Getting good sound requires both shotgun and lavalier mics. While a shotgun mic is a preferred way of getting dialogue, you may find the need to use lavs as well.

Recording with Lavaliers

Lavs are generally best used for non-fiction filmmaking like news, corporate videos or interviews. Using them for a fictional film presents problems in that the mic will have to be hidden on the actor next to their sternum. The easiest way to hide it is to clip it to a shirt behind a tie but fabric rubbing against the microphone will ruin the audio. Sometimes you may be required to use medical tape and tape it to the actor’s breastbone or even hide it on a nearby prop.

One of the upsides of using a lav is that you can shoot audio for an extremely wide shot where there would be no chance of hiding your shotgun mic– or audio crew for that matter. Conversely, the opposite is also true like shooting in a cramped environment such as a car or anywhere with a lot of ambient noise like on a street. Lav mics are fairly weak so they won’t pick up as much ambient audio as a shotgun mic. Depending on the scene, this could be a good or bad thing as you’ll need some extra foley work on lav only scenes.

Also, beware of mixing lav audio with shotgun audio as they will sound very different from each other. Wireless lavs also have a habit of running out of power quicker than a shotgun, so make sure to have plenty of spare 9 volts on hand.

Recording with Shotgun Mics

The shotgun mic is the workhorse of on set audio. Using a highly directional mic pointed 45 degrees at an actor’s chest will usually give you the best audio not only for voice but also for the sounds they make when they move.

Some basic tools you’ll need to work with a shotgun are a boompole (no surprise there), a shock mount to reduce noise coming from the handling of the boompole and a wind sock for outdoor shooting. All quality shotguns use XLR cables but remember to bring backup cables just in case a cable goes bad.

Don’t forget to reduce any sound from anything touching the boom pole. Tightly wrap the XLR cable around the pole but make sure there’s a bit of slack at the mic end of the pole. Use electrical or gaffers tape to tape the cable at that end. While recording make sure not to move your hands on the pole as the mic will pick up the sound of your hands rubbing against it.

Previous articles in this story:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5 

The post On Set Sound – Part 6 appeared first on Doddle.

Getting good sound is difficult. The previous 4 parts in this series were all about letting you know why it’s hard to get good sound on set and how to minimize getting bad sound, even if it means not shooting in the perfect location. Now that you know what to avoid and what equipment you’ll need to get good sound, the next step is to how to actually get good sound.

Hire a Pro

I think I’ve made this point in every single one of these articles. It’s really the best idea because they know what they’re doing and have their own professional recording equipment.

Listen to what they have to say as well. Their job is to make sure the sound is as good as possible so they’ll give you suggestions on how to do just that or if something mucked up the audio take.

Room Tone

What is the sound of one hand clapping? Room tone. For every single scene in your film you will want to record the sound of silence in that room. The background ambient noise is really important to get for the sound editor in post and applies to both interior locations and exterior locations. For 30 to 60 seconds, get the crew to stand silently while the sound guy records the ambient sound of your location. Don’t send your crew out of the room as their bodies will actually subtly change the sound of the room and you want it to be as close to the background sound of when your cast was speaking.

The room tone can be used for everything from covering a sneaker squeaking on the floor to making an actors ADR sound as natural as possible in post production.

Sound Logs

Take notes on every single take. Again, this is key for the post-production team so they have an exact idea of anything that may have been out of the ordinary on an audio track. Take 3 might have been good visually but it also has the sound of a plane flying overhead. While you’re at it, make sure you have a good naming convention for each audio take. If you really want to make the video editor happy, make the audio and video naming schemes exactly the same.

Wild Takes, You Make My Heart Sing

I know, I know, that doesn’t rhyme. Sometimes you can’t properly capture an actor’s dialogue because they’re sitting on a leather couch and every move they make causes the couch to squeak or they’re getting in and out of a pool and have no lav on (obviously). Well then, turn the camera off after shooting the shot and just record a wild track, that is, shoot the audio with the camera off. Your actor will still have their performance fresh in mind and it will sound right with the background noise. Instead of having them go through the blocking, they can stand still and deliver their lines. This could save you time and money in post since you may not have to ADR anything.

Have a question or comment? Let us know below!

Previous Parts in this Series
Part 1: Introduction to Sound
Part 2: Mic Overview
Part 3: On Set Sound Hazards
Part 4: Equipment Overview

The post On Set Sound – Part 5 appeared first on Doddle.

