Sound tips on a project

B

blackfilm

Member
Hello,

i hope you can help me out here, i've been trying to come up with a solution for weeks now. I'm doing a bigger project than usual now and i would love it to have naturalistic sounds. It will be shot on location near a river and in the forest. I want a lot of the action to be audible, things like:
1) General ambience, bird sounds, flowing river and the like.
2) Specific ones, like when the character is walking in the river, moving through the forest and touching leaves, the sound of footsteps and so on. All these things that you wouldn't notice or hear at all in general.

Now i do understand that it's not wise to include every sound possible. I just want to have most of them, so in post i'd select which ones i want to be audible and which i don't, also mix them to choose which are the background ones and so on. So my problem is, i don't have any sound equipment. I could possibly get a recorder, but would that be enough to record all these things with built in mics only? Or not record anything at all and use foley only? What kind of a result can i expect from that? Oh, and there won't be any dialog at all.

Thanks for the help!
 
For the ambient sounds, I would record them separately or get them from a sound library (these are very common sounds, so you might find some decent ones for free). For the "specific" sounds, depending on how much and how complex they are (water can be tricky), I would do a combination of Foley and FX recording/library. (I would record while shooting as well, but more for reference and for the odd useful sound)

Regardless of how you do it though, you need some equipment. Could you use a handheld for everything? Others have, but I doubt it, since the kind of sounds you want are quite low in level, and handhelds are noisy. A good mic doesn't cost much to rent though, and recorders aren't too pricey either.
 
You seem to think that the way to do this is to somehow record it all on separate tracks and then pick and choose which to play in post.

It's not intrinsically impossible to do it that way but it is practically impossible. For instance you won't get clean footsteps if you are trudging along recording them, unless you are recording yourself and you are the only one walking.

The way to do this is to add the sounds in post. Or most of them. Record for dialog first, in production. If you have some MOS scenes then pick up the general sound. All of the non dialog though is probably going to be reference more than really usable.Af

After you edit the picture note the things you need/ want and go record or find them. In production when you are not shooting, you could also pick up ambiences and such but probably you are going to be over your head dealing with production issues and won't have the mental time to spare to do good recordings. but if you can swing it then I would go ahead and pick up BG's while you are there.

As Jema said this would normally be a combo of FX and Foley. I'm guessing you are not set up to be able to do real Foley, but you can do what we used to refer to as WIFO, "wild Foley". Basically FX but with very specific bits in mind - and covering what traditionally would be done in Foley (like footsteps). You can even put a cut of the scene on a tablet or smartphone and do semi sync recording (which gets you pretty close to actual Foley).

Once you have a bunch of tracks you can mix them to get that selective focus "hyper reality" sound you are looking for.

This BTW is actually closer to the way humans actually hear. Our brains tune out what they don't think is important and tune in to what they think is important. With recorded sound the brain doesn't have the external clues it needs to create the selective focus so it all comes in as one big mess. A big part of the art of mixing is to create the focus that the brain would have done on it's own in real life. And it gives you a golden opportunity to tell the viewer what IS important in a way they won't notice.
 
Noiz2 said:
Our brains tune out what they don't think is important and tune in to what they think is important. With recorded sound the brain doesn't have the external clues it needs to create the selective focus so it all comes in as one big mess. A big part of the art of mixing is to create the focus that the brain would have done on it's own in real life. And it gives you a golden opportunity to tell the viewer what IS important in a way they won't notice.
Click to expand...

That's as concise an explanation of a complex concept as I've ever read. Nicely done, and thank you Scott.
 
Thank you so much! Now i'm much more relaxed and can concentrate on other things and leave sound for later. Also the explanation of how we hear things is wonderful, that's exactly what i want to do. I want my character to be in this meditative state where she hears the smallest things around her. I think i'll have to search for a person who could help me out with this! Thanks again.
 
Yes. You seem to have specific needs on this, and if you don't know how to do it yourself, hire someone who does.
 
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