5 Production tools

 

Quick start guide: Production tools and aesthetics

How to get to the part you need now

First choose your route:

First shoot your footage
1 Condensed guide to shooting	Chapter 5:1, page 146
2 Basic principles of lighting	Chapter 5:2, page 150
3 Basic aims for sound skills	Chapter 5:3, page 161
And also look at basic composition
Better looking films	Chapter 6:1, page 194
And look out for continuity problems
Narrative continuity	Chapter 6:2, page 211
If you are going to shoot on location
Real world guide to location filming	Chapter 5:4, page 180

 

Light your set professionally
1 Lighting attributes, aims and principles	Chapter 5:2, page 150
2 Using lamps	Chapter 5:2, page 150
And record sound professionally
Hierarchy of sound recording techniques	Chapter 5:3, page 171
Then improve your camera composition
Better looking films	Chapter 6:1, page 194

 

First record sound professionally
Sound recording techniques	Chapter 5:3, page 150
And look at other documentary filmmakers to get ideas
Documentary background to revival	Chapter 6:3, page 221

 

First shoot so that you can work with the clips on any screen
Shooting for compression	Chapter 5:5, page 188
Then avoid clichés
Ingredients of VJ work	Chapter 6:4, page 238

1. A condensed guide to shooting

This chapter is going to help to get you filming quickly, taking you through the basics of filming so that you can start working on the projects detailed in this book. Refer to this chapter before you start each project so that you go shooting with more confidence, aware of the various obstacles that could arise.

Preparing yourself

As we saw in Chapter 4, much of the filmmaking process is about how to deal with problems – minor and potentially larger ones. Every day you may encounter some obstacle to your plans, some person or rule that puts everything on hold. The sorts of skills you need to overcome these problems are the kind that you use every day to deal with many situations: those transferable skills that have enabled you to negotiate a pay rise, calm a distraught friend, sort out a problem with your bank – or all three at the same time. All these hurdles are the kind that have been secretly preparing you for the process of shooting. You already have the most important skills needed to accomplish the task of making a movie, and when you put these to work with your technical knowledge of cameras and your ideas about what you want to express on video, you are on your way.

Equipment

You need:

• Video camera.
• Power supplies. Batteries or mains connection cables.
• Videotapes. Take four or five for a day’s work, although it is unlikely that you will accomplish this much shooting.
• Camera support. Take a tripod.
• Microphones. A boom or shotgun mic should cover most situations, but take a unidirectional cardioid mic as well if you have one. A lavalier or clip-on mic will help with close-ups, or if you want to exclude other noises when recording dialogue.
• Lights. If you only have one lamp, make sure it’s a strong key light such as a Redhead (a brand name, but people will know what you mean if you refer to it). But you don’t always need highpowered lamps – DV copes with less light than previous formats, so a 300 W should cover you for all eventualities. But you can make great-looking films using just one strong, purpose-built lamp. Avoid using lamps that clip on to the camera. If you have the budget to use a good range, see the list in Chapter 5:2 (the ideal kit-bag), but also refer to this list for the extras you will need, such as gaffer tape.
• Monitor. If you want to be sure that the film you are shooting maintains the highest technical standards throughout, consider using a monitor, a small television hooked up to show you what you are recording.

The camera

• Focus. Don’t shoot constantly with automatic focus as it plays havoc with interesting compositions. Use manual focus and check that the frame looks sharp and in focus often, even after the slightest movement of camera or actors.
• White balance. See Chapter 2:3 for details of white balance.
• Aperture (iris control). Automatic settings will again affect your best laid plans with lighting. See Chapter 2:3 for more about this.
• LCD display. But it uses more power to use the LCD display than the small viewfinder – often halving battery life.
• Timecode. See Chapter 7:5 for more details about timecode.
• Continuity. Keep notes, take Polaroids, use video shots – anything to make an accurate record of the location of props, the arrangement of costumes, the kind of light, the costumes and so on.

Using audio

• Record sounds separately if you want to be able to manipulate them later in the editing stage.
• Use a mixing board if you have one.
• Don’t record with the built-in camera mic, but if your mics fail and you have no choice, go ahead and use the camera mic, as you can use this as a guide track if you need to dub sounds later.
• Look at the hierarchy of sound recording techniques in Chapter 5:3. Use this as your default guide to every situation.
• Use headphones to be sure that you hear the levels of audio correctly.
• Use XLR adapters on the mic cables to minimize interference.
• Always record at the highest possible level before the sound starts to distort.

Working with actors and crew

• You may get far more out of actors if you treat them as part of the team – involve them in discussions about the direction in which the film is headed.
• Don’t skip on good, plentiful food on set – for actors and crew. Aim for cheap, filling food that suits everyone: pizzas, fried food and so on (‘I was nearly fired for taking two donuts when it was made clear that one was the maximum per day per person’ – Harrison Ford on the set of American Graffiti).
• Listen to your actors – they may have as much or more experience than you about filming.

Getting help

What happens if you are filming and you come up against a technical problem you cannot solve? The downfall of many filmmakers is a lack of experience of technical issues – it stops a production in its tracks and undermines your confidence.

• Get to know the retailer where you buy your filmmaking gear. They make a living working out what each bit of equipment does, how useful it is and why you need it. They may help with your questions to make sure you come back and buy more goods.
• Get involved, in advance, with local filmmaker networks. One of the strong points about the independent sector is that people help each other, on the whole. Exchange of information and help is the commodity it thrives on, as much as Hollywood does on dollar bills. Cultivate contacts with other filmmakers and don’t be shy to ask for help.
• Use the Internet for quick advice. If you can wait 24–48 hours, post a notice on one of the excellent filmmakers’ notice-boards, such as Shooting People (UK) or IndieWire (USA), and wait for a response. It’s common to see urgent ads asking for replacement actors, legal queries or technical problems. No question is too stupid and, in any case, answers are often posted on the site and benefit everyone.

How much to shoot and how long it will take

This one has no answer but it deserves attention because it is so frequently asked.

• Shoot as much as you like, but bear in mind that economical use of your tape helps focus your mind. If you shoot everything and anything, you may end up with 10 slightly interesting, unfinished films. Limit what you film and you make better decisions. But also remember that some of the most useful shots that add spontaneity to the movie are found by being more relaxed about how much you shoot.
• If you want to be able to compare what we could call the success ratio of useful to useless footage, it would be good to aim for something like 1:10. When independent feature films are being shot it is common to try to complete shooting of about two minutes a day, or two pages of script, but will vary according to the complexity of the sequence.
• If you work a whole day you might get in about four hours of shooting solidly. Short films tend to overrun more than features because there is the tendency to make each scene perfect.
• Build a good, fair schedule that reflects both your experience and the amount of available time you have and you will remain on time and, consequently, on budget.

But bear in mind that some schools of thought recommend gathering far too much footage, leaving the shaping of the whole movie to the post-production stage. George Lucas took this route on American Graffiti, and the result is a vibrant drama with a documentary feel.

Insurance

If you can stretch to the cost of this, it could be the one outgoing that enables you to carry on making movies. Ask your insurer about large-item cover for your basic equipment and check to see how you are covered if you borrow other people’s gear. If one of your actors breaks a leg during work and cannot take the next acting job, you need to be sure that you are covered either by written, legal mutual agreement or insurance.

Permission

If you are shooting in public you may (perhaps inadvertently) film someone who objects to being filmed, or would not like their image to be broadcast. A written consent form will cover you and save you from costly recutting or shooting later. Prepare a form that you can use on set should the need arise. Children will need the consent of their parents or guardians. In general, you can film anyone in a public place provided that footage is not improperly used, or shows them in a derogatory manner.

Emergency funding

What happens if you run out of money during filming?

• Credit is one option, but investment from people who believe in your project is better. Credit has the potential to stop future projects, even if it helps your current one.
• If you run up against the possibility that you cannot finish your film, don’t consider abandoning the whole project. Shoot certain key scenes and consider applying for completion funding.

The Crunch

• Plan the shoot well and you will achieve more
• Remember – power, batteries, headache pills
• Listen to advice
• Don’t rush – be confident and calm
• Be bold and decisive
• Improvise and think around a problem
• Be calm and relaxed
• Make the shoot fun for you and the crew – warm food, music and mutual support.

2. Lighting

Digital filmmaking is a double-edged sword: on the one hand you are going to be able to make a movie for less than you ever thought possible, but on the other you are going to have to be much more creative with very basic equipment. You don’t just need to make the best of what you have, but make what little you have look like the best. In the area of lighting, this is certainly true; good lighting has the ability to lift a film out of the limitations of its budget and into another league.

Basic principles

Purpose of lighting

Lighting helps to do the following.

Pick out relevant details and figures in a scene

At its most basic, lighting can pick out like a stage spotlight a significant part of the frame for us to focus on. But it goes beyond this to the use of shadow and light together. How we use shadows is similar to the way we use composition – it is another way of directing the viewer’s eye towards a certain part of a frame. We could simply zoom in on the important element, but the use of composition would then be limited. For instance, if you want to create a feeling that someone is isolated, we need to see space surrounding the figure, to suggest emptiness. We may also want to see the figure in relation to other objects, to suggest that the figure is smaller than the surroundings, and therefore vulnerable. So, shadow is a compositional tool as well as a visual direction, helping assign a meaning to what we see.

Reveal shape and form

How we use space is crucial to a frame. It is tempting to think in terms of the space within the four ‘walls’ of the camera frame as being all that we have to play with, but there are two other planes in the illusion we want to create. Three-dimensionality is central to creating the illusion of total space and the main way of revealing it is in variable lighting of parts of a form. By throwing light at just one of those planes of space we throw the others into relief. So a figure sitting on a chair can be lit by throwing strong light on the side, with less light reflected on the front, and none at all on the other side. In this way we see the differences in each aspect of the form and start to believe it is no longer flat. Two-dimensional shape and three-dimensional form are each made apparent to the viewer through variations of shadow.

Create mood and atmosphere

This brings us to the core of what lighting is for most filmmakers, an aid to creating a layer of meaning to a set of objects in a scene. A simple living room can be made to take on human characteristics of emotion simply by changing the use of light. A light bounced around the ceiling to create a flat, all-over look will suggest inertia or odd calmness. The same room lit by soft small lamps with warm orange colour casts will suggest a pleasant and attractive place. Again, strong lamps creating shadows of objects out of proportion to their size may create unease. There is no shortcut to knowing how to set up a certain look, despite what some film manuals will suggest with the outdated three-lamp technique, but one starting point is to use the accumulated wisdom of how we light for mood at home. From here, experiment with lamps to moderate or amplify moods.

As an aid to the camera

On a more prosaic level, this is probably the most important in the list. Without a basic level of light a camera will perform badly and even the most carefully set-up shot will not create the effect you want. DV cameras are more capable than VHS or other analog of picking up light, so you can get away with less powerful lamps. You probably don’t need to use the old 800 W Redheads that were common with low-budget filmmakers (see lamps guide below) but you will still require at least a 300 W lamp illuminating the subject. In almost all situations extra lights are preferable to ambient light.