Looking for a good resource on screenwriting? John August is a screenwriter who’s best known for working with Tim Burton on Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Frankenweenie. He was also the screenwriter for Go and directed The Nines with Ryan Reynolds. But the great thing is that he’s been blogging online for the last 10 years on screenwriting and has a pretty good following at his website, JohnAugust.com.

Advice on screenwriting online is dime a dozen but usually it’s from screenwriters who have never sold a single screenplay so it’s great that we have writers like Mr. August to give a view from the trenches. Besides giving advice on his blog and answering readers’ questions he also runs a podcast called Scriptnotes with Craig Mazin which is about, you guessed it, screenwriting. They’ve cover quite a bit of the business of screenwriting on that show along with advice on craft.

I guess this is why the byline for his site is “a ton of useful information about screenwriting”.

Beyond Just Simple Advice

Advice for writers is great and he covers everything from formatting to surviving a director’s rewrite but he also takes it a step further and has made his screenplays available for educational purposes. It’s the age old advice of if you want to learn to write a screenplay, you need to read a lot of them.

Rounding it all up, he also owns a company called Quote-Unquote Apps which sells apps for screenwriters. One of my favorites is called Fountain which is a syntax formatting set of rules for .txt files. You basically write your screenplay in a text file and it formats the file based on rules. For example, if you start a line with INT. Fountain will automatically know that is a scene header and will format accordingly. I love writing in text files that I sync on the cloud so it’s a great little program for me.

They’ve also developed a new courier typeface called Courier Prime. The idea was to make minor changes to the font in an effort to make it as readable as possible. As they developed the font they showed the same screenplay page in Courier, Final Draft Courier and their own Courier Prime to screenwriters to get feedback in a blind study– that is, the screenwriters didn’t know which font was which.

Comparing 3 types of the courier typeface.

Ultimately they went through 25 builds of the typeface to get to the font they’ve just released. It’s been released for free for both Windows and Mac and while the changes are subtle, I find it just a bit easier to read. There are many artists who go out of their way to foster the next generation of talent. But few screenwriters have gone as far as John August to really give you a sense of what they’re up against. Check out his website JohnAugust.com and his app company Quote-Unquote Apps.

The post Looking For Great Screenwriting Resources? Check out John August’s Site appeared first on Doddle.

Holy crap I was really really lazy this week. For the first half of the month I was doing amazing to keep up with my writing… the past week has been abysmal. Between the 16th to the 20th I didn’t write at all.

What the Fuck Danny?

Honestly, there were a lot of errands I had to run and I had one of those emotional rollercoaster weeks which basically means, um, I just didn’t feel like writing.

This is not a good report for where my writing is since it’s basically, “oops, I messed up” but I did learn somethings.

How To Write Everyday

While setting a goal is great and all there is the one big problem that you’ll come up to. Writing isn’t difficult, developing ideas to write about is very hard on a daily basis. I suffered a 4 day drought and kept thinking, “I’ll make it up tomorrow”. Now I have to make up a few days of not writing really quickly.

A place to write is incredibly important. My favorite place to write (and where I’m writing this now) is the CSI Coffee Pub in Toronto. Ever since I’ve found this place I’ve written every single time I was here and it’s become fairly Pavlovian. If I don’t write when I’m here I feel… off.

The downside is that if I’m completely broke, I can’t afford to pay for transit to get out here and the coffee which I feel I must buy in order to sit here. I doubt they’d kick me out, but I’d feel bad if I didn’t have one.

All in all, I’m behind in my words and I still haven’t got a good enough idea on how to consistently generate ideas. At least today I’ve written quite a bit but now I just need to keep up with that. Currently at 8903 words total and I should be at 10500. Fuck.

Memphis Belle image: Basegreen (Flickr; click for larger)

By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)

Some of my favorite television comes out of HBO. The amount of quality work they produce is just staggering and the bar for miniseries, in my humble opinion, has always been Band of Brothers… and they’re making a third World War II miniseries.

After tackling Europe on the ground in Band of Brothers and the pacific in, well, The Pacific, HBO has announced that Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Steven Spielberg will be taking to the skies. As with the previous two miniseries the yet-as-untitled third miniseries will be based on a non-fiction book as it’s source material, Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany.

