This Is Steph’s Blog

“Good Thing There’s No Audio” A Look into the Reedy Fork Farm’s Documentary

Overall, in terms of working with someone, I did enjoy having a partner.  It was nice in editing to have someone double-checking your work and critiquing with you.  Also, if Christie knew more about an editing technique, or I did, we could help each other and really work together.  While filming on the farm, we always checked with the other to make sure they liked the shot or if the audio was sounding good (or, at least, if we thought that the audio sounded good, but I’ll get to that).  It was nice to know that someone was with you to help you avoid making mistakes.  I enjoyed working with Christie and I felt that we shared the work well together both on the farm and in the edit labs.

For this project, we were able to get a hold of a Canon 7d, as well as the Panasonic.  This, combined with the morning light and the beautiful farm, made for some of the best visuals I’ve seen in any project I’ve ever done.  With both cameras, we were able to experiment with a lot of shots and we had a really good time. Regardless, the beautiful farm was invaded by an impossible-to-deal-with amount of wind.  I learned a lot about editing audio for this project because it was what we spent the bulk of our time doing.  Using two 3-band equalizers and, at times, a low-shelf filter, we had to find the frequency of the wind, along with the frequency of our subject’s voice.  Then, we had to attempt to match it throughout the clips.  While, at the time, I had thought to myself “we should just be doing this inside,” I realize now, we could’ve blocked the wind with a board or a coat, anything to cut off that wind.  And, although I had the wireless lav attached to Mr. Teague’s shirt, it was the rode mike attached to the Canon 7d that we were able to take audio from.

When we were worried about our audio, we went back and redid the interview in an area with more buildings around to block the wind.  This audio ended up being used under b-roll, which helped to clean up our piece a little bit.  Though, we did have to try and keep some consistency with the sound and, therefore, had the 3-band equalizer on that audio as well.

We filmed Friday morning, Saturday afternoon and Sunday in the late afternoon.  The wind never ceased. On Sunday, we interviewed Mr. Teague’s son and father, as well as the milking of the cows.  While the wireless lav completely shut down on me, I was able to get good audio on the shot gun mike, or so we thought.  Both Christie and I were shocked when we got into the edit suites to find the entire day’s audio was nonexistent.  Even though the audio was coming out in the headphones, we had nothing to show for it.  We changed the focus of the documentary to the middle Teague and the farm’s change to organic, with less emphasis on the family aspect.  While it was upsetting to lose so much good footage, there was nothing we could do and we had to work with it.  I think that’s what I learned, while doing this project: You have to work with what you got.  I think that considering the problems we did encounter, we were able to pull off a decent documentary and, hopefully, we’ll only get better for the next project.

1 Comment so far
Leave a comment