowledge" plus I figure it is a good way to get on some cool sets and to make myself more useful and involved in the film-making process.

I had a quick question in regards to levels though. Maybe I'm just inexperienced/ not doing something right but whenever I boosted the levels I could hear a lot more background noise and it felt like the microphone was just super sensitive to things. However when I did do that the actors sounded much clearer and vibrant. Is it better to boost the levels and get that sensitivity or to tone them down a little bit and block out that background noise at the expense of more vibrant vocals?
 
I did free soundtrack work for SCAD students for about 4 years. I started with composition and then even did all the sound on a few of them. It gave me a chance to practice I thought, but what it really gave me was a huge headache. It got me wondering if film schools do not put enough emphasis on sound. I asked for room tone, they send me a file where I hear people telling jokes. I ask for on location recording of say someone knocking on a door, they knock once, send that to me. The scene the person knocks three times. *sigh*

To me, sound seems to be a thankless job, but when you nail sound, it REALLY makes a difference.

Great writeup on your experience, I think others starting out will enjoy that. There are ALWAYS problems. Even when trying to plan for sound, things happen you didn't expect. Learning to adapt and have the tools to adapt is the best.
 
AdventMediaProductions said:
Thanks for the links and advice everybody.

I do agree that it was a very tough situation given the lack of support that I had and my relative inexperience, but part of me is saying to myself "well you survived that so you can probably do a much better job with a little more support, experience and knowledge" plus I figure it is a good way to get on some cool sets and to make myself more useful and involved in the film-making process.

I had a quick question in regards to levels though. Maybe I'm just inexperienced/ not doing something right but whenever I boosted the levels I could hear a lot more background noise and it felt like the microphone was just super sensitive to things. However when I did do that the actors sounded much clearer and vibrant. Is it better to boost the levels and get that sensitivity or to tone them down a little bit and block out that background noise at the expense of more vibrant vocals?
Click to expand...

I try to set my levels to give headroom in case a loud action occurs, but not too low that the noise of the converters is pushed up closer to the actual content. I actually record 2 channels of the same thing, one at -12dB to the other in case something does clip, I can repair it with the lower copy.

In post, I want to add negative gain to clips and never positive gain, which is why I try and record at good levels. If you add positive gain, you are increasing the noise of the recording system. With negative gain, you are always pushing it down. The background noise will push down with negative gain as well. As long as the mic is in a good position, most of my background noise sounds correct in the scene, and I clean out parts with room tone that are not (as long as dialog isn't happening over that time). Or, I add to the background noise to make it full.

For instance, we have done scenes where construction work was going on. What did we do? We showed some of the construction going on and used the tones to really set the environment.
 
The generic rule of levels is to keep the recording levels within the "Goldilocks Zone"-- not too hot and not too cold.
If the signal is too low, it will be "down in the mud" of equipment noise (typically hiss or white noise).
And it the signal is too hot, it will clip when it reaches full-scale. Most analog equipment had some amount of "grace" that would allow peaks without horrible distortion. But in the digital world, 0dBFS (Full Scale) is the ABSOLUTE limit. When you're out of bits, there is nowhere else to go, and you will get distortion ranging from bad to horrible.
Setting record levels is a matter of optimizing the recording. It has nothing to do with acoustic/environmental/ambient noise. Separating environmental noise from the desired signal (presumably the actor dialog) has nothing to do with levels. It has everything to do with selecting and placement of the microphone(s).

One of the ways of improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is to use more DIRECTIONAL MICROPHONES (i.e. "shotgun", etc.) They reduce the noise by a higher rejection of off-axis sounds. But those long microphones really are more like shotguns and not like rifles. They aren't nearly as directional as you think.

The second major technique for improving the acoustic SNR is PROXIMITY, i.e. getting the microphone closer to the actors' mouth. This exploits the inverse-square law which describes how sound levels fall off with distance. The closer you can get the mic to the mouth, the "louder" the speech will be relative to the surrounding noise.

Neither of these factors has ANYTHING to do with recording level. Optimal micing is just as important as setting proper record levels. But they are just two of the many independent factors that one must optimize to record the best production sound possible.
 