Go to: Chapter 2:3 for details on how the camera reacts with light.

Allow you to create a style for the film

This is a less crucial function of lighting, but can help create a design for your movie that cuts across the entire film. It is essential to plan this before you turn up on set as any changes will seriously affect continuity and have a drastic effect on narrative. The most effective way to begin is by listing a few descriptive words which summarize the style you want. Sketch locations you have earmarked for the film and try them in different lighting set-ups until you get the effect that closely matches your description. Then experiment with lamps for real to see how it translates into reality.

Maintain continuity between takes and shots

Assuming that continuity is what you want for your film, lighting is an important factor in enabling continuity during production. Much of your work towards continuity will take place during editing, but lighting (and sound) is going to make this process much more straightforward. Use notes during planning and production to maintain a consistent quantity of light throughout a scene. You can change lighting effects for the next scene, but any lighting within a single scene (defined here as a sequence within a single time-frame and place) needs to be carefully adhered to.

Attributes of light

To describe how light functions in relation to a camera we need to understand first how we can measure it, what its attributes are. This is useful in figuring out what light is actually in a place (the objective light) and what we are seeing (the subjective light). The subjective light in our perception will always be what we are aiming towards in creating a lighting effect for a scene, but in order to set it up we need to think entirely in terms of objective light.

Hue

Hue is what we normally think of as colour. In technical terms colour is the reflective waves not absorbed by the surface of the object.

Saturation

This refers to the strength of that colour. We can describe a colour as being diluted or pure, using percentages to assign a measurement to this: 100 per cent would be described as pure colour, while 50 per cent would be half the saturation.

Brightness

This is a tough one to adequately describe, since it involves looking at what is both subjective and objective. We talk about light as being bright or weak, but this gets confused when other lights come into play – for instance, when a torch is shone directly at the eye we see it as being as bright as a car headlamp. It is confused further when colour is included. A green surface is perceived as being less bright than a red surface because the brain perceives red before other colours. For extra clarity in talking about brightness, a few extra terms have come into use: ‘luminance’ refers to the actual brightness of a surface, while ‘luminosity’ refers to the perceived brightness we think we see.

Good practice

Nestor Almendros, director of photography on many acclaimed movies, including Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) and The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980), often preferred just one light source, rejecting the traditional key, fill and background light technique. ‘The result [of this traditional method] has nothing to do with reality, where a window or a lamp, or at most both of them, normally provide the only sources of light.’ (A Man with a Camera, Faber & Faber, 1980, p. 8.) He used the key light as a functional source, taking his cue from the light that would be cast from sunlight or from an interior lamp. ‘Once the key light has been decided, the space around it and the areas that might be left in total darkness are reinforced with a very soft, gentle light, until what is reproduced on film is close to what the eye would see.’ (Ibid., p. 9.)

Almendros’s approach is to match reality through as little intervention as possible. And yet the three-lamp technique of placing a hard lamp, a smaller filler lamp and a background lamp at specific places around a subject has become a staple of many film schools. Other cinematographers also bemoan its use, blaming it for films where everything looks as if shot in a controlled studio. It does, they say, prevent the human eye from seeing places as real, whole environments – instead portraying them as theatrical stages.

High contrast

Film noir made a virtue out of using lighting with high contrast and unusually placed shadow. For example, a scene with a detective standing in a doorway, looking ominously at a figure he is tailing, may be lit with just a few puddles of light scattered around, some of which is strategically placed on the detective’s face but, by and large, the scene was under-lit, relying on darkness to evoke a feeling of menace and uncertainty.

Softening contrast

Contrast is badly used, however, if you use it without regard to whether it suits the film you are making. Although its effects are to make compositions look stronger, it can flatten three-dimensional objects by removing the shades of grey that show form. At this extreme, it is as destructive as flat, low-contrast, all-over lighting, which also has too little shadow to reveal three-dimensionality. Use contrast to a degree, but also add softer lights within the scene to make sure that the tonal values of objects are not lost. Use contrast as a tool to solve problems associated with composition or to help show depth and texture in a shot. But avoid using it simply as a style option, as it can take on too prominent a place in your film; use it as a tool to reveal atmosphere in a scene and to mask an absence of expensive props and sets.

Use lamps

Realism is often the aim of a filmmaker. But you don’t get realistic lighting by using just what is around naturally. If the camera was as sophisticated as the human eye then you could do this, but you have to help a camera to see as we see. This involves using additional light, whether you are outside in natural daylight or in what seems to be a well-lit room. The level of light is not really the issue here; it is about directing the light, altering its intensity and removing it from some areas. Lamps will help you with this, but you don’t necessarily have to go out and spend half your budget on the full range. Like everything, there are ways of using fewer.

Natural light and ambient light

Natural light varies considerably moment by moment and as such is a problem for continuity in any outdoor shooting. Certain parts of the world experience more settled weather and have a quality of light that varies little throughout a typical day. For instance, in Europe light is bluer (see colour temperature below) than elsewhere, weather is unsettled and frequent changes in cloud affect the intensity of light and its direction, and change it from hard light to soft and back again within minutes. In warmer countries nearer to the equator than Europe, light is less refracted through the atmosphere due to the sun’s position on the equator being higher, and can be harder, warmer in colour and more predictable to work with.

Ambient light refers to the kind of light that is present in a location without any additional artificial light. In a room, for instance, the light that is generated by a single bulb in the ceiling and that which is coming through a window would be the ambient light for that particular place. But for most camcorders this would be insufficient and would need boosting to a certain extent.

All of which points towards natural light being less useful for filmmakers than artificial. But many cinematographers highlight the effects of light at certain times of the day that are unmatched by artificial means. The so-called ‘magic hour’ of dusk or dawn presents colours that are extremely captivating, creating atmosphere through unusual shadow colours and glowing horizons.

 

When you assess a location, look for the level of ambient lighting present. Record tests on camera to see whether the existing light is sufficient or can be aided by bouncing natural light around with reflective boards.

Colour temperature

Something else that video cameras, particularly at the lower end, are not good at is balancing the colours they see, which is why they have a white balance feature that helps take out the ‘cast’ of a particular lighting condition – that is, the particular colours given off by most artificial light. The human eye performs a similar routine every time you enter a new environment. A room lit by a domestic light-bulb, for instance, will not give off true light in the way we think of daylight, but instead is tinted by orange. Your brain can automatically compensate for this, but the camera will need your help. We need either to use light that does not give off unwanted colours or adjust the camera to offset what it sees. On the other hand, like everything about filming, there are creative uses to colour imbalance, such as setting white balance incorrectly in outdoor daylight by altering it to remove the orange cast of indoor lamps, resulting in a cold, blue tint to the scene. The worst of all worlds is where daylight and artificial light are mixing in the same frame.

To understand this, we need to have a look at colour temperature. All light has a temperature, measured in degrees kelvin. In film, we refer to daylight as normal light – light giving a true reading of colours – and it resides somewhere in the middle of the scale, at 5600 degrees. This applies to sunny afternoon light in Europe, but in places where light is stronger, such as in California, colour temperature will be lower, whereas an overcast day with poor light will have a higher colour temperature. The point of looking at this is to be able to use certain lamps to light your scene effectively, with colour as true to daylight as possible. To this end, use tungsten lights, which have a colour temperature of near daylight, and avoid household lights for movies.

Figure 5.2 Colour temperature.

Tools

When you are on set there are certain shortcuts that will help you to make the best use of lamps, to troubleshoot and to use your time more efficiently. In an area of filmmaking that includes physics, electronics and perception, these are going to seem complicated at first but make real sense when you try them out.

The cosine law

This refers to the difference made to light when it is reflected. It is usually the case that when you shine a light at a surface it bounces at an angle to that surface and in doing so it covers more area than the original source. To put this into practice, suppose you have a figure in front of the camera, requiring lighting. You could bounce light from a white surface so it illuminates the figure. It would be useful, then, to know how much the light is reduced when it is reflected.

At a 60-degree angle the area of light is doubled, while the light actually reaching the figure is halved – it is covering a broader area but is less intense. At a 45-degree angle there is a 30 per cent loss, while any light bounced at less than 25 degrees loses a negligible amount of light.

The inverse square law

This law is as useful in sound work as in light, because both deal with the loss of energy over distances. In terms of light, it follows that since light spreads out (diverges), the further you move the lamp away the more it spreads out. The effect is that it becomes less intense as it covers a wider area. The basic idea is that when you move a lamp double the distance from a subject, the illuminance is halved. The practical value of this is that, when lighting a set with few lamps, or even just one, you can define how to reduce light more exactly simply by measuring how far you move a lamp to or from a subject. So if a lamp is one metre from a figure, and you feel the light is too bright, moving it two metres away will reduce the brightness by 50 per cent.

The camera and light

The video camera reacts to light in much the same way as the human eye. It has a sensor behind the lens, called a CCD (charge-coupled device), which converts light entering the lens into digital information to be stored on tape. But unlike the human eye, if there isn’t enough information coming into the lens, it compensates, resulting in bad quality, grainy pictures. Today’s cameras are designed to see in almost any lighting conditions, but you cannot rely on this to give a clear picture. To keep picture quality high we have to feed the camera lots of light. This doesn’t mean blanket lighting, but rather enough strong light in spots for it to maintain quality.

Most video cameras are less able to distinguish between shades of light or colour than traditional celluloid film. Film is about 10 times more able to see the various subtle tints or hues in a shot than video. To make matters worse, the chips embedded in lower-end cameras are less able again, and need particular attention. You will eventually get great results with any camera as long as you know the limitations of the camera you are working with. Be aware that video – at least at the low to mid range of cameras – does not read subtle light to the degree you might like; what looks good to the human eye may not reveal itself through a camera lens. This means lighting your sets in a certain way that will exaggerate natural light.

Automatic camera features: why you don’t need them

Your biggest enemy on the camcorder is probably the automatic setting. This is useful for some conditions, but on the whole you cannot rely on it to deliver when it comes to creative filmmaking – it’s the fast food of lighting. Since the camera fills in the frame if it doesn’t see the amount of light it would like, it is better to have a camera with manual override to switch off this feature – which the vast majority do. This means you can set the lighting yourself and be more creative about what you record. As an example, you may want to shoot a scene in which a group of people are in a room, with windows behind them with bright sunlight flooding in. On auto, the camera simply cancels out some of the sunlight, rendering the figures dark beyond all recognition, the sunlight just about right. But you may want the scene to be overexposed (too much light coming in) in the windows because that gives a certain feel to the scene, and in any case is the only sure way to still see the figures. Automatic will do it the way the manufacturer’s handbook says, but manual allows you to do it your way.

The iris and light

Just as with the human eye, the camera has a small hole at the front of the lens that controls how much light is allowed in. In bright conditions, it closes slightly to block some out, while in darker conditions it opens to make more of what little light there is. On a technical level, the iris is important in stopping the inner workings of the camera from being damaged by too much sunlight, just as does the human iris. Too much light also stops the camera from reading colour correctly. But like other features on the camera, we can use the iris creatively. Allowing too much light, or restricting light, can be useful ways of adding atmosphere to a scene.

