Welcome to Brading images. We are a Photography and Videography studio in Manchester, Salford, Irlam. We primarily do music videos and family photoshoots in the studio. We particularly enjoying doing: Newborn photoshoots, one year old photoshoots, toddler photoshoots, kids photoshoots, fairy photoshoots, mother daughter photoshoots, maternity photoshoots and siblings photoshoots, here, in manchester!
Outside the studio, we run a film club called The Stage and Screen Academy, where we teach filmmaking 101.
Sound is 50% of film, so recording good sound is just as important as recording good video. In fact, it’s often more important as people are more likely to put up with a bad looking film with great sound than a great looking film which sounds terrible.
When recording sound, there are four main things which affect the quality: how close the microphone is to the subject, what type of microphone is used, the amount of gain used when recording and how much background noise there is.
In order to record good sound, you will constantly be doing your best to get the microphone as close as possible to the person speaking, without being in the shot. If the microphone is too far away, the sound will be too quiet. You can boost sound levels in post production but it will still sound distant and the background noise will also get boosted, which sounds bad.
To get as close as possible, you will nearly alway use a boom. This is like a long stick that your mic will be attached to. This allows you to have the microphone just above, or below, the actors in scene – slightly out of the camera shot. The microphone used with a boom is known as a shotgun microphone and is able to focus on a specific source of sound, depending on where it is pointing. Therefore it’s essential the microphone points directly at the actors mouths when they are talking – which might mean moving the boom when different people speak in the scene.
You can also use radio mics where the actor has a microphone directly attached to them which then wirelessly transmits to your sound recording device. These are very commonly used in TV shows and in theatres, but may be used in Film if it is impossible or impractical to use a Boom mic. The microphone, also known as a lavalier microphone, can be discreetly attached to the actors costume near to their mouth. This is why they are sometimes called tie-clip microphones, as TV presenters will have them clipped to their ties. However, for film, you will want the microphone to be completely hidden.
Most sound recording devices will have a sound level on them which shows how loud the audio being recorded is. The scale is from 0DB (absolute loudest) to -infinityDB (complete silence). The aim when recording sound is to get the sound level hovering around -10 to -12DB. What you want to avoid, is for sound to be too loud and going above 0DB, also known as “peaking”, which will result in the audio becoming distorted. You would normally see red appear when monitoring your audio if this happened. You can use the gain control on the recording device to achieve the correct sound level – however, if you turn the gain up to high it can add noise to the recording – which doesn’t sound great.
So let’s recap recording good sound is vital to making a good film and is as easy as getting your microphone as close as possible to your actors and making sure the sound level is loud – without ever getting too loud. Oh, and you always want to make sure the location you are recording in is as quiet as possible – “QUIET ON SET PLEASE”.