Sound and Movement

Today we had a technical workshop on sound and movement for film. The group was divided into two, my group started with the sound workshop.

The main types of sound are:

• Music - diegetic: can be heard by character and audience, non-diegetic: only heard by audience

• Sound effects - artificially created

• Dialogue - written or spoken words

• Foley sound - objects used to make sounds

We looked at different royalty free music and websites to use:

bensound.com

pixabay.com

freemusicarchive.com

We looked at the 'H2n Zoom Handheld Recorder' that is kept in SiSo for us to take out. We were shown how to use it and how it can be helpful when filming our projects. You can record your own dialogue, narration, sound effects or foley. We were set with a task of experimenting with the microphone and cameras to make sound and audio.

We got into small groups and got given our kit to start experimenting. We decided we wanted to try some ASMR sounds by using the microphone and the boom pole to get up close and pick up all the small details. We began by recording walking on leaves and gravel, we made sure to record this with the camera as well so we could overlay the sound on top of the video in post.

We also got some footage of a crisp packet rustling, of water running and paper towels crunching. Once we finished recording with the cameras and microphones, which was very simple to use, we uploaded all the footage onto premier. We began arranging the clips and then we realised we wanted to create some sort of narrative and maybe add a voiceover. We thought we could arrange the clips and create some sort of ASMR campaign about washing hands. We wrote out a small bit of dialogue which I spoke into the microphone so we could add it in as a voiceover. The first recording was unsuccessful as it was too muffled. To fix this we put my hat over the top of the microphone and then rerecorded and it came out a lot better. We popped this audio over the top of our clips and adjusted the volume of everything to get it sounding how we want. For a small workshop we were proud of this outcome.

This workshop will help me in the future if I want to focus on audio and will also help me when watching other films and analysing them.

Watch our short video here:

For the movement part of the workshop we looked at different cameras and tricks to use them. Looking at frame rate and achieving slow mo or smoother shots which can be created by higher frame rates.

Here are some different methods shooting that we learnt.

• Handheld camera - heighten intensity, creates intimacy

• Tripod - focus on subjects, focus on dialogue

• Panning - follow a character, reveal information

• Tilting - reveal character, setting or scale

• Sliders - emphasise movement, reveal context

We then had a go at using all the cameras and equipment. We got a chance to play with and experiment with the FS5, 5D and tripod which will be really helpful for when we want to take these out of SiSo and use for our projects.