Richard Crowley said:
The generic rule of levels is to keep the recording levels within the "Goldilocks Zone"-- not too hot and not too cold.
If the signal is too low, it will be "down in the mud" of equipment noise (typically hiss or white noise).
And it the signal is too hot, it will clip when it reaches full-scale. Most analog equipment had some amount of "grace" that would allow peaks without horrible distortion. But in the digital world, 0dBFS (Full Scale) is the ABSOLUTE limit. When you're out of bits, there is nowhere else to go, and you will get distortion ranging from bad to horrible.
Setting record levels is a matter of optimizing the recording. It has nothing to do with acoustic/environmental/ambient noise. Separating environmental noise from the desired signal (presumably the actor dialog) has nothing to do with levels. It has everything to do with selecting and placement of the microphone(s).

One of the ways of improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is to use more DIRECTIONAL MICROPHONES (i.e. "shotgun", etc.) They reduce the noise by a higher rejection of off-axis sounds. But those long microphones really are more like shotguns and not like rifles. They aren't nearly as directional as you think.

The second major technique for improving the acoustic SNR is PROXIMITY, i.e. getting the microphone closer to the actors' mouth. This exploits the inverse-square law which describes how sound levels fall off with distance. The closer you can get the mic to the mouth, the "louder" the speech will be relative to the surrounding noise.

Neither of these factors has ANYTHING to do with recording level. Optimal micing is just as important as setting proper record levels. But they are just two of the many independent factors that one must optimize to record the best production sound possible.
Click to expand...

+1!

One thing I tell people is experiment with your shotgun mic and yourself to see how the difference in location makes a HUGE difference. And I always monitor in headphones with the gain up so I can hear everything and easily adjust.
 
AdventMediaProductions said:
Asking camera crew if my boom microphone was in their frame only to have them not respond to me at all.
Click to expand...
It's typical for them not to respond, after all they are "above you" in the below the line pecking order, plus maybe they are still messing with the lens, adjusting, whatnot.
The thing to do is put the boom mic right in the shot and hold it there... they will then respond with "boom in"... and you casually look their way with an "Oh....it is?" Then move boom just a little bit,, and they will yell at you again.... and keep moving it until out of frame. You will then know exactly where their frame line is.
Another method .... when you first meet cam op. introduce yourself....friendly, and say, "oh, by the way, if you see a boom in, go tighter." They will laugh at you, but without cracking a smile tell them you aren't kidding! This works well especially if you are older than cam op.
 
Another method .... when you first meet cam op. introduce yourself....friendly, and say, "oh, by the way, if you see a boom in, go tighter." They will laugh at you, but without cracking a smile tell them you aren't kidding! This works well especially if you are older than cam op.
Click to expand...
I would LOVE to do this, but I don't think I could keep a straight face...

I must agree in that I think you have a good attitude, and it's very good that you have taken the time to analyze what was good and what wasn't. You can get far just with that and the will to improve.

When you're working with people who knows very little of sound work and what you need to do, such as adjust lavs, get the DP to talk to you, catch wild lines, get room tone etc, it can be of great help to simply get a meeting and talk about this with everyone. I've done that more than once, and it makes my job much easier, and I don't have to be seen as a pest by everyone on set.

Another thing is to try to limit the things that can make noise on set, such as clocks, refrigerators, ventialtion etc (tough luck on those alarms). You can also use blankets, carpets and similar to dampen reflections in rooms, which can sometimes make a huge improvement. I have a few tests where I have recorded a dialogue before and after removing noises and dampening reflections, and the difference is startling! (a good way to enlighten those who don't know what good productions sound is)

Keep up the good work!
 
I am currently a film school student and have been jumping on as many student productions as possible. Since I am only a sophomore I have mainly been PAing but when my producer sent me an email asking for additional hands I volunteered to help out sound department simply because it was a non-PA job. I met up with my producer the next day and when I arrived he told me that I would be doing ALL of the sound for the film. Seeing as how it was less than 24 hours before the film was scheduled to shoot, I was kind of freaked out because I have no formal audio training or experience doing audio for a film (which he knew haha). So I spent the rest of the day reading all of the manuals for the audio equipment that my school owns, and browsing this forum to figure out every last bit of information that I could about audio before the shoot began.

Continue with doing as lot as projects as possible. And it's good you tried to prepare as good as possible.

Our first day of shooting came around and things were okay, not great by any means, but not bad either.

