Tierno Michael - Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers

This book covers everything you need to know to master the fundamentals of location sound recording and postproduction sound in a comprehensive one-stop guide.

This user-friendly book provides real world situations to analyze the many kinds of location recording configurations and postproduction scenarios and offers easy-to-adopt, budget-conscious solutions to some of the most common issues that arise when working with sound. Chapters cover the theory of sound, preproduction with a sound emphasis, microphone selection, testing equipment, how to boom and mix on set, synchronization and time code, and editing sound while doing a picture cut in a traditional picture software platform. Additionally, the book discusses bringing a project into a Digital Audio Workstation and explores basic sound design, dialogue editing, Automated Dialogue Replacement, Foley, sound effects, music for film, re-recording the final mix, and outputting sound to finish a project. Accompanying examples allow readers the opportunity to try out the various techniques and drills on location, in postproduction, or both.

Aimed at students, early career and independent filmmakers, as well as those considering a vocation in location and postproduction sound, Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers makes achieving great sound attainable for all, and is an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to better understand the art of film sound.

Michael Tierno is a former Miramax Story analyst and an independent writer/director/editor of feature films. He is author of the best-selling book Aristotles Poetics for Screenwriters and has made four feature films including Turn Back Night, a sci-fi comedy. He is Associate Professor of Film Production at East Carolina University.

Michael Tierno

First published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Taylor & Francis

Adobe product screenshot(s) reprinted with permission from Adobe.

Logic Pro X product screenshot reprinted with permission from Apple.

All Chapter 10 sample media can be found at: https://www.michaeltierno.com/link-23

The right of Michael Tierno to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 9780367354251 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780367354244 (pbk)

ISBN: 9780429331305 (ebk)

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Writing a book like this is a lot like making a film; it involves the hard work and commitment of a lot of people trying to help you accomplish your vision. Along those lines I first wish to thank Routledge for believing in the book and helping me develop it to become so much more than I could ever have done on my own. Im very grateful that Simon Jacobs brought in the project; Emma Tyce helped develop it and finally Alyssa Turner steered it through production. Along the way I received a lot of great reads on the manuscript but I especially want to thank Kira Summers and Korey Pereira for their extensive notes and insights. I also want to thank East Carolina University, the school where I teach, because they provide me with a solid platform to research sound and make films. I thank all my students over the years; too numerous to name, but you have made this whole experience exciting and fun and having your active minds and passion to inspire me has been priceless. I would like to thank my art director Jennifer Woolard for her tireless work making great infographics, and my assistant art director Matt Barnhart who came in at the last minute and helped with key manuscript preparations.

Of course, love to my friends and family for listening to me babble excitedly about films over the years, some of which they have no interest in ever seeing! Finally, I want to thank my ultimate family member, my wife Judy Quinn, the love of my life, my best friend, co-producer of films, editor, and most fun person to be with ever.

Tom Hanks plays a soldier in Saving Private Ryan (a sound design masterpiece) where he and his men find themselves in a dangerous situation, facing certain death by approaching Nazi tanks. They dont have much in the way of firepower to fight them off. But Hanks character is a schoolteacher who recalls having read the army manual where it talked about sticky bombs, bombs you can improvise using rags and gasoline to attach to tanks as a way to blow them up.

I never forgot that scene because to me, that is the perfect analogy to what reading a book about the filmmaking process should be. It can never duplicate the experience of being in the field and making films in terms of learning how to do it. But it can give you a lot of great ideas. That said, welcome to Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers, a manual to help you through the battlefield of filmmaking, with regard to sound.

Disclaimer: you cannot learn how to make great sound in film by reading a book any more than you can plow a field by churning it in your mind. Ill return to this later, but for now, welcome to a unique journey through location and postproduction sound for filmmakers written by a filmmaker who has a passion for sound and a lot of experience producing sound with a variety of budgets, crews, technicians, etc. This manual is set up a little bit differently than most books on sound or even filmmaking in general, so let me explain.

In uses a feature film I recently shot, Turn Back Night, as an example to discuss various scenarios of location sound recording.

In , we move into the postproduction process, with a brief overview focusing on workflows and all the various jobs that need to be done in sound postproduction, jobs normally delegated to teams of professionals. But in this chapter, I assume that you will be a one-person band, doing everything thats required. In fact, if there were an overarching theme to the entire book, its that as an independent filmmaker, we need to know how to do everything.

Keeping in that tradition of knowing how to do everything, , Putting it all together, I do a very short mix showing the whole process again.

There are links to demos and folders that contain practice media so you can try out some of the exercises on your own. Most of the specimen examples come from the feature film I made, Turn Back Night. It stars Holly Anne Williams, Chris Chirdon (