The book follows the 8th Air Force, known as the “Mighty Eight” as they battled the Germans and the elements. At the time, strategic bombing was a brand new kind of warfare and while the US was keen on hitting industrial targets, the British were more likely to conduct bombings over civilian targets. The book is described as the following:

Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes readers on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people.

What Might We See

Members of the Mighty Eight included legendary pilots such as Robert Morgan who flew the infamous Memphis Belle and Paul Tibbets who would go on to fly the Enola Gay and drop the first atomic bomb. Even Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart were part of the 8th Air Force while Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite were war correspondents during that time.

So we’ll definitely get some name dropping at least.

The book also covers stories of captured airmen including the prison break at Stalag Luft III which has already been fictionalized in a small movie you may have heard called The Great Escape. Chuck Yeager was also shot down over German occupied France and escaped with the help of the French resistance.

Band of Brothers and The Pacific are some of the highest rated programs on HBO and did amazingly well during awards season winning 14 Emmys between them. We can expect that same quality from this new series and, quite frankly, I can’t wait to see it!

Hat tip: The Hollywood Reporter

The post HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific to get Sequel appeared first on Doddle.

A lot of low-to-no budget films record to camera which is fine if you really can’t afford high end sound systems. I’d really just like to take the time to point out why this really should be your last resort for recording sound on set. What you really want is sync sound where audio is recorded to a separate device.

DSLRs

Just don’t do it. A single minijack for audio is, for all intents and purposes, useless. Sure you can go to a local electronics store and pick up an XLR to minijack and make it work. If you do, remember to use a long XLR cable and not a long minijack cable. You’ll also have to make sure you’re shotgun mic takes batteries because you’re not getting phantom power out of the DSLR.

But remember, you get exactly one audio track and mixing the audio in post will be so much of a pain in the ass– look, do your sound editor a favour and just don’t do it!

Many DSLR shooters looking to save a buck usually use a sync sound system with something like a Zoom H4n or something similar. These guys usually have 2 XLR inputs and are relatively inexpensive.

Field Mixers and Preamps

If you’re still dead set on going directly to camera, make sure your sound guy has a field mixer. This will allow him to control the sound way more effectively than direct to camera. If you don’t, then the sound guy and camera man will have to share the camera to keep track of audio and video. This is a quick way to get both departments to hate each other.

And no, your camera man should not be keeping track of audio levels, he’s too busy for that.

Many field mixers come with a preamp which boosts the audio signal before reaching the recording device. Some are better than others so you may need a separate preamp for your audio. If there is one piece of advice I can give you it’s to get a preamp.

Inputs

Many prosumer cameras with XLR inputs have only 2 of them. While you can get by with only 2 (even the H4n has only 2) the more inputs the better. With just 4 inputs you can lav 3 actors plus have the boom out. This gives far more options for your sound guy to mix the audio and you’ll be able to get a better audio mix in post.

Another great reason to go with sync sound is that it frees your audio guys to be located far away from the camera. This way, your cameraman can execute a complex series of moves without worrying about any extra cables he may get tangled in or people near him.

Have any questions or comments? We’d love to hear from you, so leave them below!

Previous Parts in this Series
Part 1: Introduction to Sound
Part 2: Mic Overview
Part 3: On Set Sound Hazards

The post On Set Sound – Part 4 appeared first on Doddle.

Rules of the Game

I should have covered this before, but the 500 words a day is the average words I want to write per day. Or to put it another way, if failure was to not hit 500 words on a given day, I would have failed a few days into the challenge. But because I feel the need to add to my word-count every day, I sit down to write every day, and that’s the key to keep writing. Just sitting down and doing it.

The other thing is that writers can be very lazy. Yeah, writing is nice and all and kind of calming once you start doing it, but most writers don’t want to sit down and face that stupid blank page.

At least I don’t.

Binge Writing

There are several days where I’ve written like 35 or 50 words the entire day which puts me significantly behind where I want to be. So every few days I freak out and binge write when that happens. The worst part isn’t writing, it’s figuring out what to write. I’ve cracked open the laptop and just sat there, slack-jawed, thinking “shit, I have nothing to write about.”

This is the worst thing that can happen and there’s about 600 words that were just a stream of consciousness writing a few days ago. Nothing publishable came from it but it did help me organize some thoughts.

All in all, I’m surprised I’m keeping up with this as well as I am. I didn’t think I could really keep up.