Depth of field and light

Furthermore, the iris performs a quite separate job of adjusting how much of the frame is in focus. This is called depth of field and refers to the aperture of the iris. On some cameras these are expressed in numbers, such as f/2, f/8 and so on, the larger numbers corresponding to the smaller hole openings. As we have seen, the higher the f-stop number (or the smaller the opening of the iris), the greater the depth of field. Greater depth of field means that you get more objects in focus before and behind the main focal point. In some conditions, then, you may want to open up the iris for other reasons than just light.

Go to: Chapter 2:3 for more details on depth of field.

Lamps

When using lamps we can break them up into categories, serving different functions. In different ways, each lamp will affect both the technical aspects of your production – for instance, by exposing too much or too little – as well as the artistic aspects, such as dramatic mood and atmosphere.

For each lamp, we should look at its:

• Quality – or the harshness or softness of the light it throws. Hard light refers to a light that is not diffused and creates strong, crisp shadows and reveals texture. Soft light is more diffused and reveals form but less texture.
• Intensity – that is, how bright it is. This is determined partly by the amount of power going in and by the type of bulb it uses, such as halogen, fluorescent or tungsten.
• Colour temperature – that is, what kind of colour cast the light gives when picked up on non-whitebalanced film. Ideally, you should stick to lamps that do not have any inherent colour of their own, allowing you maximum freedom to add your own, with the use of gels, a transparent coloured film that is placed over the lamp (don’t use anything but a film manufactured for use with lamps – something that can’t stand the heat could be a fire risk).
• Direction – that is, the degree to which you can point the light at the places you want. For many lights, however, you will have the option of shutters or barn doors, which allow you to let the light diffuse outwards in many directions or fill just a small area of the set.

Further to this, you need to consider how simple each lamp is to use in exterior shooting in terms of how easy it is to move about and how much power it consumes.

• Redhead. A good workhorse and very versatile, this 800 W tungsten–halogen (quartz) lamp is named after the colour of the lamp top, although actually a kind of orange. It is the brand name of Ianiro, but its popularity has made it a generic term for this sort of lamp. Use this for hard light as your main lamp; it is too strong to use easily as background, but you can direct away from the subject by bouncing light off other surfaces to get adequate fill light.
• Blonde. So called because of its gold painted head, it is a 2 kW lamp from the same company as the Redhead. This is a versatile, strong and reliable lamp with uses for key and fill lighting.
• Pup, Mizar, Inky-Dink. These trademark names are all at the lower end of intensity and power. These are useful for lighting very small pockets of the set, with direct, focused beams. Use these for picking out specific parts of the set.
• Dedo. A set of lights probably out of the price range of most low-budgeteers, these are actually a set of lights that are small and versatile and designed to add complexity and variety to a set. The name comes from the company, Dedo Wiegart Film.
• HMI. Using a special, high-pressure metal–halide bulb, this lamp is much more economical in terms of power use, and is brighter than a similar wattage Blonde. It has the colour temperature of daylight and so can be used to fake sunlight in interiors, or to just maintain good colour balance.
• Sun-gun. This is a term referring to any battery-powered, hand-held light, available in tungsten or halogen.

You should be able to find any of these lamps through specialist suppliers or via photographic retailers.

Lamps: the ideal kit-bag

Whatever your budget, you need to still work with the same kind of range of lamps. Some of these lamps can be supplanted by those not specifically made for the film industry, but the range should be about the same as that used in a well-resourced production.

If you can, get hold of:

• Big, versatile lamps such as the Redhead. Get three or four if you can. Anywhere between 300 and 800 W is sufficient.
• A battery-powered, hand-held lamp: the sun-gun.
• At least two small, highly directionable lamps, such as Mizars or Dedos.

On top of this, you should carry:

• Many metres of extension cable.
• Some distribution boards or multi-sockets.
• A large flat, white, reflective surface, such as card or polystyrene, or a folding, reflective panel called a Lastolite, to bounce light around or complement lighting without too many smaller lamps.
• Some coloured gels, especially blue, so that your tungsten lamps will not upset colour balance in daylight.
• A few sheets of tracing paper to diffuse light but make sure it is heat resistant.
• Lots of bull-clips or pegs to attach gobos (opaque pieces of board to obscure light and make interesting shadows) and gels. Wooden clothes pegs are also good for this.
• Spare bulbs. You could change these more often than you need, to avoid a lamp blowing just in themiddle of a crucial, one-off scene.
• Gaffer tape, to bundle wires out of the way and make your set safe.

If you are a no-budget filmmaker, try:

• One strong lamp of up to 800W

or

• A starter kit of three smaller 300 W lamps.

The Crunch

• Get to know how your camera reacts to different lighting conditions
• Keep control over your camera – avoid automatic features
• Use high contrast for web films
• Say no to the three-lamp technique – it will turn your films into stage sets
• Use a small selection of good lamps
• Use lamps as near to daylight in degrees kelvin as possible
• Avoid at all costs a scene where both daylight and artificial light meet
• Look at alternative methods of lighting – try lamps you already have, but also look for cheap alternatives for halogen (household security lights, for example)
• Feed the camera what it wants – strong light.

3 Sound recording

Video filmmaking is cheap, enabling you to make movies at a fraction of the cost of those on traditional celluloid film. But for most filmmakers using basic, consumer digital equipment, picture and colour resolution are poorer than high-level digital video or film. In one particular area, however, you can compete with the very highest quality: sound. The sound quality of your movies can equal the best by using a 16-bit digital stereo signal and an interesting layer of sounds. If you can master good quality sound recording, you can give your film the best possible start in life.

Reasons not to use the built-in camera mic

The easiest way of recording sound is by using the mic that comes built in with your camera. But sooner or later you will see the limits of the camera mic and need to invest in an external mic to plug into your camcorder. For almost all filmmakers, inbuilt mics are too inflexible, whether for creative work or documentary. The essential aspects that you need to be able to control are the level of sound (how prominent it is on the video), which part of your location you record (which actor, for example) and the background sounds.

Cam mics boost sound levels unnaturally

The problem with built-in mics on camcorders is that they boost sound levels automatically, even if there is not much to hear. This is very frustrating when encountered for the first time and results in costly reshoots or extensive post-production cleaning up. For example, if you film a quiet room with whispering voices, the camera will push up sound levels and end up recording the background, ambient sound too loudly. This doesn’t mean that it records low-level voices at perfect volume, but that it pushes up the whole range of sounds in the room, and not just the one that you actually want to hear.

You can’t tell if the sound levels are correct

The problem with camcorders is that they do not usually offer any way of viewing the sound levels. This means that you have no visual way of accurately telling whether sounds are being recorded at the right level, which should be as high as you can get it without the sound distorting.

Your basic aims for sound skills

1Record sound cleanly

2Get to know about external mics

3Know how to record ambient sound

4Record any sound anywhere

5Match camera with sound

6Create a sound environment

7Consistency and continuity in recording.

Clean sound

Recording sound with DV is not very different to any other format; the crucial placing of the mic is the most important factor in the quality of the sound you record, just as it always was. Even the best mic in the world will perform badly if used in the wrong context, but the worst mic will perform far better if it is used exactly in the right way. One of the most fundamental skills is recording sound as cleanly as possible and knowing how to use the mic is the first step in achieving this.

Clean sound is a track that is free from interference, free from background or unwanted sounds and recorded at the maximum level.

The reason why clean sound is needed is because it opens up wider possibilities in post-production. Post-production sound technique, as we will see later, is concerned with how you mix and layer sounds to create an aural environment. Sounds that can be isolated and treated separately are much easier to edit with than ones where parts of other sounds are audible beneath.

To do

• Learn how to use mics.
• Always carry a variety of mics.
• Use headphones to hear immediately if problems occur.
• Plan a scene in advance so you know what sounds to expect.
• Place the mic correctly to record only what you want to record (see ‘Know about ambient sound’ section below).
• Always record sounds at the highest level possible, which will appear as zero on a sound meter. This is the last point before clean sound becomes distorted through excessive levels.
• Watch out for interference from power sources (cables or concentrations of hi-fi or computer equipment). Mobile phones will also cause problems. Note that you can’t always hear interference on headphones and you need to play back to be sure your sound is clean.

Get to know about external mics

Different mics react in different ways and it is essential to find out which is best for which job. Go through the list below to work out the uses for each one. In basic terms, mics tend to accompany the shots you are familiar with on your camera and can be considered in a similar way: some mics will pick up a whole room or environment, just as in a long shot; some will pick up a smaller area, as in a mid-shot; and others will pick up only very close subjects, as in the close-up shot. Within this range are many varieties to accommodate different conditions.

To do

• The best way to learn what each mic does, once you know the general purpose of each one, is to play with them.
• Take them out and shoot in a range of locations. See how they perform in big spaces, tiled rooms, noisy train platforms and so on. Only through applying a hands-on knowledge of each mic does a good working knowledge of them take root.

Know about ambient sound

Ambient sound is one of the most underrated aspects of a shoot. If used badly or ignored it can ruin a scene, with little chance of correcting it. But if used well it has the potential to make editing a smooth process. It helps with continuity and with enabling consistency in recording, all of which are next on our list.

Ambient sound refers to the background sound in a certain location, containing sounds that are indistinguishable from each other much of the time.

When you shoot in a room or other location there is a constant sound reflecting the environment unique to that place. Each time you move the camera and microphone position for different shots, the ambient sound will change slightly. Also, every time you record a new take, perhaps if an actor has missed a line, the ambient sound has changed slightly. If you then edit these shots together, those sound differences will become very apparent. The audience won’t know exactly what is wrong but it will immediately remove any sense of illusion, which is why the radical Danish group Dogme 95 insists on not using ambient tracks.

To do

• To add an ambient track, record a few minutes of background sound for every scene while on location and loop this on the film later, at a constant but low level.
• If you are filming an interior scene, simply empty the room of actors and hold the mic steady, pointing at nothing in particular, but not too close to anything giving off sounds that could distort the overall track, such as computer fans or air-conditioning.
• When doing this, don’t fall into the trap of recording it quietly – in other words, down on the decibel register. If you have a digital recording device, such as mini-disc, you may be able to alter the level at which you record, but you may have to use the camera itself for these sounds, and most midrange or consumer-level cameras record on an automatic level.
• As with everything, record as high as you can go – usually −8 dB, or zero on a meter. Reduce the volume at the editing stage later.
• For a more professional feel, record two presence tracks to add depth and to aid in creating a transition between two clips.

Record any sound anywhere

In just about any recording set-up it is necessary to add extra sounds in post-production to create a ‘sound environment’. This means that you need to be able to use the right mic to record anything you need. CD sound effects are going to sound nice in isolation, but really do not compare with sound you have recorded yourself. CD collections tend to be extremely sterile in their sound, somehow making atmosphere hard to create for a scene. Avoid them as far as possible.

Use the guide below to the hierarchy of sound recording techniques to get a starting point for just about any situation. For best results, a hand-held unidirectional mic will pick up most sounds cleanly, but it is important to experiment widely with recording sounds so that you are aware of distance from the subject as a factor in both clean sound and good levels.