We were shooting this film around campus which seemed like a good idea from a logistical standpoint but a terrible idea from an audio standpoint. Since my school is still on semester break, there was construction everywhere and in the first building that we were shooting in they were testing fire alarms for the majority of the day. Needless to say most of the audio that I captured from that first location had quite a few saws/ hammers in the background as well some fire alarms ringing when we were outside.

That's the time you just go to the producer and say: The construction works bother the sound... go fix it... Well it's mostly location manager or assistant. You as a soundguy have never to go to the construction
workers to ask them to be quiet because you have other things to do. What you can do is tell the location manager or assistant that they don't have to stop all day long... they ONLY have to stop during recording. So give them something to communicate. When you do that, everybody will be happy. It's important to remember: people who are not in film/tv bussiness don't know poopoo about it (I typed the poopoo myself :-p)
Which means they have to be explained how it works.

But anyway...the producer has responsibility... Although with sound isues they mostly say to the soundguy "go fix it...(so that we don't have to do it)"

LOCATION VISIT: VERY IMPORTANT

Some things that threw me off on that first day:
Director comes up to me and tells me that he wasn't thinking about sound at all. This was very evident as he refused to answer some legitimate questions like whether I should be recording for scenes that were obviously going to be MOS and that he did little to react to the fact that I was picking up construction sounds/ fire alarms.
Assistant Director not calling "roll sound" like every other AD on a film set that I've been on. This really wasn't that big of a deal but it confused me at first.
My Edirol-Roland R44 recorder eating through 4 batteries every hour. I was told that this recorder could record up to about 4 hours continuously but I was getting no-where near that. That thing was eating through batteries like crazy and it got to the point where I was turning it off in between takes and lowering the display brightness, contrast, etc. as best as I could to save power.

That's because it were "cheep" batteries... You have to buy the more expensive ones.

If they don't wanne listen...Force them...give them the headphones and say "THIS is what you will hear....do you like that ??"
and also "inform" them (the hard way) that this can NOT be fixed in post because you can't remove the orange juse from a coctail.

If then, they don't wanne listen... Try to find other projects and tell them: I have another projects were they DO listen to me.

It seems that here they justed wanted to have the cheapest as possible. Which is not your mistake.

Some things that I did right:
Added a wireless transmitter/receiver to my boom microphone so that way I wouldn't have to worry about the tangle of an XLR cable. This totally saved me considering that I had nobody else to help me in the sound department, and that my director/ AD weren't very helpful or considerate of my position.
Recorded a lot of scenes which sounded pretty good and at least provided acceptable audio to some degree.

Short XLR cables help a lot. if you have 5m it will mostly do. Depens on the lenght of the boom also...

Things that I did not do but should have done:
Use lavalier microphones. Since it was my first day ever doing audio I was kind of scared of using lavalier microphones simply because I felt that it was more components then I could possibly handle. Also, we were running tight on time and I doubted that my director/ ad would be understanding if I had to take the time to wire people up.
Push my levels a little more. When I was figuring everything out an audio teacher came in and gave me a crash course. He said that I should keep my levels at around -18DB just because it was a healthy level and would give me plenty of head room. I was a little shy of -18 on most of my takes and was closer to -22 so it sounded a little quiet when playing back over laptop speakers, though it sounded fine through headphones.

Headphone volume has to be set right

And I also don't think the director/AD would give you time to wire people GOOD... If they would have given time they would have tought it's something that could be done in 0,0000000000000001 seconds

Day two was easily our worst day. I think the production was a little over-ambitious with the shots that we needed to take and the time that we had to take them. For instance we had well over thirty takes for scenes that amounted to a total of 1 minute of dialog but only had 7 takes for a rather large conference scene with a ton of extras and a lot of other different elements. It was obvious that we missed the mark for what we wanted to shoot for that day and everyone was very tense.

Lot's of takes and important scenes just 3 takes.. this sounds as a first year filmschool project...
Another thing that tricks a lot are... INSERTS... Most think "weeeell, inserts...that's just shooting... only takes 5 seconds". But inserts can take... few hours... Because they have to look how they do it, the light,
they think they have time so they don't realise time.

Some things that threw me off:
Asking director to listen to the audio feed from the house microphones to see if it gave him the feel that he wanted. He refused to listen to it even though it was only 30 seconds long.
Asking camera crew if my boom microphone was in their frame only to have them not respond to me at all.
Getting weird sounds from my boom microphone towards the end of the day when doing wild lines, even though I swapped out my wireless boom microphone setup upon hearing it and went wired.

