This week’s tasks are all about production and actually planning and creating the audio in production and using our skills and being able to create a piece of audio as if it was in an actual production and going through the stages of production.

The Four Stages Of Production:

  1. Pre-Production: In the stages of pre-production it is all about planning. Planning what you are going to do in your production, this includes things like your storyboards, locations, equipment, lighting, audio, wardrobe, all the elements of the production that needs to be planned and organised should be sorted in these first stages of production.
  2. Production: This stage is all about actually creating the product. Putting the plan in action, and this includes, filming, recording audio going to locations and filming, lighting, acting and actually forming the project and using shots changing it if needed and it is all about the product.
  3. Post-Production: In this stage it’s all about editing and putting it all together syncing sound and finalising everything, this is one of the most important stages because of without this is wouldn’t bee a good project at all because of the scenes wouldn’t flow and the audio wouldn’t be synced and the whole production would be a disaster.

How does Pre-Production apply to audio:
Audio in pre-production is often overlooked because it is considered not that important when it is probably just as important as visuals because audio has to plan where they are going to be putting the microphones in the scene with them remaining out of the shot so the shots being used need to be considered. Pre-Production is so important because they need to plan what microphones to use in what locations, what equipment they’ll need. and meeting with the director and asking what scenes would need audio and what are the important elements that are needed to be recording and whether they want ambient sound. it also gives the audio a chance to plan what equipment will be ne3eded and have a checklist of what is needed and when.

What are the elements that need to be considered?

Important elements the audio need to consider are things like the locations, mics needed, who’s going to be on screen, what the actors are going to be wearing to reduce the amount of ambient sound from clothing, how the audio will be synced. Thinking about these elements are important because if they aren’t considered it can lead to poor audio quality and effect the quality of the production, and all these elements are important because without properly planned audio it just causes too man problems in post production and production because you can’t create good audio with no plan.

How do they link with other stages of production:

They link with other stages by the fact of if the audio team has planned how they are going to record sound it means in the production stages they can be prepared for the scene and be quick and easy to set up also being able to record good audio with ease because they are prepared and know where to put the mics and how to make their work more effective. Also, it’s useful for post production because having the sync done correctly helps the editor in many ways and making syncing up with the footage easier.

Paperwork:

In pre-production, we do a lot of paperwork as there are main elements to considered whilst recording which need to be planned and organised. Having these elements organised makes the entire production simpler and easier to have full control of and having a plan means you have a general idea of what you are going to plan and yes the plan may change however you have that information about your locations and health and safety assessment, so even if plan do change that information is still there. Also having this information is useful because you can study and think whether that location is good or do it have too many health risks to film there and you will have to change your plans and that’s why planning is important. So with our paperwork, we have to do a risk assessment of our locations so we can know how safe this location is. We do a location recee to understand the location and the size seeing how the sound will bounce off the wall whether it is in a good location and its a general understanding of a location and see if it’s right for what you want/ need.  We also have to write a script, we do this because it gives our story what the actors are going to say few things are usually changed but it is one of the most important pieces of paperwork you need because without a script there is no story and having no idea what you are doing. A storyboard is created at this stage, irrelevant for our task but still, it is very important. A schedule is important as well because, without an organised schedule, you have no plan of what’s happening when and without the plan, you can’t film because no one knows where to be at what times it throws the whole production into chaos, so scheduling is important to have an organised crew and cast. We also have to create an equipment list so that we can know what equipment we will need for our filming/ recording work and you can relate this to the schedule if needed but it means the crew can be more organised by having the equipment on the right days and know what equipment they need. It is also useful to create a checklist so that you are able to know what paperwork you have done and what paperwork you need o do its a good way of keeping track of your work.

Our Task:

In this task we have to create a radio show titled “The Proposal”, it will consist of two characters and one of the characters will propose something to the other. As a group, we have decided to do a marriage proposal this may be more mainstream however it matters less about the actual content and more of the quality of the work produced. We will be considering all elements of recording this audio in or pre-production stage because we are treating this task as a real production. We will do this by looking at the elements of audio such as location, types of microphones, the size of the rooms, the type of walls and floor etc. and using the information we gather we will apply it to our production and post production work.

