Recording in a very 'echo-y' hallway

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scottfs

Well-known member
I am helping on a short film tomorrow. The boom operator is very green, and I'm there to set the lights and to help with the sound. The problem I am concerned with is the location. We are shooting several scenes inside a converted school. We are limited to where we can shoot, so we are pretty much forced to use a foyer and adjacent hallway. The hallway is very high (ceilings are probably 16' or so, and the hallway is about 150' long. There is a very, very noticeable echo when one speaks with any 'authority' at all, and this is in the script. How do we minimize this echo?

We have a short shotgun (Chad's 'cheap and crappy' ME66) and/or an AT something or another, which I suppose isn't as good as cheap and is also I'm sure crappy. (Cheaper and even crappier?) Sound treatment is pretty much out because the walls are brick and we can't fasten anything heavy on the walls, and, well, there's no budget for acoustical treatments.
 
Not sure what you are asking if you already know a shotgun is a poor choice and you're unwilling to do what it takes to treat the area the best you can.

What kind of answer are you expecting?

No difference if you went into the lighting forum and said..
"We are shooting in a really dark room, but we don't have a high ISO camera, and we have no money for lights, what should we do?"

What would the answer be?
Move to a different location.
 
Close mike or lavs. High reverb areas are a PITA to work in. Bring in some throw rugs and blankets.
 
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Have the actors speak as softly as possible. The less acoustic energy emitted into the environment, the less reflection x4. Remember the inverse square law.
 
scottfs said:
I am helping on a short film tomorrow. The boom operator is very green, and I'm there to set the lights and to help with the sound. The problem I am concerned with is the location. We are shooting several scenes inside a converted school. We are limited to where we can shoot, so we are pretty much forced to use a foyer and adjacent hallway. The hallway is very high (ceilings are probably 16' or so, and the hallway is about 150' long. There is a very, very noticeable echo when one speaks with any 'authority' at all, and this is in the script. How do we minimize this echo?

We have a short shotgun (Chad's 'cheap and crappy' ME66) and/or an AT something or another, which I suppose isn't as good as cheap and is also I'm sure crappy. (Cheaper and even crappier?) Sound treatment is pretty much out because the walls are brick and we can't fasten anything heavy on the walls, and, well, there's no budget for acoustical treatments.
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LOL

The shot at Chad made me laugh. LOL

But seriously, I went out and bought the ME66 as my first shotgun and sadly I have to agree with Chad (and thanks Chad for all of your posts because you have taught me a lot!). Aside from the Azden it's about the worst shotgun I have ever used.

IMO of course.

But thanks for the chuckle. LOL
 
gpforet said:
Have the actors speak as softly as possible. The less acoustic energy emitted into the environment, the less reflection x4. Remember the inverse square law.
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I completely agree with you, except I don't think it's the sound dept's role to change an actors performance in a narrative situation.

Yes it will help absolutely and he may have no other option at this stage of the game, but proper planning would have been
a much better solution.

Unless I'm reading it wrong he has the shotgun mics he mentioned and thats it. So no lav choices, or no better solutions there.
He also states he has no money to ways to hang sound blankets or other materials.

Both of these could have absolutely been the way to go with proper planning.
Obviously they had the time to scout the locations, etc.

I'm not trying to sound harsh to the original poster, just stating the obvious for any future person who reads
this thread.
Plan ahead, or bring in someone who will plan ahead for you.

If the original poster did have C stands available, and also could find sound blankets somewhere (or even thick blankets at this point)
I would suggest hanging the sound blankets over the stand with the gobo arm in a T placing them as close to talent as possible
without causing bounce or negative fill. I would also angle them as to help break up the parallel walls.
Of course he stated he had no such things so this isn't a possibility in this case.
 
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All the answers given here are correct, and the simple truth is -- in that location, with that equipment, you're not going to get usable sound. Period.

So plan now for ADR. Schedule a day to have the actors come in and repeat their lines. It won't be as good as doing it right in the first place, but it's about the only way the O.P. is going to come out of this situation with acceptable sound, given the constraints on equipment, time, and treating that have been stated. Or convince the director that after every take, he's got to run the actors through it again, for sound -- and stick the mic right in their face. Half an inch away (and better have a pop filter or a BBG or something on the mic!) At least that way you'll stand a bit of a chance of the actors giving a relatively comparable performance emotion-wise, but yeah, sync'ing that up is going to be a bit of hassle.

