My formal training is actually in Computer Science. After finishing up a long contract I decided I would go back to school for Engineering. Before I could get there a friend (Carrington Vanston) finished up his first screenplay (though he has written several other stage plays, poems, and prose works). He suggested that instead of going back to school, we should form a film production company and make movies. That sounded fun to me, and so Big Woo Films was formed!

We read a stack of books on independent filmmaking and spent about 6 months in development and pre-production before shooting our feature-length romantic-comedy: Duck Duck Goose.

With 33 locations, 20 speaking roles, 7 non-speaking roles and the need for 130 extras it was a somewhat ambitious first script. Thankfully it didn't call for any effects and is primarily a 'talking' movie and so could be made on our minimal self-financed budget.

While in post-production on Duck Duck Goose we took a break to make a 4-minute horror-comedy called There's a Bloodsucker Born Every Minute. We managed to push it through the entire production process in about 4 days to get it submitted to a festival on time.

We are hoping to shoot a feature length horror-comedy in summer 2003 called Zombies Vs. Vampires. We're still in post-production on Duck Duck Goose but would like to have it finished in the next couple of months.

I should warn you that I have no formal training as a sound engineer and my answers in this area may well draw scoffs from any audio professionals out there. My responses below are based on what we learned from books, web-sites, talking with other filmmakers and from filming Duck Duck Goose.

I hope you find them useful.

Audio is just as important as visuals to producing a film people will enjoy sitting through. In many cases people will leave a screening with bad audio but will stick it out if the film has bad visuals. The human brain is simply not well equipped to tolerate bad audio.

There is no camera you can buy that has a built in microphone that is good enough to make a film you hope to get distributed. The pickup is horrid and will not produce good results, even in a soft and quiet environment. Buying an external microphone is really a must and it will likely cost you several hundred dollars.

We bought the Sennheiser ME-66 microphone with K6 power supply (phantom/battery) based on several web sources that suggested it was the best all-round mic to get if you could only afford one.

http://www.sennheiser.ca/microphoneshtml/me66.html

We made our own shock mount

Click here to see it.

...and used a painter's pole for our boom pole. The purpose of the shock mount is to prevent vibrations from the boom pole from reaching the microphone. The vibrations can come from simply moving the boom, or from the person holding the boom shifting their hand position.

A cheap item that will make your audio recording much simpler is a $US 15 boom stand, available at any store that sells musical instruments. When trying to mic from below the stand will let your mic be stationary so you don't need to worry about it moving into the shot or bumping something. You will not need a shock mount with it, since the microphone will have to be stationary. It is also helpful if you are short handed and don't have anyone available to boom the scene from above.

If your budget permits, consider getting a DAT recorder as a backup to your in-camera audio track. The audio quality will not be better than what you get on most pro-sumer digital camcorders, but if your mini-DV drops audio for some reason, at least you won't have to resort to looping. We shot without a DAT and did not experience any sound dropouts.

One other thing worth mentioning:

Having a pre-amp (or a mixer/pre-amp combo) is a must if you don't want your sound to be quiet and muddy. Recording audio without adding a pre-amp is like filming a scene without adding lighting: you'll capture it, but it's not nearly as good as it could be.

The signal coming from the microphone is very weak and you will get an okay-but-not-great signal to noise ratio if you don't have a pre-amp between your microphone and your recording device. What you are looking for primarily is a 'gain' control (not attenuation, like the BeachTek has). If your recording device has a gain control then it probably has a pre-amp built in. If not, consider renting or buying one. Having an 'Expander' feature on the pre-amp to reduce background noise is also a big plus.

Your first edit can likely be handled entirely by a product like Final Cut Pro (MAC ONLY)

http://apple.com/finalcutpro

which is quickly stealing market-share away from everyone (even Avid!). It's a great product! Apple's new Final Cut Express (priced at just $US 299) will put most editing features independent filmmakers need into the hands of even the most modest budgets.