In order to get to our production stages, we must begin by researching our project and plan what we are going to do to successfully create this project. The approach we took in order to carry out the task is taking into consideration the methods we were going to undertake in order to create our audio, this includes microphones, locations, sound libraries and our crew. We will then produce our radio show and then bring our work to AVID to create our final project.

We had decided on two different locations, we thought because of the type of show we are doing we thought we should use a radio room because in this room there is padding on the wall that is able to cancel out any ambient sound in the room it also stops echoing in the room. However, in this location, we would need adult supervision causing some difficulty’s in this location as we would have to have a member of staff with us at all times. So we decided to find a backup location if a member of staff wasn’t available when needed, we found a room next to the tv studio where i believe the lighting rig is controlled from however being in the room because of its small size and the fact it is separated from the main tv studio it is actually a very quiet room with no ambient sound so I think it is a perfect alternate location for recording audio because of the lack of echo and because of the size of the room also reduces the echo in the room, so it would be a suitable location to record in.

The recording equipment we used to record the dialogue was a unidirectional dynamic microphone, we chose this because it would be easier to capture dialogue using this microphone because of its polar pattern, it would’ve been better if we had used a microphone with a figure 8 polar pattern but one wasn’t available. This would then be connected to a zoom microphone which had a recording ability and we conned the zoom to the dynamic microphone using an XLR cable. We then would use a shotgun microphone to record the sound effects because of its polar pattern it would be easier to record specific sounds using this microphone.

It is crucial to ensure all crew members are safe on location, therefore we have to carry out a risk assessment document with a structure of information and steps to follow in case of risks. A remote survey checklist applies to the structures of rooms and equipment. This document highlights the surroundings, facts and figures of our location and equipment we will be using.

Our Script:

INTRO:

“Set in a relatively busy restaurant, a series of communication and cutlery used in the background”

-Music (classical/romantic)-

-Constant (cutlery plates talking)-

-Footsteps-

F1: Wow, this place is so fancy

F2: I know

F1: Why?

F2: Can’t I take you somewhere fancy

F1: This is the fanciest place you’ve taken me in 5 years

F2: Yeah, can’t I treat my girlfriend to a fancy dinner

F1: No

F2: WHY

F1: Because you never do

F2: Anyway, what are you having?

F1: Crab-stuffed lobster tails

F2: I’ll have the same

-Water pouring into a cup (wine)-

F1: So why are we here?

F2: I’ve been wanting to ask you this for a while

F1: Okay yes?

F2: Are you pregnant?

F1: what? NO

F2: I’m only joking, but seriously

F1: Yes

F2: Will you marry me

F1: Of Course

-Crowd clapping-

Equipment List:

    • Unidirectional dynamic microphone
    • Zoom sound recorder
    • Script
    • Headphones
    • Foley instruments: water, a cup, shoes.
    • XLR cable
    • Shotgun Microphone

Our Schedule:

Monday:

Planning- 9:20-16:10

Tuesday:

Planning- 9:20-11:20,

Recording Dialogue- 13:30-14:30,

Sound effects- 14:40-15:10

Upload work and edit- 15:10- 16:20

Wednesday:

Export and upload-9:20-11:20

Evaluate work- 11:30-12:30

Location Recee Sheet:

location-recce-sheet

Risk assessment sheet

health-and-safety

Our Production:

This is our product “The Proposal”. I thought this piece went well we did encounter a few problems of which we overcame in the post production stage. One of our problems was the fact the actors were very quiet and even though the levels were at max we had difficulty hearing them, we fixed this by raising the decibels in AVID meaning the audio was easier to hear. We also encountered the problem of because the microphone had to be held so close to the actor’s mouth having it switch between them was difficult to create that conversation feel so we recorded it is a conversation however if there were large pauses we edited them out and made the conversation flow better.

Feedback and review:

I found this week’s work really useful as it gave me a real insight into the industry and the lengths of which we have to investigate to make a film, and i know this is very basic stuff, however, i think this week has been really important in our understanding of the industry. Also this means we can work on this project and we get little to no help so it helps us display our skills and our knowledge and understanding as well as how well we can work together as a crew and i think that having the tutors chose our crew next week will be really useful because it pushes that feeling of working in the industry even more by the fact you have to work with people you necessarily wouldn’t work with and maybe even dont like but thats how the industry would be so giving us that experience will help us chose whether this is the right career choice for us. Because if we can work with strangers there’s no point in trying to get into the industry.