In week four, I continued to experiment with various editing techniques through practice. Loved how each shooting homework had a different focus. For example, the “Story In A Minute” shoot required me to record audio separately and combine it with corresponding footage. Without background music, the use of environmental sound was crucial for an immersive viewing experience. Therefore, I decided to shoot some video footage when I went to Brighton Beach, an attractive destination that has many of the ambient sounds needed for this cut.
The process of getting the video footage went smoothly because no one would care about a “tourist” with a camera on a beach. But when I wanted to record the sound of the scene alone, I found that it wasn’t easy as I found that the distance between me and the sound source had a big impact on the audio quality. I previously thought that if I were close enough to the source, I would definitely get the best audio results. When I crouched down and tried to get closer to the waves, the audio level of waves hitting the sand was great but lacked a hint of spatial awareness. This type of problem reflects the fact that I should make adjustments to the placement of the microphone to suit the needs of different scenes. For natural scenes like the beach, it is best not to point the microphone directly at a specific object, but to place it centrally to get a stereo sound. Also, as I was only recording on my iPhone, the audio quality was degraded. From my perspective, gear like a wind muff is essential to reduce wind noise from the sea breeze. The lack of gears also caused me a bit of trouble in audio editing. I needed to use a plug-in to dampen the noise as much as possible and then kept the audio level between -12db and -6d, which is considered the golden range for audio level.
