Select from one of the readings, up to but not including Week 5, and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you. 

I enjoyed Rowan Ayers’ piece on Sound Recording, which stressed the importance of sound and sound quality, bringing unwanted background noise to attention, as he raised the point that “…the human ear is selective.  It can focus on one sounds source and reject other noises, but the microphone cannot.  It will pick up every sound within its range, even some which your ears may not have noticed”, demonstrating the importance of sound recording while on a shoot, and then being incredibly selective as to what sounds you want, or don’t want throughout your scene.

After exploring Cinema Verité documentary last week in Cinema Studies, Stanley Alten’s reading on Creating the Sound Design was also interesting, discussing how sound recording could be used and manipulated in the observational form of documentary, simply by selecting different microphones for varying effects, despite the ‘truthfulness’ intended to be conveyed in cinema verité.