Playing a Role in Independent Film Production: On the Set of the Short Film NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY, Part 2

There is nothing more important to an independent film production than the audio recording. There, I've said it. You can have a mediocre screenplay. You can have some okay actors. And you can probably get away with natural lighting but without the audience being able to "hear" what your actors are saying all the other ingredients for your film will have been useless.

It is with great pleasure that I must say that one of my jobs on the set of the Blank Stage production NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY was as audio engineer. Now saying "audio engineer" doesn't mean much on this project other than that I was responsible for making sure we were getting good audio signal and levels during principal photography. I had several different people as my boom operators but I made sure that the quality & levels were adequate. One of the biggest concerns of director Brent Brooks on the film was that he didn't want to spend much time in post production doing ADR (which means reassembling actors and hoping that they can duplicate the quality of their original dialogue from the original day of filming in a sound booth). No one wants to do this when all they have to do is get great audio on the original day of filming.

On the set of NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY my main duties were as production manager and photographer but I found myself being needed in many different areas (as is befitting on any low budget film production). This happened to be the very first film (other than on my own) where I was responsible for the audio recording. It was actually kind of fun as I was able to spend time paying more attention to different aspects of filmmaking than I was usually accustomed to.

A lot can be learned by simply "listening" to what is being said when filming. Usually, I'm never asked to listen to the quality of what is being said by the actors but you can learn a lot about sound from how an actor talks when in character and what words they chose to put more emphasize on (or don't for that matter). As a writer & director (and even a production manager) one of the elements of filmmaking that I am guilty of overlooking is the audio and the on location audio recording but after working on this film it will not be something I will overlook ever again.

TO BE CONTINUED.