To do

• Carry a lavalier mic, a unidirectional mic and a contact mic if you are recording sounds, as opposed to recording an entire situation, where a boom would be necessary.
• Try recording a range of sounds, such as a washing machine, cat purring, taps pouring water, fire crackling, car exhaust, telephone conversation, footsteps, door unlocking. This list may then enable you to feel confident in situations where sounds are quiet, sudden, via transmission, at a distance or variable in levels.
• As mentioned above, always record at maximum level. And use headphones.

Match camera with sound

This is another essential which will inhibit an audience’s belief in your scene if used badly. It refers to the process where the level of sounds matches what we see on screen. So if actor A is close to the camera and actor B is further away, we would expect A to be louder than B. To a great extent this relates to the use of the boom mic; placing it accurately – in other words, close to whatever is nearest to the camera – will ensure that certain parts of the frame are heard more prominently.

A central part of this skill is the idea of ‘sound perspective’. This refers to those sounds coming straight from the source itself, or direct sound, and those that are reflected by surfaces on their way towards the mic. We usually hear direct sound when the camera is in close-up. We may see a face near to the camera and expect to hear it as if we were standing close to the figure in place of the camera, because the sounds are hitting our ears – the mic – before they hit the walls or the floors or any other reflecting surface.

With reflected sound, you help to create a sense of the place in which the actor is speaking by recording the way the words bounce around the room. Hard surfaces such as stone, tiling or glass produce a strong reflection as they bounce the sound back, whereas soft surfaces such as upholstery and curtains will absorb sound waves, thereby deadening the sound and reducing echo.

Recording this sort of sound is difficult as various surfaces at various distances from the subject reflect in different ways but, if recorded correctly, the effect of using this kind of spatial awareness in sound can add a real sense of three-dimensionality.

To do

• Make sure the boom handler is in close contact with the camera operator, or use a camera monitor to show which parts of the scene are close and which are further away.
• Let natural sound reflections carry. Don’t try to eliminate the way sound bounces around a room or is reflected more harshly off hard surfaces.
• It is hard to notice sound perspective, even with headphones. Try closing your eyes in rehearsal time to get a more realistic idea of what it sounds like.

Create a sound environment

This skill is related to both ambient sound and sound effects recording. With low-budget films in particular, it is necessary to create illusions of space, place or situation by adding sounds that were not present at the time. For example, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Scott managed to create the sense of a city crowded and polluted with dense layers of sound. The restrictions of his budget did not affect his ability (or rather that of the sound designer) to suggest scale and density of population. Seventeen years later, a similar dystopian sci-fi film The Fifth Element (1999) would employ every visual trick to emulate this kind of city, but still does not seem to match the claustrophobic effect achieved through sound environment in Scott’s film.

Planning is essential both in determining what sort of environment you want and how to record it. Use the script as the starting point for this. The notes in italic, the direction notes, may suggest a certain atmosphere or place.

To do

• Use timeline charts (see Chapter 4:4) to plan the sort of environment you want the viewer to believe isin front of them. In most cases this is concerned with enhancing elements that are already present – forinstance, by adding extra street sounds of sirens or crowds to create a more metropolitan feel, as inBlade Runner.
• Use your knowledge of clean sound recording and use of the right mic to capture sounds free of interference from other sounds, as far as possible.
• If using sound effects as loops to create a section of sound environment, make sure each sound has no sound ‘spikes’, where sudden and noticeable parts stand out. Audiences will become aware of the existence of a loop.

Consistency and continuity in recording

Good sound recording will not be noticed by anyone outside Academy voters, but bad sound recording will be noticed by just about everyone in the audience. Each of the ideas above contributes to sealing a soundtrack that supports what we are seeing on screen. To connect these together, we need to look at the uses of sound in continuity. As we will see in Chapter 6:2 on continuity filming, the aim is to ensure that editing does not disrupt the illusion we want to create. As soon as two shots recorded separately are placed together there is the potential for sudden changes in sound quality. With ambient sound we have seen how a background track can iron over the creases created when two shots are edited together. This creates a feeling of simultaneity so that events can be seen to be occurring at the same time. But it is important not to rely on ambient sound too much beyond what it is meant to do. Sound recording must be consistent throughout a scene, first and foremost, and throughout the film in terms of quality, levels and style. In this case, ‘style’ means any way of recording that is particular to the film, beyond the basic rules described here. For instance, a film where you want certain levels of tension and claustrophobia may require a foregrounding of most sounds, so that the viewer hears everything intensely and hyper-realistically.

To do

• Ensure that sound levels are consistent for an entire film. Agree at the start what level you will be shooting at – usually at the maximum on the sound meter, or zero – and stick to it.
• Sloppy recording will be apparent when sounds are recorded too low and need to be boosted later in post-production – a background hiss may become heard.
• Make a note of the quality of sounds recorded on location and re-record if necessary – don’t wait until post-production to examine them.
• If you have to dub dialogue over later – known as ADR, or automatic dialogue replacement – make sure you carefully revisit your notes on how sounds were recorded and what mic you used. ADR is notoriously difficult to do and it is better to reshoot rather than risk badly synchronized voices. But you might want off-camera voices, where lips don’t need to match sounds, and these present similar problems.

Tools of recording

Recording with external mics

Recording with a slightly more expensive camera may allow you to alter the levels at which you record. Loud sounds can be reduced and low ones omitted. These kinds may also allow you to plug in a mixing board so that sounds are recorded at a maximum and at clearer levels. Mixing boards are good for filmmakers; they enable you to have far greater control over what you record and how it is mixed, so that different mics can be used simultaneously for the situation.

The constant aim, regardless of what equipment you have or what production you work on, is to get the strongest possible signal without getting distortion, so any device that allows you to boost or reduce signal is going to make life much easier on set. One of the best principles of sound recording is to get the microphone as close to the subject as camera framing will allow. This way, you will get more of the sound you want and less of the sound you don’t.

High quality mics usually use what is called XLR as connectors, which gives it a balanced signal – so you hear no interference – even over long distances of cable. It works by having two opposite wires – one positive and the other negative – and when electrical interference is picked up on the cable, that noise is heard by both wires. Because they are opposite, they each cancel out the offending signal. Don’t get hold of a cable that has XLR at one end and a mini-plug at the other; a transformer on it to convert the signal is superior.

For the professionally minded filmmaker – even if not professionally funded – external mics are going to be a necessity. There are basically six common types:

• Personal mic. Also known as a lavalier, clip-on or tie-mic, this is a discreet small mic that can be easily hidden from view, clipped onto the actor’s clothing. For dialogue these give great results, as they pick up a full, deep, resonant sound from the chest.
• Hand-held. A common mic used in close proximity by on-camera interviewers.
• Boundary effect. These are used to pick up reflected sound bounced from hard surfaces and are sometimes known as PZ or PZM mics.

• Contact mics. These are used for attachment to musical instruments or the picking up of any other sound in physical contact with a surface or object.
• Shotgun mic. A very useful mic for location shooting, as it picks up sounds at a moderate distance from the camera.
• Studio mics. These encompass a range of mics used for studio filming, including television work.

What to use and where

Let’s go through the uses of these mics and look at what sort of mic you will need and what you can manage without.

Basic level

If you are working at the most basic levels of equipment, you need a dynamic microphone. This is a rugged type often used in news reporting and can cope with a wide mix of recording situations. A really useful feature is that it does not need a power supply, unlike the next category we shall look at. If time is at a premium and you don’t want to be reshooting, you need to avoid the mic battery running out during a scene. Dynamic mics don’t necessarily give the best quality but are easy to manage and will give you clear sound if you are not sure what to use.

Mid to experienced level

Once you get more experienced, you can start using the more sensitive and vastly smaller condenser/capacitor mics. These are not so good outside in poor weather and do need a small power supply coming through the mic cable itself, from a mixing board or an AC power supply. They also run off batteries, which can be a more flexible, convenient option but will, to the fury of you and your crew, run out of power without informing you.

Which microphone?

Within the categories above there are a number of types, for situations ranging from recording all sound in a given area to that just within a small range. We refer to mics according to their directional characteristics – in other words, the range of the angle they will pick up. This is similar to lenses, where a wide angle will see everything within a wide range whereas a macro lens is better at picking up small, close objects. There are three types: omnidirectional, bidirectional and unidirectional.

• Omnidirectional. These mics are sensitive to sounds that they hear all around them. They will pick up these sounds equally, so they record what you want plus all the other sounds going on around. This may sound good for busy, crowded scenes where you want the actors to be heard amongst a crowd, but it is rarely as clear as that. These mics will not distinguish between sounds and will record everything as an even mix, which can be adequate in some situations if there are no other sounds around to interfere with what is your main sound. You are almost always going to want to avoid this kind of mic because control of sound is your primary aim and this simply gives free rein to whatever happens to be around, including sounds behind the camera.
• Bidirectional. These mics are open to sound coming from two directions and can be used in two-way interviews or, occasionally, when working with stereo. But achieving clear stereo is not easy to accomplish using these mics without some skill, and in any case it is better to play with directions of sound in the editing process, when you can alter the track of all sound sources (when recorded separately).
• Unidirectional. These really are the ones you need for your DV movies. If you go into a store and ask for one, however, you will be asked what kind you want from a range of four types. They all pick up sound coming from one direction, in decreasingly narrow ranges of sensitivity. With movies shot on digital video, unidirectional affords you the most control over what goes on to the soundtrack.

Types of unidirectional mic

Unidirectional mics involve a wide range of types and we need to look at these in some more detail:

1Cardioid. The least narrow unidirectional mic is the cardioid. It is named after the heart-shaped look of its range pattern. It picks up sounds in a relatively wide range in front of the mic, but is less sensitive to sounds from behind the mic. For many situations even this is too wide, as it will pick up reflected sound bouncing off the walls or other surfaces in addition to the original sound. You can reduce this by moving the mic to within five feet (one and a half metres) from the source of the bounced sound.

2Supercardioid. These mics record sound on a narrower range than the cardioid. The shotgun mic described earlier is an example of this type and is widely used on location shooting. They are useful because you can stand back from the source and point the mic from a distance of up to 13 feet (four metres) – safely recording sound of an actor while avoiding placing the mic in view of the camera.

3Hypercardioid. This is even more narrow than the supercardioid and is useful for some work where distance is required and you may have lots of off-axis, or unwanted, noise to avoid. These do need careful handling; move a little to the side – or if your actor moves – and you lose pick-up.

4Parabolic. These are the most directional of this range of mics. To be exact, this is not exactly a type of mic but a way of using other directional mics. You can fit a parabolic reflector, which allows the mic to pick up only those sounds along a very narrow line in front of the mic. If you use one of these reflectors, running from 35 cm to a meter in diameter, you will have a very accurate angle of recorded sound. But, as with the hypercardioid, any movement of source or mic needs to be closely accommodated and headphones should be worn to notice unwanted changes. There are not many situations when you need a parabolic mic for movie location work, so you can skip on these unless you intend to shoot a remake of de Palma’s Blow Out, or record field sports.