Some things that I did right:
For our big conference scene I figured out a way to tie in to our conference room's microphones. I was honestly pretty proud of myself for that and they sounded pretty good despite the fact that they would cut in and out when people weren't talking directly into them (though I think they were meant to do that).
Used lavalier microphones. They sounded much better and were closer to the actors which was very helpful. It was hard to manage to manage all of the devices by myself especially because I had to mix/boom op at the same time but it was worth it.
Used stronger levels. Since my audio from day from day one was a little weaker than I wanted it to be, I pushed the levels a bit more which was very helpful.

Some things that I could have done better:
Wired up the lavalier microphones better. I think this a challenge for many first time sound guys but I had some issues with a few of the actors' clothing. Other actors sounded perfectly simply because they had cotton/ wool costumes on.

You have learned a lot here. Even if it was not 100% as it should be.. You have learned where to start.

Day 3 was very antipodal for me as a sound guy. Our first location shooting was outside and in VERY gusty winds. To be honest I'm not sure if I could have done anything better to prevent the wind from being picked up by the microphones but I tried my best. The other half of the day was basically MOS stuff so it was very easy for me.

Watch out for MOS stuff... inserts of "dead" objects can be MOS.... Whenever it's someone turning pictures/newspaper (close up hand) then say "sound is participating also". So you have the sound of "turning paper".

Things that threw me off:
The wind. Holy crap it was windy outside. I used my lavalier microphones on the actors and put cotton balls around almost everywhere with the microphone to help absorb the sound but I was still picking up the wind and was getting some weird interference with the microphones as well, even though I was using clean frequencies. My boom microphone was basically useless because it was catching the wind like crazy. I tried to lower my sensitivity/ gain levels as much as I could to prevent catching the wind but it was pretty bad.
Double checking with the director/AD that they did NOT want me to film an overcranked scene but getting no definitive answer.

Things that I did right:
Doing everything that I could to prevent the wind from hitting my microphones (even though it didn't help very much)
Insisting that we do wild line takes from the wind scene inside of a car.

Wild lines... ha !! Good you thought about that... Maybe better not inside a car....

Things that I could have done better:
Not really sure considering that the wind was the only thing that I had trouble with.

All in all I had a good time being a sound guy. It was a lot of fun actually having a viable part on set as opposed to my usual PA duties, and I think that I did a decent job considering that it was my first time. I honestly didn't agree with my director/ AD on a lot of things simply because they made decisions that didn't make sense sound-wise and they did very little to support me overall. All in all I think I can keep doing sound work until I take some cinematography classes and get into what I am going to school for ( to be a DP/ Cameraman).

Does anyone have any additional comments and advice for things that I could improve on, and does anyone have any recommended reading for me?

So you actually did sound, to "feel" how it was ? Well I'm sure when you're a DP/cameraman you will remember these days and be happy to tell the boomoperator how low he/she can go.
 
Thanks for all of the helpful insights everyone!

I just ordered a book on Amazon about sound mixing (for general music recording but it also includes film stuff) it has been helpful so far reading what professionals do and after I finish that I will definitely be investing myself in more film oriented sound materials such as Barry Green's DVD.

I personally think that a lot of the problems that I had could have been avoided with a meeting beforehand and some better pre-production work on the part of the location manager, producer, and director. However, because I was brought in the day before the film shoot there wasn't much that I could do.

Thank you guys so much for all of your help and insights. I appreciate the explanation of signal to noise ratio and the importance of good microphone placement. Hopefully I'll be able to do sound on a few more sets and keep improving.
 
If you were using phantom power on the recorder, that could have impacted your battery life too.

The Barry Green DVD would be a great investment.


When I read the OP, I couldn't help but think... sound is one of the most important aspects of the movie, to some extent second only to the story. If they didn't put any thought into that, they clearly didn't care about the movie, so why should I? I think I would have walked...
 
You (the OP) has definitively not to blame himself...

I think during the "crew-search" they even didn't think about sound. Mostly it goes like:"so, what do we need DOP... lightguys...make up..costume.. 864546456046340434 assistants...5843434 people just to be there... ok..that should be it"

Then the day before the shooting.... "oooow yes ...sound... "

Walking away is also an option, if you feel that they don't respect you...Well just do it... Tell them: "sorry but I have other things to do"...
 
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