There are a few things that could be done to minimize the problem, as Rippie pointed out, but I doubt they're going to have that much of an impact at this stage. A bad location is a bad location. Might "look" good on camera, but it's going to sound bad. Your cheapest hail-mary pass is going to be to beg, borrow, or steal some tiny lavalieres and get them as absolutely close to the actors' mouths as possible. Heck, shoot the footage in profile and tape the mics to the non-camera side of their face so you get them right up at the source, and that way you can turn the gain all the way down on your mixer and eliminate some of the echo. A little bit of echo is okay because it wouldn't be believable if the room was totally flat, but you want as little of it in your original recording as possible.

If even that is too much to ask, then yes, you are completely screwed and you'd better start planning on some ADR.

In short, there's only two ways to combat echo -- either treat the location with enough large soft stuff that it will absorb the bouncing sound waves, or get the mic so incredibly close that you can turn the volume down so far on the recorder, that the bounced sound waves won't be too noticeable on the recorded track. And in a scenario like you described, that isn't gonna happen with a shotgun on a boom that's held two feet over their heads.
 
Ahm, I don't know the script, of course, but is there any way you can make the location and the sound you're getting part of the production, itself? If you can use the location and its barrenness contextually, then the echo becomes both natural and an enhancement to what you're doing. Now, if you're using an empty building when it's SUPPOSED to be occupied and busy, then ignore what I just said.
 
Doc Bernard said:
Close mike or lavs. High reverb areas are a PITA to work in. Bring in some throw rugs and blankets.
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Lav would be the best option, using an external recorder directly on the talent. All you need to do the is to sync it in post.
Another thing that could help, check this... around 4:45. If you can it can certainly help. Something similar like thick blanket should be good "on-the-cheap".
 
StuOS said:
Ahm, I don't know the script, of course, but is there any way you can make the location and the sound you're getting part of the production, itself? If you can use the location and its barrenness contextually, then the echo becomes both natural and an enhancement to what you're doing.
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Bad sound is bad sound, and there's no way to write it off as "part of the story". Even when you hear sound that is fairly saturated with reverb, desolate, isolated, cavernous... that's all been done in post. If you are in a place that is naturally very reflective, and thus very saturated with reverb already, and are using a mic that is going to do nothing more than make the bad sound worse, the recording is going to be muddy and hardly intelligible. It will also come across to the audience as bad sound.

Even things in the movies that seem imperfect are typically "perfectly" imperfect, or, created to be that way under controlled circumstances.
 
OK, the shoot is over. The visuals are fantastic, with the director and the writer in love with the look of the long hallway (it goes on forever, said the director). We did shoot with my worse-than-tin can-with string mic and we shot all dialog in extreme close up. That permitted us to mic very, very close to the mouth of the actor. The sound isn't bad at all. The space is established early on as a very long hallway.

The director has planned on doing all of the outside shots ADR because we shot on a beautiful old part of Sacramento (I'm sure, being Sacramento, it is crappy, but we all can't be Hollywood) that is right next to the freeway. But, using the ME66, and miking away from the freeway, it isn't half bad. (I'm sure many would say the mic is so noisy it drowns out the freeway noise). So he may choose to do the dialog inside the same way. The other point is that there is literally six lines of dialog in that space, so 'fixing' it shouldn't be much of a problem. We'll see once our editor plays with the footage. (Unfortunately, my wife, who is an extra, is hardly visible in the film. She's going to be disappointed.)

This is a zero budget, ten minute film for a local contest here in Sacramento. Craft service (they bought sandwiches and Pepsi) will be the biggest cost item in the film. Doesn't anyone on this board make these zero budget films with cheapie stuff? Or did I stumble on the 'it's not a film unless the budget is seven figures board? I'm living on savings as it is; I have no money to buy a $2000 mic.
 
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scottfs said:
I'm living on savings as it is; I have no money to buy a $2000 mic.
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Having one and doesn't know how to use it would be useless. I don't have expensive gear but I can get decent sound out of it. It always makes me laugh when people spend hundreds of dollars on sound equipement and usually just post their videos online like youtube/vimeo...
Come back and tell me about that expensive gear when you'll export lossless on bluray: then it'll worth the investment, otherwise, some less expensive gear could do the job easily.