Good sound recording on location: the hierarchy of microphone techniques

There are ways of achieving good, clear sound from all your diverse sources on the movie set. Knowing how to get this when working at a fast pace is going to make your production move smoothly. In larger productions, there is a concept known as ‘the hierarchy of microphone techniques’ and this model can be used as your default method for recording a scene and then altered only when you encounter unusual recording situations.

In this technique, the top method of recording – number 1 – is going to work most of the time in most situations, while the method following it can be used when the first won’t work and so on.

1Overhead boom/shotgun mic

2Shotgun from underneath

3Shotgun mic placed in one position

4Lavalier (personal) mic in one position

5Lavalier mic on the actor

6Lavalier mic without cords.

Overhead boom/shotgun mic

If you want good quality sound with minimum effort and minimal mixing later, and if you want it to sound natural and not over-produced (in other words, artificial or too clean), the shotgun mic is the best option. This elongated mic is held, typically, above the heads of the actors, out of view of the camera. This is even more helpful when you start working on a scene that has more than two actors speaking. Actors can move about, enter or leave the scene, stand up or whatever they need to do and still be heard, the mic operator adjusting the angle of the boom to focus on the right person. Furthermore, there are no cables to get in your way. This approach will work in almost any scene and allows for great flexibility in what you record, depending on how close the mic is to certain sounds.

Shotgun from underneath

There are times, though, when obstacles on set get in the way of an accurate reading of all sounds and you may need to hold the boom from beneath the actor. This does alter the tone of the sound, as the lower, bass sounds are located in the lowest parts of the chest and are nearest to the mic. It is less common to do boom recording this way, as you are more likely to get the mic in shot and it reduces the freedom of movement of the actor, but it does have its uses because it is quick and easy to set up.

Shotgun mic placed in one position and lavalier mic in one position

There are occasions when it may not be convenient to hold a mic above an actor – for instance, if the camera is recording a wide angle – and it is easier to secure it to a stationary part of the set. You can secure a large boom mic or a small lavalier at a given point in a room, set or location to pick up a particular sound. There are times when this is the most favourable method when a boom is not feasible – as in a car – or when you need to pick up a sound on one part of a set only occasionally, allowing you to hold the main boom mic over the main action or dialogue.

Lavalier mic on the actor

Although not your first choice, a lavalier mic, or tie-mic, situated on an actor’s body offers a good method for recording dialogue. Some people prefer this mic as it gives a strong signal with lots of bass when using a standard consumer-level camcorder. These cameras record high quality sound but do not always allow you to alter the tone of the signal – something that can, in any case, often be achieved in post-production with very basic sound software. Attaching a mic to the body gives you deeper sound but is prone to interference when clothes rustle or other objects or actors obscure sound. On the whole, if you want natural sound it is better to record with hidden rather than attached lavalier mics. Bear in mind that if you do use lavalier mics a lot in your dialogue, the result will be clean but maybe a little too clean, and you may need to add ambient sound later to create a more natural effect, as achieved by a boom or shotgun.

Lavalier mic without cords

If none of the above work, then you can resort to the radio mic. These bring a disproportionate amount of problems with them, despite their usefulness in capturing a fast-moving, unpredictable source. These mics use a weak FM signal, as weak as possible to avoid contravening national guidelines, and so tend to attract interference from other radio transmitters. Local taxies, security walkie-talkies and other radio users near your location can often cause disturbance. Many radio mics allow you to alter the channel you use for transmission and it is usually possible to find a clear path free of interference, often in the UHF (Ultra-High Frequency) range, but you may still have problems with metal surfaces obstructing transmission. There are two types of radio mic: hand-held and clip-on. Radio mics are getting better at eliminating interference and some camcorders have built-in antennae for picking up this sound. The convenience of the radio mic is obvious, but it is the method most prone to causing problems.

Line feed levels: getting the mixture right

If you can invest in a mixing board to combine the various sounds being recorded you will achieve high quality results. As we have seen, one of the main advantages is being able to see the levels – the power – of the audio signals and adjust accordingly.

Using an audio mixing board

An audio signal entering a mixing board is boosted above that coming in from a standard mic, usually at the 600-ohm level. However, most camcorders can’t function with sound this powerful, so you will need to reduce the signal by about 30–50 dB, although some mixing boards have a simple switch to set the levels at the right point for camcorder mic inputs. Again, make sure you check for interference on the signal the camcorder picks up, not just that which the mixing board hears. Testing is crucial to see whether your levels are correct and whether you are experiencing problems with interference, so record a test scene and play the sequence back using headphones. Don’t rely on what you hear on headphones as you record, as sometimes you may hear a buzzing sound on the tape that you couldn’t hear when recording.

Location recording troubleshooting

To summarize the ideas we have covered so far, it may be useful to look at a few different situations and see how you would use mics and how you would record the signal. There is no typical scene; every film has different needs and will present different problems.

Example 1: two figures, interior

A scene involves two actors, A and B, situated in a room. They talk and at a particular point a third actor appears at the door, after which the scene cuts. For this sequence you can assume that the dialogue is important and needs to be clear and audible. As the two actors are sitting in the same position throughout the scene, you could use a stationary shotgun or boom mic, which picks up their voices. Actor C appears later and we will need to pick up what is said by all three. Actor C will stand at the door entrance and say a few lines before departing, so we can safely attach a hidden lavalier cardioid mic to the side of the door frame.

You will also need to record the extra sounds to be placed behind these tracks later, when editing. You would first record ambient sound or presence, which acts as a continuity device, smoothing over the subtle alterations in background hum as you film each part of the sequence. Record just a few minutes of this using omnidirectional or cardioid mics, and loop it when editing. Each of the other separate sounds are recorded including, for instance, street sounds outside the room, footsteps of actor C coming up the drive and a slightly exaggerated door opening and shutting.

Example 2: several figures, street scene

The scene is set in a narrow street with several actors, all of whom are talking simultaneously. There is a strong sense of atmosphere as the rich sounds of a street market, traffic and cathedral bells in the distance combine. To record this complex scene, use a shotgun mic mounted on a pole or boom, situated a little higher than usual above the actors’ heads. The shotgun is good for giving you a sense of sound perspective (sounds far away are less powerful) and will pick up other background sounds to give a more natural sound, but will not drown out the main voices. If one actor above the others needs to be heard at one point, you can direct the mic the right way. Even though you are recording good, natural sound with the voices, you still need an overall ambient track to iron out the differences in the various takes later. You will, don’t forget, be shooting over a period of time, during which the sounds of the street may change. With this scene, you could use a dynamic mic to record everything if you want to stick with basic equipment; it should pick up sounds in all the various conditions present, but may compromise quality.

Example 3: two figures, a car, exterior

A scene involves two people in a car. A third is to talk to the others as they arrive at their destination and get out of the car in one continuous take. This is tricky, as it involves different situations, dialogue and potential problems with situating the mics.

To begin the scene, place lavalier mics in the car. Hide one each on both driver and passenger sun visors to pick up dialogue clearly. Attaching it to clothes would cause problems with seat-belt or clothes causing rustling sounds. If you can’t attach it to the sun visor (a soft-top with the roof down?), try attaching to clothes but soften the clothing and take out the starchiness that causes the noise by damping a small section of cloth, out of view.

When the two reach their destination, we need to have one take in which they get out of the car and talk to a third actor. Record this by using an overhead boom mic angled to pick up all three at the same time. The noise of the car engine will also appear in the background of the shotgun track, adding realism. The lavalier will pick up the last of the conversation in the car, while the shotgun picks it up from there outside. In this case, you actually need a difference in sound to reflect the move from interior to exterior, so the alteration in what you pick up is satisfactory. If you want one continuous recording, try a radio mic attached to the actor’s body, but switch to a more reliable mic as soon as you can in the scene.

Example 4: three figures, exterior, sea front

Continuing on from the scene above, let’s assume the three actors then walk down to the sea front and talk further. Recording this scene presents problems because of the need to keep crew and cameras well back from the actors as they walk further along the beach and the potential of wind noise to interfere with quality. Although parabolic mics are going to do the job more cleanly, a hypercardioid may be easier to use as it does not have to be so pin-point accurate, and if your actors are moving around this is going to be crucial. If you are restricted by your equipment, and do not have an accurate longdistance mic, you could consider overdubbing voices if you cannot actually see clearly the actors speaking their lines. You may still want natural sound, with all the ambient sound of the beach location, but this could be more easily handled if the actors are close to the camera. This would be a better option than radio mics in some ways, since the latter will tend to give sound that is too clear and neat, requiring you to lay over much ambient sound to ‘rough it up’ sufficiently to convey the location.

Sound effects

If you have relatively little experience of sound work it is better to record all your sounds on videotape at first and then, in the editing stage, import and alter sound clips in the same way as you would for vision clips. This method for recording background sound or particular effects, such as footsteps or telephone rings, is straightforward because you can simply use your existing editing software and don’t need to yet get involved in specialist sound software. The timeline in most software offers a useful visual guide to the layers of sound on the soundtrack. On the negative side, capturing these clips at the editing stage is less than economical, as video clips are far larger than sound files, but you can, of course, delete vision from these files as you use them.

There are two formats available if you choose to record sound separate to the camcorder: mini-disc and digital audio tape (DAT).

DAT

Digital audio tape was created in 1987. The quality of the DAT format is such that professional studiosvery quickly adopted it and made it the digital standard for recording. It offers three hours of digitalsound on a tape half the size of an analog audio cassette tape, with the same format as a CD (44.1 kHzsampling frequency and 16 bits). While both digital compact cassette (DCC) tape and mini-disc usedata compression, DAT is the only consumer recording standard that does not, meaning that the wholesignal is held on the tape. DAT is easy to use on location; indexing of the tape and rewinding areextremely fast (50 seconds for a 120-minute tape), so you can quickly access any place on the DATtape. For clarity and purity of sound, DAT rivals the compact disc (CD).

Mini-disc

Mini-discs were created by Sony in 1991 as a disc-based digital recording medium that is as near to CD quality as possible. There are two types of mini-disc (MD): pre-mastered MDs, which can be recorded on once only and are similar to CDs in operation and manufacture; and recordable MDs, which can be recorded on repeatedly and employ magneto-optical technology.

DAT vs mini-disc: which format is better for filmmaking?

Bear in mind that while DAT and MD are both digital formats, MD stores audio signals using a data reduction or compression technique and there are data quantity differences between the quality of a CD recording and an MD copy of it. But this doesn’t mean that anyone listening will hear the difference; most people will assume the CD and the MD recording are the same. So, for filmmaking there is going to be a negligible difference between the high-data DAT and the compressed MD. However, the one disadvantage of MD is that differences from the original increase with each generation copy, even though it is recorded digitally. There is a build-up of ‘artefacts’ (picture disturbances caused by technical limitations) as data is recompressed.

