By Ben Crosbie
In the last post I promised I would tell you more about audio. This is where I fulfill that promise – for only three easy payments of $39.99, you too can learn the secrets of documentary audio production! (Not a guarantee)
Anyway… Audio is usually the part of filmmaking that takes the backseat to everything else, at least until a film reaches post production. I already mentioned the idea that audio is just as important as the visuals. This is certainly nothing new, and not original to me, but most people focus on the visuals first because it’s what first comes to mind when most people think about the movies. You don’t hear many people say “Man that movie had some awesome audio!” after leaving the multiplex. It’s not that the audio isn’t great; it’s just that when it is great, people don’t even notice it. Only when your audio is garbled, muddy, or noisy do people take notice. They may not even notice it consciously, but just leave the film feeling like they were annoyed by something, or couldn’t really focus on it. Getting good audio is a whole art unto itself, but in most cases, and ours especially, we don’t have a dedicated audio crew to ensure perfect sound.
So how do you go about getting great audio on a two-person documentary? Well, you don’t really – at least not in my experience. You can only try to get the best audio out of each situation you can, and most of the time it’s not very good. It doesn’t matter how expensive your mics are, if they aren’t positioned close to your subject’s mouth at the correct angle, then your audio will be less than perfect. The best way to achieve this is by using a shotgun on a boom pole, but with a two person crew, this can be difficult. You can have one person operate the camera, and the other the boom, but then who is going to interview and interact with people? Most small-crew documentaries go the route of a camera mounted shotgun, and a wireless lavaliere attached to one of the subjects. This is the direction we took, as we found it to be the best compromise of quality, cost, and ease of use.
We have an Azden SGM 1-X shotgun microphone mounted to the camera, and a Sennheiser Evolution G2 as our wireless system. The Azden is definitely at the bottom of the barrel for shotgun mics, but I had used it before on my short films and found the sound quality to be quite good. I’ve never used a better mic, and I’m sure if I did I would see the light and never go back, but there was just no need (or budget – because we spent all the money on the camera!) to get anything better. Plus, it would be camera mounted, so its effectiveness would limited.
The Sennheiser is considered to be one of the best sub $1000 lavaliere systems, so we went with it based on reviews. The units are also small and compact which helps when the receiver is also mounted to the camera (it keeps getting progressively heavier!) We haven’t had a chance to robustly test out the G2, but from our initial tests it works great.
In the next post, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about really exciting things like tapes, tripods and batteries!
