WEEK SIX: SILENCE

Today we given a Zoom H2N and the task of finding the most silent place to record. I initially thought that would be easy – but then I put the headphones on and listened to the sensitivity of the microphone. Very sensitive. I swear I could be standing on one side of a room and hear someones thoughts at the other side. Our first go to place was the disabled toilet, because it’s small and usually empty. BUT we could hear the lights flickering and the constant dull buzz of electricity. Next we went to an elevator, our theory, that when empty, unmoving and isolated it would be the ideal place for silence. Again the electricity could be heard and we had to search on. Time was running out and we were yet to find somewhere quiet enough so we decided to trash the ultra sensitive microphone. Well, we found a bin full of bubble wrap and we thought maybe this softer environment would be home to less sounds. But alas the bubble could be heard, moving unnoticeably to the eye but still slowing moving. A shaky first experience in search of silence but not the first time I had dealt with difficult audio.

Last year I shot a short film for year 12 media as part of our final assessment and had my only hands on experience with audio. My movie was set in the outskirts of Rangoon but shot in suburban Blackburn in a dusty carpark behind a church. Obviously I was required to construct the setting, and attempted to do so with both image and sound. I created both diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound in the post production process which primitively involved me holding my MacBook microphone up to various objects. Brian spoke of having a recording of the background or environment of a scene as it can creating a flow and created quite transparent editing rather than clear cuts. My movie had a lot of short and disjointed shots, and despite being quite amateurish, a constant track of background noise created a real and continuos setting that my disjointed cuts would not have otherwise achieved. So I understand the importance of audio. The next step I guess would be understanding how to produce good audio.