The Crunch

• You may not have the best model of camcorder on the market, but you can have sound quality to match big-budget productions
• The camera mic is almost never a good solution to your sound needs
• Use good quality mics with XLR transformers and adapters to attach to your camera mic input socket
• There is no need to buy the whole range of mics unless you can afford to right now; a good shotgun cardioid and a lavalier will cover you for most situations, while a hand-held cardioid mic will help record individual sounds
• While you are building up experience of how to record sound in varied situations, use the hierarchy of recording techniques.

What this project is for: to get better at sound recording
Time: allow a few days for planning, two days for shooting and a few days for editing

What this project is about

This film is going to put into practice a few ideas we have covered so far. This doesn’t mean it is necessarily harder than other projects, just that it starts to challenge you on several levels. Here’s how.

This project asks you to make a film in which we don’t see the main aspects of the narrative. We are going to use the powers of suggestion in sound to imply what is happening rather than showing it directly, allowing us to make a drama that relies less on a big budget and more on what comes free – namely, your skill and imagination.

The film centres around a figure running through a series of dark streets, running into different obstacles,possibly being chased by something we cannot see. We only hear what the figure encounters throughoutthe film. In addition to your use of sound, we need to use the ideas brought up in the earlier parts ofthis section, on using the camera. Use the whole range of camera angles in this one, and go as far as youneed to suggest the tension and drama of the events of the plot. In order to keep your options open as to what the figure encounters, try to avoid complicating the plot in any way. It’s enough to use the figure’sjourney as our sole purpose of watching the movie.

Stage 1

Since we have the story worked out in its essentials, you need only at this stage to think of what the figure will encounter in its path. The specifics of this are down to you: you can make it a comic film, a serious scary movie or a futuristic fantasy. Indicate what the character is going to run into – for instance, ‘wild animal sound’ or ‘weird flying object’.

The kind of movie you make may be influenced by the locations you have access to. If you know of a place you can film with a labyrinthine set of corridors, or a series of narrow streets, or an industrial site, then let that be your deciding factor in where it is set. Add to the air of mystery by keeping several facts from the audience. Where are we? What year is it? Who is the protagonist?

Stage 2

Complete a set of visualizations and storyboards that detail how your film is going to look. Since we have few details to go on, it is going to be easy for the audience to become lost, so we are going to have to remain in control of continuity issues. This means making sure that the lighting you use is constant throughout, so that we get a sense of the chase taking place in one continuous flow of events. Keep the costume the same throughout and make sure that the direction of the figure running is maintained: this means he or she will probably go from left to right, exiting right but reappearing left and continuing on right. This will help to show that the movement of the figure is in one main direction: away from whatever is threatening.

Stage 3

Shooting this movie may feel artificial, or at least more artificial than it usually does. It’s going to be like Keanu Reeves dodging on a film set from a hundred imaginary, but soon to be computer-created, Agent Smiths. But bear with it. Indicate to your actor points on the set when particular reactions are required and, since we don’t have to use sounds recorded actually on set, you can shout as much as you need.

To maintain continuity of lighting, choose a set-up you like and stay with it. If you are unsure what to opt for, choose a strong single lamp stationary on the set, casting a light that the actor can enter and leave, revealing facial expressions and yet keeping the majority of the set in shadow, allowing us to fill the shadow, as it were, with sounds. Now and then, step back and take a few shots of the overall scene, showing off a particular part of the set that looks good. These covering shots, displaying the actor in full and allowing us to notice the left–right direction they are going in, are going to be useful later in the editing stage, helping to stitch the whole film together easily.

Stage 4

Editing this film is relatively straightforward. But before you start piecing it together, we need to put into place some way of the action getting more intense as the film reaches the end. Keep the individual cuts on the longer side at the start, perhaps four or five seconds or more, while the last quarter of the film sees the cuts get quicker, indicating a speeding up of the action and an imminent conclusion.

At this point we can start to think of the sounds that indicate what the figure has encountered. This is a time to have some playtime with the microphones. Spend a few days investigating and recording sounds. Go into this with an open mind; it really is a revelation how something very ordinary sounds when taken out of context. For example, try recording how a cabbage sounds when cut in half; the crunching sound was often used in horror movie scenes of a guillotine. Record washing machines, dripping water taps, a cat howling, and make use of whatever you can do with your voice. The aim is to find raw sounds that can later be layered to create a full and menacing soundscape.

Stage 5

When you begin the process of inserting sounds, try layering few together on the timeline. Import sounds directly into your editing program and play around with them on the timeline, listening to how they sound in conjunction with others. Look for the available tracks you have on the timeline and create as many as you need. Place the clips down first and make a complete silent movie. Many editing programs enable you to place visual markers on the timeline, so that you can tie-in certain sounds later to particular shots. Also make sure that you adjust the sound levels of each clip.

Make sure that you have:

• A constant noise that will indicate to the audience that we are in one place.
• A suggestion that there is a ‘something’ pursuing the figure, again by sounds alone. Try footsteps or a howling.
• A particular sound that we associate with the figure, maybe a musical watch or panic-stricken breathing. We need to associate the pursuer and the ‘pursuee’ with two very distinct sounds.

Evaluation

This project requires much more work on the post-production side than shooting. You may well have shot everything in one evening but then had to spend many days perfecting the sounds and the way they match the visuals.

How was the sound layering? Success in this area can be measured by how you have managed to take the sound out of its setting and given it a new life. So, if the sound of dog growling layered with a child’s rattle, for example, is like nothing else, then you have hit the right mark. As you may have found, the plot of the figure being pursued and encountering different events along the way is no more than a vehicle to allow us to play around with sounds.

Beyond this, however, look at how you handled the potential continuity problems. Play the movie to your friends, ask whether they noticed any unnatural jumps in action, as if a section of time had been removed, or whether it seemed as if the events of the film flowed realistically.

When looking at your use of the camera, make a note of the kinds of shots you used. Did you use shots which resembled each other too much? Or was the range of shots varied, maintaining our interest in the film?

Whatever you managed to achieve, the main purpose of this film has been to see in this very extreme example how sound can be just as powerful as images, but at a fraction of the cost.

I want something more challenging

We focused in this project on action-oriented scenes, which make it easier to include sounds because there are specific objects or places that need them. But if you wanted to try a more difficult version, opt for a scene where there is little discernible physical action and where the real action is going on in the mind of the protagonist. Refer back to the scene from Hitchcock’s Blackmail, earlier in this chapter. Can you devise a scene where simple sounds are used to create a metaphorical feeling? For example, in a scene of a simple family dinner, can you suggest what is going on in the mind of one person, who may be experiencing some terrible, traumatic period? Could sounds be amplified, altered, layered or new ones added to suggest feelings for this character?

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What this project is for: to look at how to change a scene simply by using sound
Time: allow around four or five hours for editing

What this project is about

The aim of this project is to find out exactly how far you can manipulate a scene by changing the sounds we hear. It is surprising how much of the total information we receive from a scene is derived from sounds. Some estimates put this at around 60 per cent from sound and 40 per cent from visuals. Put this to the test by replacing the sounds from an existing clip and altering how we perceive it.

Stage 1

Find a clip from a movie. This needs to be around three minutes long and centred on one location. A clip without dialogue is far easier to manipulate because the sounds of the environment are foregrounded, but it will work just as well with dialogue.

Stage 2

Watch the clip a few times and note the sounds you can hear. List these in order so that the loudest or most noticeable is at the top or your list, with other sounds placed below. Next, figure out how you could add to these sounds to alter the situation. For instance, can an interior scene have wartime noises outside, with sirens, bombs and crowds? Can you transform a city street into a futuristic one by adding sounds to suggest flying cars, futuristic talking billboards and so on (look at Jean-Luc Godard’s classic sci-fi movie Alphaville, a big influence on Blade Runner, to see how a contemporary street can be sent 50 years into the future).

Stage 3

Place the clip on the timeline of your editing software and gather sounds from other sources, such as other movies, sound effects CDs and your own recordings. Layer the sounds and mix them until you get an environment you feel matches your plans. Remember to always reduce the volume of the sound layers if you want another layer to be foregrounded, rather than simply increasing the volume of the main one.

Evaluation

The key to success in this film is a naturalistic sound environment which convinces the viewer that the sounds were always on the clip and do not seem out of place. To test this, watch parts of the movie before your clip and then watch your new sequence. There will be an obvious jump in the way it appears, but this is exactly what you want; the movie should seem to have moved to another entirely different location, even another genre or time. The more you have changed the movie, the more you have unleashed the power of sound to affect what we perceive.

I want something more challenging

To push this project further, try recording the sounds yourself, giving you good experience of foley work (sound effects). It will restrict you in what you can record, but will ensure that you also find out more about how microphones work.

Another challenge is to try using very diverse sounds to mix together and make new ones. Collect and merge sounds, using edit settings to alter the speed of them, perhaps to create entirely new ones. For instance, some spaceships in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002) are a mixture of sounds including what appears to be hydraulic machines and World War II Spitfire aircraft.

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4. Real world guide to location shooting

In this section we will road test what we have talked about so far and talk to filmmakers who bring their own experiences of location shooting to bear.

In each case, they highlight the way that what goes on while shooting on location is different to what is expected, and how knowing this can help prevent problems large and small. All the filmmakers have been making short films for several years and were interviewed by the author.

Matt Sheldon, James Sharpe, Liz Crow, Jon Rennie, Richard Graham, Sean Martin, Nick Ball, Max Sobol, David Casals and Carl Tibbets all make short films. Gurchetan Singh is a music promo director. Phil Grabsky is an award-winning documentary director. Jonnie Oddball is founder of 48-hour Film Challenge and a feature-film director.

How the shoot went

Liz Crow: I shot in daylight and for the days leading up to the shoot conditions were perfect, but just as the shoot got underway the sun appeared and spent the whole time dodging in and out of cloud, so my exposures were all over the place and the shots didn’t match. A reshoot was out of the question, so it had to be made to work. What it did was force me to experiment wildly in the edit. In the end, I think the resulting images are more interesting, more beautiful, than the pictures I’d thought I was trying to make.

Richard Graham: I’ve just finished post-production on my second short film, Kafkaesque. We shot over six pretty relaxed days and that included two nights of shooting in the supermarket location when it was (supposed to be) a bit quieter. The really hard part was shooting two nights in the middle of the schedule and trying to keep everyone energetic at three in the morning, with 15 set-ups left to shoot. I planned the shoot as meticulously as I could. During prep I made the decision to shoot one continuous week and not break the shoot up into smaller chunks.

Jon Rennie: Bad weather caused me to postpone to the weekend, thus costing me my actress, who had to be replaced at short notice. However, the shooting day was bright and clear, and it took us about five hours to get all the shots.

Worst moments

Liz Crow: We were up against the clock, the make-up guy had a terrible cold, the actor’s back was hurting from crouching under the tripod for too long and I was balanced on a stool trying to peer through the viewfinder. My main job then was trying to make people laugh.

