For our collaborative project in February, I have been assigned the job of being the chief audio mixer. This job involves a lot of preparation and perfect execution in order to get useable sound. Theres an old cliche that audiences will tolerate bad video quality, but will not tolerate bad sound quality, and as of such it is quite possibly the most essential job not to muck up.

In order to prepare for this I have been looking up tutorials and examples of sound in order to mould my mind into caputuring the best quality possible. The sound mixer Dean Humphreys gave us a masterclass in sound production whilst at encounters film festival, and whilst I sadly did not learn that much from his talk, a good tip that I gained from it was to always record the dialogue correctly, as this is the sound area that will draw your audience more towards the plot and not care about tiny little scratches in the track from time to time. Thus I think it would be best to direct Nick, who shall be doing boom recording to place the microphone as close to their mouths as possible without getting it in shot.

Another tip I learned was not to pay massive attention to books about sound, as it is majoratively audio based and thus best learned about via experience as opposed to theory, though it is best to get the basics noted down. Because of this I will watch audio videos as opposed to getting a book from the library.

Filmmaker IQ have released a video showing how to record sound properly for film making, I have not watched the entirity of it yet, however what I have seen regarding the best sound levels to get has been quite interesting an informative. It is best to get the levels in between -20 and -12 to avoid peaking, as when the audio is too loud the sound becomes distorted and unsalvagable.

We have also decided to make a short documentary about of lives at Swiss Road (our house) in order to get experience in recording sound correctly. I am looking forward to this.