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Planning for Location Sound

Production | January 15, 2017

Based on years of experience recording location sound, here is a practical overview on getting the best results on set.

Pre-production

1. When considering a commercial or industrial location for shooting, make sure you can turn off the on-site heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) unit.
2. If you are planning to shoot inside a bar or restaurant — commercial-grade drink machines, refrigerators and freezers can be very noisy. You may need to negotiate with the proprietor what can be turned off before shooting at the location.
3. If you are using a gasoline-powered generator, place it as far away from the set as possible. Avoid any direct line of site by using any natural barriers (such as trees) or artificial barriers (such as parked vehicles). Use sound blankets suspended with C-stands around the generator (without blocking the exhaust).
4. Provide a copy of the shooting script to the sound department. It is very helpful to anticipate how many cast members will be seen at once on screen, and plan for different location environments.
5. As possible, the use of curtain drapes, rugs, and upholstered furniture helps dampen room reverberation.
6. When scouting outdoor locations, consider a second shooting location in case of unexpected noise problems or budget for ADR to replace any unusable dialog.

Production

1. Remind your cast and crew to silence their cell phones before shooting begins.
2. Turn off any audible smart-home controls (such as Alexa).
3. In a residential house or apartment, the most common source of noise is the refrigerator. On the day of the shoot, plan to unplug the refrigerator. Use an ice cooler instead for storing cold food and drinks for craft services.
4. Keep pets away for the day of the shoot. Barking dogs ruin takes and is an unnecessary distraction for talent and crew. The same goes for pet birds. Aquarium pumps have been known to cause issues as well.
5. Professional motion picture cameras, such as RED uses an internal vent fan. Adjust the setting so the fan automatically turns off during recording.
6. When shooting on bare wooden floors, have furniture blankets ready to dampen creaking footsteps. It will also protect the floor from scratches caused by set equipment.
7. When shooting scenes with dialog, plan for full coverage allowing the boom to get close to the talent. Do not solely shoot establishing or wide shots where the boom cannot be used. A boom microphone will sound better than lavalier microphones.
8. Plate compositing or “shooting plates” is a technique where the boom is visible in the frame of a wide shot and later composited in post with the same shot without the boom. It allows for the boom to be used without ever being seen. This is ideally suited when the camera is mounted on a tripod without movement with a fixed focal setting.
9. Allow the sound mixer to record a minute of room tone before moving on or calling wrap. Room tone allows the editor to cut dialogue with no audible gaps in the final mix.

Post-production

1. Use high quality speakers or headphones for monitoring audio when editing. Most consumer-grade speakers and headphones do not accurately reproduce balanced frequency sound.
2. In editing, use the audio track with the recorded boom microphone as the primary sound source, and the audio track(s) with the lav microphones as the backup. The boom microphone will sound better and have reduced room tone.
3. Many different kinds of recorded sound related distortions, such as ambience, hums, ticks can be reduced or eliminated. However, you may need to budget for ADR if the recorded sound is severely distorted.
4. You can improve dialog audio by using a low-pass and high-pass filter.
5. In situations where the recorded sound is not usable, such as excessive environmental noise, a professional ADR session can save your project. To make the process easier for talent, we prepare video files with matching on-screen text and cues that allows them to mimic the line for precise lip-syncing. In cases where lip-syncing issues persist, we have specialized techniques that can closely match the previously recorded audio.
6. We have an archive library of thousands of sound effects, foley and ambience. Whatever you need, we probably already have it, and if we don’t — we can create it.