1. Unit 38: Sound Production
L02 - Be able to record audio for moving image
Adam McCallion

2. In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams Sound
I produced a documentary with my friend George, we delve into the life and work of one of the wold’s most influential photographers of black and white landscape photography. His name was Ansel Adams.
We decided we wanted to narrate this documentary ourselves, however this did bring up some problems:
Buzzing in audio
Too low/ peaking
Noise
Echo

3. Solutions
The Buzzing We later discovered that the issue with the bussing was coming from the cable that we were using on our mic. The cable had to be gold plated or the audio would be destroyed. Too Low/ Too high The main problem with having the audio too high is that once It “clipps” or reaches past its peak, it is then unrecoverable as the audio waveforms are cut off so we had to ensure that the audio levels were set correctly in correlation with the in build +20db on our mic. Noise & echo Noise & echo were a big problem for us when we were doing the narration. From The echo from the room as we spoke and the background noises in George’s living room, We decided to create a blanket wall around the area we were green screening so that the echo was removed along with shutting off any fans or computers that would be heard during the recording.

4. Our goal was to make our voices isolated in silence so that when the music was added in editing, there was no hissing noise. I believe this noise to sound very amateur in any video so we had to make sure it was right at all costs. It took us a total of 8 attempts before we were both satisfied. We also wanted our voices to have a warm and humbling feel to them. For us to achieve this sound we added a vocal enhancer to our audio in editing which gave us our desired effect.
Our goal

5. I was very pleased with the finished product, although no special effects in audio were used, I believe that in terms of the narration we did a pretty good job. Throughout the rest of our documentary we used various songs from different artists and our subscription service from epidemic sound; which gives us access to royalty free/ copyright free music (Non-Diegetic). When Ansel Adams comes on screen at the end playing piano, the audio from the piano is Diegetic as it is there in the shot being played at that time.
The finished product

6. Our Finished Piece https://www. youtube. com/watch
Our Finished Piece We made sure to credit the songs to the artists and “ES” (Epidemic Sound)
Link