Richard Graham: The worst moment occurred on the first day of night shooting. We’d just shot the pivotal scene of the film with an actor who was about 60, a real thespian, whom I had convinced to work for nothing, so we tried to make the whole night shoot in a supermarket as pleasant as possible for this chap, shooting his scenes quickly so he could go home early. This meant giving preference to his set-ups and saying we’d go back later and shoot the stuff without him in. I missed one really crucial set-up because of this. Every time I see this scene now I wince at the lack of the set-up I missed. Also, when we went back to pick up the shots we’d purposely missed we only had a single-chip JVC camera which didn’t have manual colour temperature controls and produced some pretty weird colours under fluorescent supermarket lighting.

Sean Martin: The shoot went very well. It was very quick – all done in two weeks. In fact, the whole film was very quick and unexpected! Things got a little tense the week before we were due to begin shooting, as there was almost no money in the bank and we couldn’t track down the investor. I remember having to rehearse the actors as if nothing was wrong and having chest pains throughout the day due to the stress. Then, at the last minute, Doug, our producer, called me to say that the money was finally in the bank.

By the last day, exhaustion was really kicking in and we still had to somehow shoot the remaining scenes set in [main character] Cade’s flat, despite the fact that we no longer had access to it. The final scene we shot was of Cade throwing up. I felt like doing the same by that point, but again there just wasn’t the time.

The best moments were those wonderful times during rehearsal where a scene that’s only half working suddenly comes to life, and somehow what you end up with is much better than what was originally in the script.

Phil Grabsky: The most difficult thing on a documentary is lugging all the equipment through endless security checks at airports. Once I arrive at the location, I’m so relieved! Apart from that, I also spend a lot of time cleaning and maintaining the kit.

Jon Rennie: Worst moment was when it began to rain. It was also very cold, but because I was well prepared, shooting went very smoothly.

Nick Ball: It was our first shoot, so we hadn’t really got anything to compare it to. The worst moment was probably on about the third day of what was a four-day shoot. Your time is incredibly pressurized on a schedule like that. Nick and I were standing discussing a shot, thinking we were doing quite well, and Dan Bronx – our DoP [Director of Photography] – came up, put a friendly arm around us, smiled and said ‘Lads, we are drowning.’ He was basically saying that if we didn’t pick the pace up we were going to be left with half a film.

Guchetan Singh: My last short film Ned Warking worked out really well, but the shoot was terrible. It was probably one of the most stressful things I have ever done. Everyone working on it was paid nothing and did it for the credit, and we were all quite novice filmmakers. It was my fault to the extent that I hadn’t scheduled the shoot. Although it was kind of clear in my head, it wasn’t so clear to our DoP. This is a must: always, always schedule your shoots. This is something your production manager or producer will do, but when it comes to no-budget or low-budget filmmaking, you sometimes find yourself taking these roles on yourself, which can be very stressful, as you’re trying to think logistically and creatively.

We also worked long hours, 12–16 hours, which again could have been controlled with decent scheduling. Again, try to avoid this, as people start to become stressed, and when people are stressed it becomes a pretty sour set. Also, our DoP did not get on with our sound man, which created problems as the set became pretty intense. All this said and done, the set might have been terrible, but each evening when I would go to bed, a little smile would come to me as I knew I was getting a little closer to achieving my goal, which was to make a great little short.

Also stressful is people letting you down, which will happen because people are rarely being paid. The best moment is when you hear the positive comments from other people, because filmmaking can be very personal and lonely. If it’s your idea, your script, your direction, then you’re exposing your most personal thoughts to the world. So it’s great to hear the positive voices because it means that all that hard work and stress has paid off.

Carl Tibbetts: The worst thing I think for any indie director is not being able to get that one all-important shot because the kit’s late back to the hire firm or the light’s gone or something else to do with the a non-existent budget.

Nick Miles: One of my most recent location shoots was an all-nighter, to produce a two-minute short worthy of showreel material. I had worked on many night shoots before, from being outside all night with the crew working in torrential downpours to split days where half of the day was spent at night on one stunt. But this was different; it was written, directed and shot in one night from concept to returning the equipment to the hire company the next morning. The problem with working in this environment is that everything takes twice as long; at night you are tired because you are out of sync with your usual working day.

James Sharpe: The shoot was planned for two days; it was only just done in time. I was dead lucky with not having rain as there’s quite a bit of stuff done outside. There were difficult moments. For instance, there was a scene outside shot at a bus stop. James Fisher and ‘Marielle Dreier’ were seated saying about five lines each. Although it’s on screen for 30 seconds it took about two hours to get a clean take of sound, as there was a building site just behind us and as soon as I shout action 10 cars decide to come past. When I cut it’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop. I then used sound from the good take and then wild it over close-ups from a bad sounded take. I sync’d it perfectly then cleaned the audio up in Adobe Audition.

Equipment choices

Liz Crow: I prefer a Sony VX2000 on fixed tripod, plus a mini-disc. I used the mini-disc because it gives a much better sound quality than the camera mic. I edited on a Mac using Final Cut Pro.

Richard Graham: We shot on a Canon XL1 and for shots where the Canon was too big and heavy to put it where I wanted, we used a single-chip Panasonic. We also did a few pick-up shots of a scene using a JVC single-chip camera which, compared to the Panasonic, was quite frankly rubbish. The project was edited on Final Cut 3 and 4.

Phil Grabsky: It depends on the project, but right now I am married to my Sony PD150. I was a late convert from super-16 mm film to Digi-Beta, and then from Digi-Beta to DVCAM (where appropriate), but the PD150 (now PD170) is extraordinary; I couldn’t have made my Afghan film if I hadn’t have had the PD150. My Australian cinema distributor thought I’d shot it on HD [high definition]. I think the most welcome compliments I’ve had for the film have been for the photography.

Jon Rennie: I took the opportunity to use a Digi-Beta camera for the film so that I could get a high quality anamorphic image. Although I’d considered using a [Sony] PD150, I wanted to get as good an image as possible so that the rendered special effects would not look out of place. It pays to use the best possible quality equipment – that’s where my money went.

Carl Tibbets: Get hold of an HD camera (go to your local facility house and beg or just go and look and learn the kit); lots of companies will lend you gear over weekends if it’s just sitting on a shelf otherwise. For editing, Final Cut Pro 4 – it’s right for this level of filmmaking.

Nick Miles: The camera that I would recommend to any filmmaker starting out is the Sony DSR PD170. It has great functionality and when shooting DVCAM stock with good lighting practice can produce outstanding results. I have pushed this camera to its limits both technically and physically, like when I door-mounted mine to the door of a car to get a brilliant two-shot whilst the characters were driving along.

The PD 170/150 gives a very cold broadcast look, great for TV and documentaries (that is why the BBC endorse it as a camera for their journalists), but if you want to achieve a more film look, I tend to white balance off a blue-tinted white card to give a warmer cinematic feel usually only achieved by film.

James Sharpe: I saved up £3000 and really wanted an XL2, but thought the extra £500 wasn’t worth it. I know that some BBC documentaries are shot on [Sony] PD150 or 170. I went for that and am not disappointed.

Essential tips

Liz Crow: Plan all the details and brief the crew and actors thoroughly. It leaves room both to be spontaneous and to problem solve. I storyboard the full film beforehand and, because I’m new to shooting my own footage, I try to have test runs before the day of the shoot.

Sean Martin: Try and keep a clear head. Take deep breaths. Focus. Be decisive, but always remain open to suggestions (just because you’re the director, it doesn’t mean you have a monopoly on all the best ideas). Always remain calm. And always make it seem like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Once a director has lost their authority through being indecisive, difficult, rude or just plain wrong, it’s very difficult if not impossible to get that respect back.

Jon Rennie: When you’re making the film, don’t just leave the camera on a tripod or set it on the widest angle. Think about your shots and storyboard in advance. Rehearse your actors so that you don’t have to keep directing them all day when you should be dealing with the camera and sound.

Jonnie Oddball: One of the biggest things I learned is what can be done when you really focus on what you want. Take a die-hard attitude and do whatever it takes. I asked the cast to improvise the scenes, but only told the actors the scenes on the day of filming. I found writing a film around what you know and what you have around you works and that goes for locations as well; with no budget at all it’s amazing what you have around you that you never think about.

Gurchetan Singh: You will always hear people talking about how you should only work with people who are on the same wavelength as you; this is great but if you’re starting out then that network isn’t always accessible, especially if you don’t live in a film/media-orientated world. So as a director you have to become very clear about the style you like, about the shots that inspire you. Dabble in some editing, try and put footage together and make stories. Try and experiment with ideas and techniques, and by doing all this you can start to realize what you like and what you don’t, so when that network isn’t so strong at least your vision will be, which will often help to carry a film.

Nick Miles: The single most important piece of advice I would give to any first-time producer, director of photography or filmmaker is visit your location again and again and again, as many times as possible, before your location shoot. No matter how many times you check the location and prepare for anything, something will always throw you. Unexpected building works is one, parades through city centres with loud bands, adverse weather conditions another, e.g. snow in May/June. Owners of buildings/land can also be quite unpredictable. Also, always take more than you need – it is better to have a car loaded with too many chocolate biscuits, AAA batteries and umbrellas.

Matt Sheldon: Time is the worst thing. There is never enough time. It’s OK if you have lots of money because then you have time, but otherwise it is your worst enemy. I started off well because I decided that to get the crew on my side I would shoot the first scene in two takes. But 13 hours later, I thought it was getting out of control. After that I learnt to keep the days short.

James Sharpe: Make sure you are familiar with exposure and focus. If you don’t have an outside monitor be sure you’re used to the viewfinder and LCD monitor, otherwise what might look OK then could look totally dark or overexposed when you get back.

Always have belief. There’s nothing worse than setting up as a beginner and having people you know saying you can’t do that and laughing at you. I had that and I just blocked them out. If you have the burning desire to do it you will do it. Living with the Dead was screened to these same people and now they eat their words in style.

Crew

Jon Rennie: There were seven people on the shoot. You don’t need a large crew to make a film – just enough so that no one is standing around and you don’t have to wait around too long. It wasn’t paid, apart from food and expenses, and in all it has cost me about £400 to make.

Jonnie Oddball: Amazingly, yes, every single person I got for the film was wonderful and helped out any way they could; I was trying to keep everyone happy in −2 degrees in woods in the middle of nowhere. You have to really respect everyone on your no-budget movie more than anything else, as they paid their own travel expenses and brought their packed lunch.

Carl Tibbets: I think at this level of micro-budget shorts you should not push people too far – it’s a fine line getting the most out of what you have without annoying everyone left, right and centre! I think crew and actors working in a good atmosphere, not stressed out, with plenty of food and water on tap is the best way to get the most out of your shoot.

David Casals: For location food, hot meals are the best. Pizza is a classic that always works. In our last short film we had Chinese food and it was a success. People also appreciate home-made food, but that also depends on how many people can help you out preparing it.

Max Sobol: Crew will always like fat sandwiches, stuff like bacon butties, and an almost constant stream of coffee.

James Sharpe: To get the best from actors, make sure you screen test them at the audition, as they all appear different on camera than they do in real life. Make sure there’s a few rehearsals so they know exactly what to do when you go to shoot. This is good practice and helped me shoot a 12-minute film in two days. On location, I made sure they weren’t cold – make sure there’s plenty of tea and coffee and at least feed them and pay their expenses. Make sure the actors stay fully charged. Sometimes I shoot the same thing from several angles and sometimes after several takes you have to make sure they keep the same enthusiasm as they did in the first.

