Recording Ambient Sounds and Dialogue

Recording Ambient Sounds

Ambient recordings are the background noise in everyday life that we don't respond to or notice, an example what be convocations in a classrooms or footsteps in a hallway or even the humming of a radiator in a room,

Ambient sounds can range from ticking of a clock to the natural sounds of the ocean.

basically its the environment at work in audio form.

An example would be in the hunger games: catching fire, in this there are lots of jungle scenes and flips between a city and the jungle so a lot of ambient noises are included to make each individual area more immersive and realistic without it being ruined by the swapping of location.

an example would be tree's swaying in the wind, frogs croaking in the forest, birds calling, wet muddy footsteps when the characters are moving on foot, this are the examples in the jungle scenes.

the other end of would be in the city (the capital).the ambient noises would be very different indeed.

here are some examples of what be in work;

there would a humming of electricity and lights around, people possible talking in streets, concrete footsteps in rooms and city buildings, doors opening and closing etc., there are many more examples of this, ambient noises are just the environment you are in.

in a film some scenes maybe be hard cuts, which is a scene goes to the next scene without a transition and this can be bad for the mixing of ambient sounds because its a sudden of one environment to the other without a moment or two to smoothly add them together so the ambient noises just suddenly stop and start again between scenes which sounds and looks bad and completely ruins the immersive experience seeming that its not seamless, and looks rough so audio mixers try to avoid having to be in a scenario where they are working with hard cuts because it looks rough and ragged, with transitions this can be avoided by time for quick swaps of ambient noises without being noticing the environment changing.

it's best to record on set of the environment and ambient noises and not get them from record sound library's because when you record on set you can get exactly would you need from the audio and you can rely on it instead of going with sound that half sounds like what you want.

also recording on set is the real thing and is exactly what it sounds like not just a different version of it.

some examples of this are;

 fire, its better to record fire of what the visual is showing because fire can so many different sounding variations, like wood burning or cheap metals or plastic, a large fire or a small one, it could be a roaring fire you need or a forest fire not all sounds are going to be want for the sequence so with recoding it your self the sound is authentic and realistic.

another example would be the forest because of things like the weather and what kind of forest you are in, you wouldn't want a tundra sound for a rain forest, so recording on set will get you correct, accurate sound you need for the environment.

last example is footsteps, libraries may have out of time footsteps and the ground may be different e.g you want mug running and all you can find is concrete running.

Recording Dialogue

recording dialogue can be extremely difficult and it is, due to many factors recording clean solid dialogue is hard to achieve, even harder without good equipment or any for that fact, within recording on set there are a lot of sounds going on so ambient noises are crossing over dialogue and it can over power it making dialogue hard to hear, so every element of audio needs to be individually recorded, so there is a lot of work to get clean audio which can be either time consuming or hard to get.

you could record the dialogue indpendantly and then use it to dub over the clip, however this is risky in terms of audio not fitting with lips in the clip.

also a problem with dubbing the dialogue is that is sounds very odd at times and doesn't  sound like its from the scene so in the end dubbing is a bad idea to use because it's hard to master.

another idea for recording dialogue is to have a microphone on the person or near them however this also can get muffled in walking scenes or sound like its not the correct distance to the camera.

the importance of Ambient noises in dialogue scenes is so important because the sounds make the convocation flow much easier and gaps of silence are filled in and make it more smoother when shots changed and when someone new speaks.

the best way to get around recording dialogue is by using a boom microphone to pick up the dialogue.