This week’s collaboration studio class we were given a workshop on audio. We were given the opportunity to get our hands on those audio mixers. Paul ran through the things we need to look out for like how the difference of speech still needs to hit the 0 dB mark. If you’re whispering or shouting, they should be in the same level. I never knew about it formally but I would say it’s automatic to make sure you’re able to hear what the actor is whispering about. For example, if you’re recording sound, when someone whispers, naturally you’d just bump up the volume to capture the sound. Hearing that this is a must and the proper technique of recording sound does make you more conscious of it when you capture the sound.
Besides that, we spent most of our time doing a mock shoot for our group assignment. Paul’s advice during consultation was to use the time during class to do a shoot of two scenes of different genres. We agreed on Bianca’s “mockumentary” and Dylan’s “multicam sitcom”. The minute we started shooting, we had a few things to add to the script. Each take we added a new element into it. For Bianca’s mockumentary:
1. Just read the script as it is.
2. Add the unstable cameraman – because he is just a roommate.
3. Add off-screen voices to show that they’re still in the room where the roommates are still roaming around.
4. Just to refine the off-screen takes and actions (e.g. Bianca (the mother) standing up away from the film.
For Dylan’s sitcom:
1. We played with different angles.
2. We noticed trouble with continuity since it was a multi-cam and we only had one camera.
Check my ‘mock shoots‘ blog post for the snippets of these elements we took into consideration.
I had suggestions, for the mockumentary, of adding like an unstable shot of them talking in the kitchen like a filler shot to show the ways they usually interact. But we were not shooting on location so I decided to leave that out. Monday will be another shoot so maybe I’ll try to incorporate that. However, the mock shoot was proven to be very useful. It saved us the time to find out mistakes and how to create a more interesting shot by adding more interesting elements to the shots. Now is the editing part. The editing should help come up with more creative style of shooting.