5. Shooting for compression

There is no doubt that the web opens up new possibilities for the filmmaker. But like any new medium, some films look good when shown on the Internet and some don’t. The same is true of the difference between showing films on a television or a cinema screen. The small scale and intimacy of television means that shooting for this medium imposes certain restrictions; television is described as a close-up medium, requiring the filmmaker to bring the viewer close to the action and avoid large-scale panoramic scenes. The aspect ratio also changes between theatrical and video release to make use of the maximum amount of screen in the smaller medium.

Web movies are different

Filmmakers work within these restrictions to obtain the best results for a production. It should come as no surprise, then, that the web has other restrictions that you need to bear in mind. These are useful only when your film is going to be seen primarily on the web and you don’t expect to show it theatrically. However, the results of these guidelines on non-web films are not without merit; many films can benefit from the ideas suggested here, such as a simplification of image.

The effect of altering the movie or the way you make it, to accommodate the limits of the web, is a little like working with live music. Studio music is always going to sound clearer, neater and more subtle, but playing live requires a band to make a song understood despite the poor acoustics of an auditorium. Usually, this means making it more explicit musically and less subtle.

Figure 5.11 Data rates for video images via the Internet.

Shooting web films

Length of the movie

Short films fare better on the web, for obvious reasons; anything less than a few minutes in length is going to be more suited to the extremely slow connection rates most people still have. If you want to make something more ambitious, try dividing the movie up into small sections and turning it into an episodic series in which viewers can download a few minutes and watch it as part of the whole series.

Audio vs video

Bear in mind the choices you may have to make about the priority of audio or video. If a film needs both very smooth, clear images and a complex, layered soundtrack, you may run into problems.

If you decide to lose some picture quality in favour of sound, then the Internet is going to be kinder to your film. Fantastic sound quality is far easier to compress than pictures and you will get more quality for your data bits with sound rather than vision. If sound is not a priority, avoid relying on stereo as it will be flattened into mono in most compression methods. This won’t get rid of any sounds but, together with the overall reduction in quality, it will make them harder to distinguish from one another. Avoid complex layering of sounds. Keep interference or excessive ambient sound to a minimum. If you think in terms of sound perspective, in which sounds occupy various levels in terms of foreground and background, webfilm offers you less depth, so keep sounds obvious and clear. In general, use lavalier mics for clear, if slightly unnatural, sound. Imagine playing the movie to someone over the telephone; you would need strong, obvious sounds.

Go to: Chapter 5:3, ‘Sound recording’.

Clear-cut stories

As a whole, the story and/or themes must be more apparent, lucid and defined. Think of the live music analogy: subtlety may be lost by the time it reaches the viewer. This is not to say that you must hand the film to the viewer on a plate, but you will have to make the information more obvious, given the reduced size of that information.

Beware of text

Credits are still going to be legible but should be placed on straight colour, which should not be too highly saturated. Place credits one at a time on separate frames rather than bunched together and with a slightly larger font size than usual, maybe set at 24 point, at least. Text within the film, either as subtitles or as a design element layered over images, is more problematic. It is likely to be lost if the frame starts blurring, and the reduced screen size is going to make it blend with the background images.

Simpler imagery

This is going to mean making your compositions sharper and better, but this applies equally well to all your movies, not just those intended for the web. Try to eliminate extraneous parts of the frame, so that it shows what we need to see and virtually nothing else. Use plain backgrounds to lift out from the screen the elements you want the viewer to pick up on. Compositions should be bolder and more ‘blocky’ – in other words, with greater use of larger shapes and fewer details. In most instances, this is going to bring us back to the idea of dominance of the close-up. One way to define the kind of clarity we need is to look at design. There is a rule of thumb sometimes used by poster designers which says that a good poster needs to still make an impression viewed in passing through a dirty bus window, and this applies equally well to webfilm.

Go to: Chapter 6:1, ‘Better looking films’, for more help with stronger compositions.

Use close-ups

The film is to be seen on a small screen, at roughly 5 cm across, so you need to radically alter the way you depict action. The close-up will need to be utilized much more frequently than in other productions. If a scene requires some depiction of the expression on an actor’s face, an extreme close-up is necessary, perhaps even focusing on parts of the face in turn.

Go to: Chapter 6:2 for more help with using the close-up in your movies.

The right lighting

Celluloid film has better resolution than video, and straight, uncompressed video films have better resolution than webfilms. Being at the bottom of the heap can be resolved somewhat by a certain use of lighting, offsetting some of the detrimental effects of picture clarity. Strong contrast is crucial; flat, vague lighting is going to enhance detail but heightened shadow and light will make a frame more easy to read, while improved composition may also enhance a sense of drama. Use a key light to pick out the main subject and use some fill lighting to separate the figure from the background, but above all avoid fluorescent lighting, as this flattens the picture. To test how your scene will look, take five paces back from your camera and have a look at the LCD monitor showing your movie.

Go to: Chapter 5:2 for more detail on lighting techniques.

The right colours

Some colours don’t travel well. Just as website designers use what are called ‘web-safe colours’, so films can also suffer from colours merging into one another that are similar in hue or saturation. You will, on the whole, be safe with colour as long as you do not rely on it to convey important parts of the film; subtle differences between colours may be lost. This would have an impact, for example, on text, if the text and background image colours were not dissimilar enough. Note also that strongly saturated colours cause some problems with some formats or players regardless of the image, though this is decreasing as an issue as software codecs become more advanced.

Use of the camera

Since clarity is a constant requirement, one of the biggest obstacles is camera shake. Despite the creative possibilities in shooting with a hand-held camera, the results on the web could be disappointing. By dropping the frame rate, the video becomes slightly more jerky and anything that increases this is to be avoided. A stationary shot is going to look better than pans, tilts or tracking, as these all increase the blurring or make the picture more blocky.

Aspect ratio

As with normal video movies, try at all times to shoot in the aspect ratio (screen shape) you want to edit in. This means that if you want a widescreen look, shoot in it. In practice, you should choose the aspect ratio best suited for your film, perhaps because a television broadcaster wants it a certain ratio. Try to avoid using widescreen as a style choice – it rarely improves poor images and usually simply heightens the bad result, cropping the frame unnaturally. However, if you film from the start in this aspect ratio then it is embedded in your compositions and looks natural and well suited to the film. Web movies are usually shown in screen shapes resembling television screens, a 4:3 ratio. If you film in widescreen, no matter how natural it looks, you lose a portion of the screen at the top and bottom. Unlike the cinema, the web broadcaster doesn’t stretch its screen to accommodate your aspect ratio.

Creative web movies

Looking at the list above, the don’ts far outweigh the dos and it must seem as if there is little artistic point to using the web for making films. But part of the progress within the medium of film over the last century has been the result of filmmakers pushing the limits of what can be achieved. Hitchcock pushed the very limited resources of sound when he made Britain’s first sound film, Blackmail, in 1929. Even earlier, Georges Mellies devised the first special effects by accidentally using the camera for multiple exposures.

Push technology

Part of the task of the low-budget filmmaker is to look at what can be done with the available technology, work with it as far as possible but at the same time push it further by experimentation, discovery and, basically, doing what the manual says you shouldn’t. A quality that many independent filmmakers possess is that of being able to see possibilities within a tightly restrictive framework, whether this is budgetary or technological. Given that the web offers a filmmaker a direct way of reaching the viewing public, the constraints of this route are worth working with.

Some of the innovations seen in movie websites are testament to the fact that the filmmaker is a lateral-thinking, irrepressible artist. Many films make direct connections to early film experiments, conducted in the first decade of cinema. In that period, the theatrical movie was not the dominant form; people also wanted to see events they would not normally witness, like a train rushing overhead, filmed from the track, or burning barns crashing down. The pioneering spirit within film was a result of the desire of filmmakers to push the limits of this new form of communication and steadily turn it into an art form. That process was happening within a tightly confined space, in technology terms, yet produced a launch pad for generations of directors.

The Crunch

• Web movies are an evolving form, but they are still in their infancy – get in on the history of them from the start
• You’re an artist – you like new ways of working and new forms of movie
• Watch your movie through the camera LCD monitor from a few feet to check how it will look
• Decide whether you sacrifice picture resolution, frame rate or sound
• Keep it short and simple
• Use strong lighting
• Use steady camera
• Avoid small text
• These restrictions imposed by web movies are good for your other movies too
• Be experimental
• Don’t let it sit on the shelf – send it to a broadcast site.

What this project is for: to learn about shooting for the ultra-small screen – phone and web
Time: allow one hour to shoot and another to evaluate

What this project is about

Until new formats of communication evolved in the web and cell phones, filmmakers showed their work in only two ways: on the big screen (theatres) and on the small screen (TV). It was commonly accepted that shooting for these demanded different approaches to using the camera, editing and even the way text is used. Television needed close-ups more frequently because of the small size of the screen, while wide-angle shots and panorama shots could work more easily in the huge screens in theatres. Now we have other ways of watching films it is essential to figure out how this affects your movies.

In this project we are going to try making a short descriptive piece which addresses the demands of the web, phone viewing and hand-held devices.

Stage 1

There is no need to plan this film as it is not one that demands much forethought about structure or narrative. This is going to concentrate on a simple description of a commonplace event like making a cup of coffee or washing the car. It sounds like low-level material but the advantage of shooting something so simple is that it enables you to concentrate on the images rather than on symbolism or any meaningful stuff.

Choose a situation that you are going to film.

Stage 2

Shoot this film in-camera, so the movie is ready to play as soon as it is finished. This approach is good for morale as you can track your progress fast and see results quickly. The aim is to show every stage of the event – getting a cup, switching on the kettle, grinding the coffee and so on. Be as descriptive as possible so that it is absolutely clear what is happening.

For shooting for the ultra-small screen, make sure you shoot bearing in mind that the eventual movie will be seen at something like the size of the LCD monitor of your camcorder.

• Place the camera close to the action
• Use compositions that focus on the important elements of action
• Avoid rapid pan or tracks of the camera, as these shots will blur when compressed (see Chapter 5:5, ‘Shooting for compression’)
• Avoid detailed shots where we need to see small objects – make sure really crucial objects fill at least 30 per cent of the screen
• Avoid text that is less than 25 per cent of the height of the screen (if a screen is about 3–4 cm high)
• Light the images clearly, using hard light and strong shadows.

Evaluation

Look at the resulting movie on your camcorder monitor and assess which shots are clearly defined and which are vague. Look out for shots that are overly descriptive and uninteresting; possibly the use of light and shadow will have balanced the effects of too much description by adding atmosphere.

I want something more challenging

As a final task, try to re-edit the movie on simple editing software as a series of still images. Under the heaviest effects of compression your movie may need to appear as a slide show, or reduced to a jerky five frames a second or less. See how far you can push your movie by selecting only the most essential descriptive shots as still frames. Try selecting one for every five to ten you erase.

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