The audio tools in Final Cut Pro and Express are decent but simple. Your finished product will likely need the assistance of a professional audio package like DigiDesign's ProTools (MAC ONLY)

http://www.protools.com/

to properly balance and clean up any pops or other distortion.

Caveat: Final Cut Express does not seem to support exporting your audio to OMF which ProTools will need to edit your audio without losing the time-code. Without time-code, you will have to line your audio up with your video manually.

I haven't actually used ProTools or any other standalone audio package but it is program of choice for our post-production sound guy (Justin Drury).

The results of your audio recording will be no better than the weakest link in your audio chain. Your problem could be with the microphone, the microphone's XLR cable, the Beachtek audio transformer, the phono port on your camera, the ADC-chip in the camera, the recording heads of the camera, or the software you are using to pull the footage to your computer.

Or in some cases it can be external EMF or other interference with your equipment. Unfortunately the only way to find the source of the problem is trial & error. The easiest one is to try swapping your microphone and see if you get the same results.

Keep in mind that the sound you hear from your camera's headphone port at the time of recording is not necessarily the same as the sound you will hear in the studio. On our Canon GL-1 it always sounds like the dialog is clipping, but when we pull the footage into Final Cut Pro, the dialog is fine.

It is because of these eccentricities in most budget equipment that it is important to test your equipment thoroughly before going into production. Another example of this is that the Canon GL-1 actually records about 3% more image than it will show you on the eyepiece or LCD. If you've framed something just out of shot, it will be in shot when you pull the footage.

It's a good idea to try to take some test footage all the way through the production process, if possible. This will allow you to know that if something looks/sounds like x at one point it will look/sound like y when you get it into your editing suite or printed to tape/disc.

I haven't used them myself. My understanding is that you get a very good recording like you would with DAT on a medium that is more durable than DAT. One problem might be the lack of time-code. DAT can provide this but to the best of my knowledge mini-disc players do not.

We avoided the use of lapel mics because we just didn't have room for them in our budget. If we couldn't use our ME-66 for some reason then we just resigned ourselves to looping the dialog in post.

Don't switch brands of Mini-DV tapes. Pick a brand and stick with it. Each tape manufacturer uses a different emulsion to hold the magnetic bits to the tape. The different emulsions on different brands of tapes is frequently what causes your camera to drop audio.

When possible, try to record in a soft room; put blankets, etc around a hard room to try to absorb any echo. If you want an echoey sound from your audio, you can always add that in post, but you won't likely be able to make tinny or echoey audio clean.

ALWAYS get the best audio you can. A couple of times when we were recording outdoors we stopped booming because we 'knew' the audio was going to need to be looped (too much background noise). So we just used the built in microphone, to be used as a guide track for our future looping needs. When we later pulled the footage it turned out our boomed audio was much better than we thought and would have been totally usable if we had just kept booming.

Also, the cleaner the dialog, the easier it will be to use by the actors when looping their original lines (if still needed).

We have lots of other items which may be of interest to filmmakers in the tools section of the Big Woo site:
http://www.bigwoofilms.com/tools.html

and these guys have some interesting articles too:
http://www.volksmovie.com/

And finally:
The best way to learn how to make movies to make one. So go do it!

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Glossary:

Clipping: When audio is so loud it is outside the recordable range of the device or medium and must have some of the audio data is truncated (clipped).

Looping (a.k.a ADR): the recording of dialog in post production to be used in place of the original dialog recorded during production.

ADC-chip: Analog to Digital Conversion chip. Used to convert the analog signals from the microphone to digital information that can be recorded to Mini-DV.

Phantom Power: Microphone power that comes from the XLR line (and is where the Tragically Hip's fantastic "Phantom Power" album gets it's name).

Transformer: A device used to alter the properties on an electrical signal. e.g., in addition to having a different shape, XLR and phono connectors carry a different electrical signal which can be matched by use of a transformer.

XLR: A balanced audio cable for connecting microphones (etc.) to your equipment. XLR is superior to phono cabled mics as they are less susceptible to interference.