Location, location, location. One of the biggest mistakes I see made on first time productions is location scouting, for everything from set decoration to cinematography and sound. Not that the locations are not well picked for what the film requires (if you want the best example of this, however, watch the film After Last Season) but because sound wasn’t taken into consideration.

Always bring a sound guy with you when you’re scouting! Sure it may look great but sound might be an issue and they’ll be there to point out any problems.

Air Conditioners and Appliances

These things can be quiet… but quiet isn’t silent. They can create a background hum that’s audible. Especially coolers and refrigerators, which every sound person has grown to hate on a primal level. Not only do they hum, but the pitch of the hum can also change while you’re filming, so figure out how to turn them all off and make sure the owner of the location knows you’ll be turning them off.

Public Institutions

Is your awesome location located near a school, police station, fire station or hospital? These places can be noisy at really inappropriate times and can mess up your shot. Worse, there are times when you have to wait for the noise to pass before you can start up again and a few minutes here and there can add up fast. If you have kids, you know the surrounding area can be noisy for up to 2 hours after the students have been let out, not to mention recess and lunch.

Another thing you may want to watch out for is road construction, this happened to me once. I had a location only for a day and on that day the city brought in some jackhammers to tear up the road, I really should have checked with the city if there was going to be any roadwork done in that area. It was a nightmare!

Transports

Have the most amazing location? Too bad it’s right by a freeway and when you point your mic in one direction you pic up more of the passing traffic than when you point it in another direction, wreaking havoc in the sound editing room! It’s not just car traffic you should be aware of but trains and air traffic as well. So try to avoid locations near train tracks and airports. Even if it’s a bit away from an airport it may still be located on a landing or takeoff flight path which would put an airplane flying overhead every few minutes.

The Camera

Film cameras are a dying breed, so this is becoming less and less of an issue, but some cameras make a lot of noise. El Mariachi’s 16mm camera was so loud that Robert Rodriguez had to record all the audio after filming the visual and praying it would line up in post.

Bring a Mic

Basically, bring a mic. The human ear is pretty advanced compared to mics as our brains can filter sound. The best way to tell whether a location is perfect for sound is just to bring a mic and listen. Anything can create sound problems on a set from the freezer in the basement to the river outside. You just may not be able to notice it until you hear it through a mic.

Have a question or comment? Let us know below!

Previous Parts in this Series
Part 1: Introduction to Sound
Part 2: Mic Overview

Check out After Last Season

The post On Set Sound – Part 3 appeared first on Doddle.

I nearly spit my coffee onto my laptop laughing so hard!

The White House officially responds to the “Build a Death Star” petition. The following is the tl;dr version

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

If the headline didn’t tip you off, a release date has been set for a brand new Jurassic Park film.

Details are light about the plot for the new film but what we do know is that Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (who wrote Rise of the Planet of the Apes) will be penning the script which will be shot in 3D. My best guess is that it will take place on an island where dinosaurs run amok– although that’s not guaranteed.

The last time there was a screenplay floating around for a Jurassic Park 4 the plot went something like this: some corporation successfully crossbreeds human and dino DNA to create a mercenary team of dinosaurs. I pause here to allow you to make the obvious joke “dinosaur mercenaries? Isn’t that the plot for The Expendables?”

To give you an idea of what could of been, here’s some concept art that was released a few months ago for what could have been.

Chances are that they’re not going to go with that idea and I think most of us will agree it’s probably for the best.

I also wonder if Universal Pictures re-releasing Jurassic Park in 3D this April is a way to gauge interest in a new dinosaur film. While the franchise has been very successful, each sequel has brought in much less than the one before it. It’s very difficult to catch the magic of the first film. If you were a kid during that time, like I was, it was the most amazing thing you had ever seen on the big screen.

Steven Spielberg is returning to produce the film along with Frank Marshall. Now that Robopocalypse is being retooled it’s possible for Spielberg to return to the director’s chair for this film. As of now, however, there isn’t a director attached. Also according to Marshall, this film will rely heavily on animatronics and not just CGI which bodes well for the film.

As to whether any alumni from the previous films appear in the upcoming film… well, your guess is as good as mine.

Jurassic Park 4 is set to hit the big screen June 13, 2014, 20 years nearly to the date of the first one.

Are you looking forward to a new Jurassic Park adventure? Let us know in the comments!

Hat tip: /Film

The post Jurassic Park 4 Roars into Theaters June 2014 appeared first on Doddle.