OBSERVING AUDIO IN DOCUMENTARIES

This week in Ways of Making, we began to look at sound as a tool for making media and how it is used in drama and documentary. Due to my lack of audio competency, I found our introductory class on sound very useful (as per my previous blog post) and thought that it would be good to further investigate and the better my understanding of sound in a filmmaking environment. As part of my conceptual study for my media course I am doing a course this semester called True Lies: Documentary Study, so I thought it would be suitable to investigate the use of sound in the films that we have watched so far and more specifically, location sound.

Sound is so important in creating a scene, however audio in documentary films are explored separately from the narrative form. For example Jeffrey Ruoff in his article Conventions of Sound in Documentary state “location sound work in documentary films occasionally makes discrimination among sounds difficult, if not impossible.” Ruoff implies that the intelligibility of documentary works cannot meet the standards of studio films, with characters often being inaudible. Lack of clarity in sound is often characterised as an exclusive stylistic choice in documentary filmmaking. The audio used in final cuts of films would often be deemed unworthy of conventional Hollywood, who would omit, reshoot or folly undesirable sounds.

Film production in its earliest form was moved into studios due to the inaccessible and large equipment needed to record both audio and visual material. Mass production enabled the creating process to be repeated until the desired outcome had been achieved. Jefrery Ruoff describes that with the development of new technology, filmmaking, much like us as in our studio lesson, was able to take to the street. This environment when compared to a studio is often unpredictable. But I don’t think that this is always a bad thing, as it is often a choice. Observational cinema and Cinéma vérité highlight the benefits and artistic qualities of raw audio. D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 film Don’t Look Back for example boasts a sense of honesty through sound. Good sound can create something with a heightened sense of realism. A single camera shot can place you as a fly on the wall, but a single audio track gives that fly ears.

Hollywood sounds are a lot nicer on the ear than what we actually hear. They are able to cut everything to reflect a particular mood, or change the levels of specific noises to attract the audience to particular things. Documentary filmmakers will often take a single shot, so the quality of audio here is increasingly important. I think understanding this makes me particularly aware of the importance of understanding how sound works in films. I often find myself obsessing over image and neglecting almost all audio elements. I think that this is because I don’t fully understand or perhaps appreciate how to create something that sounds good. Good ambient sound is something you don’t notice unless something goes wrong. I think that this is for me, perhaps, a lesson in observing all elements and noticing all sounds.

 

Notes from Ruoff, J. (1993). Conventions of sound in documentary. Cinema Journal,32(3), 24-40.