But that's just my opinion.
 
scottfs said:
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This is a zero budget, ten minute film for a local contest here in Sacramento. Craft service (they bought sandwiches and Pepsi) will be the biggest cost item in the film. Doesn't anyone on this board make these zero budget films with cheapie stuff? Or did I stumble on the 'it's not a film unless the budget is seven figures board? I'm living on savings as it is; I have no money to buy a $2000 mic.
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No one needs to spend $2000 on a mic in order to get great results. But it's damned hard to get great results from a $20 mic either. There are real reasons that there's a broad spectrum of prices for gear and they're not always based on the manufacturer's marketing department imagination. Would you have been able to get the beautiful shots of actors walking down that long hallway if you were shooting with the camera in an iPhone and no lights? What makes people think the level of equipment one would need to get beautiful sound is any different? I'm continually amazed at the effort and expense people will go to in order to get great images but just any old sound is good enough as long as you can make out what's being said.
 
Steve House said:
Would you have been able to get the beautiful shots of actors walking down that long hallway if you were shooting with the camera in an iPhone and no lights? What makes people think the level of equipment one would need to get beautiful sound is any different?
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This may help:

http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/iphone-slr-mount/

iphone-slr-mount-e14c_600.0000001309999543.jpg
 
Alex H. said:
Bad sound is bad sound, and there's no way to write it off as "part of the story". Even when you hear sound that is fairly saturated with reverb, desolate, isolated, cavernous... that's all been done in post. If you are in a place that is naturally very reflective, and thus very saturated with reverb already, and are using a mic that is going to do nothing more than make the bad sound worse, the recording is going to be muddy and hardly intelligible. It will also come across to the audience as bad sound.

Even things in the movies that seem imperfect are typically "perfectly" imperfect, or, created to be that way under controlled circumstances.
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I get that. But doesn't it depend on exactly HOW bad the sound is? For instance, I once shot a scene in an abandoned school with an enormously long, wide, and echoey hallway. Hard bare walls, hard coating on a perfectly smooth, hardwood floor, etc. The sound was absolutely bad in every way imaginable. We miked close with lavs to minimize the damage, of course, then made a big deal in the shots out of the barrenness and white-walled despair of the place. We brought some children in to talk, play, shout and what have you, and added that in as a constant, but low, background, increasing the volume as classroom doors banged open and a kid walked down the hall with echoing footsteps, or when an external door opened, letting in playground sounds.

So, with great respect, is it fair to say that there is never a case when bad acoustics can be used to advantage? I don't think so. This series of shots and locations is still one I cherish, and I've been making films and video since 1983. I suggestion was merely an option. It may or may not have worked, but I put it forward as a possibility just in case it might have worked.
 
How the hallway shot came off.

How the hallway shot came off.

We did shoot the long hallway with mainly natural light. The windows were west-facing, and we had more of a problem with too much light (reflecting off the shiny floor, solved with some blankets we always carry). The sound was difficult, and we had no time (or budget) to install sound-deadening material. We did take the advice to do all dialog getting the mic very, very close to the talent, recording each as they went through their lines. But it's always possible to do some ADR.

One of the crew works for an organization that has a small studio with a recording booth. That's a plus, especially when you have zero budget. Volunteers on an indie film is essential. On this shoot, we were lucky to have crew who could bring their own equipment. Our camera operator has some very, very nice stuff. But not audio. That was left up to poor me (poor in several senses). And the visuals turned out very, very nice, with great depth-of-focus using one of the Canon DSLRs. We watched the dailies yesterday.

Get this: we did a third location shoot in said studio. We used a lav, but only as a prop. The director wanted to use the ME66 in the very sound-dead space (no echo from anywhere). Perhaps he wanted consistent (consistently cheap and crappy, Chad would say) sound. I don't know. It's his film, not mine. I just do what he wants done.

No one needs to spend $2000 on a mic in order to get great results. But it's damned hard to get great results from a $20 mic either. There are real reasons that there's a broad spectrum of prices for gear and they're not always based on the manufacturer's marketing department imagination. Would you have been able to get the beautiful shots of actors walking down that long hallway if you were shooting with the camera in an iPhone and no lights? What makes people think the level of equipment one would need to get beautiful sound is any different? I'm continually amazed at the effort and expense people will go to in order to get great images but just any old sound is good enough as long as you can make out what's being said.
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You love to take little pot shots at me whenever you talk about your ME66 now scottfs. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I just calls it likes I hears it... There is cheaper crap out there, AKA Azden, so you could do worse. In a few years you'll quietly thank me though, when the box arrives from UPS with your new shotgun. And for that moment I send you a hearty, "You're welcome!"
 
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