Originally my plan for this module was decided on genres which would most benefit from this experiment, and which ones may lean towards needing stronger visuals and than audio but recently I've had a change of heart. Due to time constraints and creative decisions, I've decided only to use my own films and student films very minimally to show how this kind of experiment doesn't perform positively on these types of footage. I've experimented with certain student footage to discover it doesn't affect the quality as significantly as I'd like, so I'm using this in my work to show I tried with this type of footage but didn't receive the results I'd like.
Because of this I've decided it may be best to edit and alter big budget feature films that have set the high quality standard that audiences are accustomed to. Fair use is a rule/law that makes this possible for me as a student and creative editor, where I can use and edit the footage to my own purpose and be protected under fair use. The genres I've landed on using for my work is:
Action/Adventure
Horror
Drama
Visual Spectacle
These four genres should cover the range I'm hoping to explore but more could be added if needed. Action/Adventure should provide a heavy action set piece with a lot of visual activity with the audio necessary to follow the plot. Horror will provide an uncomfortable mood that relies on both sound and video to fulfil its purpose. Drama will be a dialogue heavy piece with an intense acting performance needing both visuals and audio. The Visual Spectacle will rely on its action packed special effects and overwhelming visual content which will put audio to the test.
The four films that should cover these are:
Gravity (2013)
The Conjuring 2 (2016)
Goodfellas (19900
Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
I've found clips in all these films which will help me complete my experiment. They match up with all the guidelines I was looking for and should help me achieve success from this module.
For this minor project I have decided I will be editing on the professional software Avid. Avid is the industry standard for editing and I've learnt more and more skills since I've been at Uni. For this module I need to learn the opposite of everything I've been taught, I'll need to downgrade and disrupt the quality of the videos instead of improving them and editing for a higher standard. I've began researching techniques and ways of lowering the quality and quite a few or using the same tools I already use for improving but lowering and decreasing certain aspects to see a major effect on the visuals.
Tools such as Colour Effect play a major part in the importance of degrading the visual quality, changing the hue and saturation can have significant effects on the colours and remove or add brighter and darker tones completely changing the final outcome. You can also alter individual colours with this effect to really change and add an off putting visual look to the film. Another technique I've learnt to change the visual quality is to give the appearance of poor frame rate and sort of give it an echo. To achieve this I need to use the visual twice. On one layer will be the main footage that will be used for maintaining the story and to be edited, while the second layer will be placed above and set to play one frame after the original clip, but superimposed over the top making it see through and noticeable on the video. This is a very effective technique in lowering the video quality and is quite off putting for the audience. Along with the colour changes this is my primarily method of effecting the visual quality of the footage, other changes will be applied here and there so all videos don't look the same, but I don't want to alter it too much because theres a chance of overkill which could ruin the experiment.
For the audio quality I looked into using different software for editing the sound aspect as Avid does offer their own sound effect editing, there are other software which is for only sound editing. Adobe Audition, Audacity and iZotope are professional and industry standard softwares known for sound editing and can offer unique sound editing for my work but my main goal is to lower the sound quality instead of enhancing or improving. Lee should me new methods of using the Avid sound editing tools and very interesting ways of altering the sound to achieve the effect I want. Using Avid's own sound editing tools does not only create the sound effects I'm looking for, but it also makes it simpler with less and less going to and from softwares, exporting and importing files and clips.
While researching films with bad audio, it only seemed fair to research films with bad video and weigh up each side. Surprisingly, other than films with really bad visual effects, they're aren't too many films with low quality visuals, that weren't because of the time and availability of technology during that era. Films such as The Blair Witch Project were filmed on a low budget and used the low quality visuals (and also audio) to it's advantage through a clever marketing scheme. Many 80's and 90's films have been criticised for their bad quality and foggy like cinematography but this is mainly due to the converting and restoring process at the time. Many films from earlier decades like the 60's have been remastered and tend to look better than films from the 80's and 90's because they are yet to be remastered.
Films that are probably considered to have the lowest quality of footage is the earliest form of it, such as silent films but you can't criticise this genre based on its visual look and quality. It started the whole industry off and set us on the path we're on now.
A recent release film that seems to have the attention of movie fans due to its low quality visuals in theatres is Spectre (2015)
"At this point, I noticed that the quality of the main film was nothing like as good as the preceding material.
It looked soft, unsaturated, grainy (but not in a good way) and noisy and indistinct in the shadows. At times it almost looked like a high-res version of a VHS recording!
I have no idea what was going on here. I don’t know if there was something wrong, or whether this cinema buys lower resolution copies for its secondary screens (I really do doubt that). Or maybe I’ve got so used to digital that I was noticing that most of the movie was acquired on 35mm film. I’m no expert on cinema film delivery or projection, but I am used to looking at very high quality material, and this certainly wasn’t.
It was all the more striking because I had already seen that the cinema was capable of projecting extremely high quality pictures."
Now this seems to be up for debate at the moment but there are numerous accounts of people having the same viewing experience. Most high budget films are of very high visual quality so the quality of Spectre at these cinemas must have really been low for people to have noticed and talked about it after there experience.
It's not all that common that many big budget films are released with low quality audio anymore these days, but there a few that slip through the cracks. Although in some cases the quality of audio can be quite opinionated and matter to you as an individual, more than a general majority, but I've decided to research into some films that are known for their bad audio.
A common movie many people bring up when discussing bad sound is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014). This wasn't just from your average movie going audience, many insiders in the industry also have problems and complaints about this one. The feedback hasn't been positive when it comes to the sound mixing of the film. Theres been many talk about misunderstanding dialogue and completely not been able to hear it, due to composer Hans Zimmer's score increasingly getting louder. This has many people wondering how it got released like this, it completely takes you out of the movie at some points and is not the standard you've come to expect from these films. Interstellar's sound mixing team includes rerecording mixers Gary Rizzo and Gregg Landaker, who are both experienced pros and worked with Nolan before on 2010's Inception, winning them an Oscar.
In 1972's The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, there is a few sound effect issues here and there but nothing to major to really affect the film too much. Audiences have pointed out that in a seen where someones windshield gets kicked in, you can hear the sound of breaking glass before it actually happens, and again in a scene during an assassination attempt, one of the assassins gun is smoking but it made no gun shot noise. These are very minor audio mistakes, that shouldn't be happening in a film of this standard but not major enough to ruin the quality of the overall production.
Similar to the audio problems in The Godfather, 1993's Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg also has a few minor inconveniences in the audio department here and there. During lunch, when Malcolm says, 'And now you're selling, you wanna sell it,' the short quickly cuts to Gennaro. In it, Malcolm's lips are still moving after he's finished speaking. Again in the kitchen scene, the instant the first velociraptor hops up onto the counters, it knocks off a large metal pot. There is no sound of it hitting the ground. I began researching Jurassic Park because of a debate we had in lesson with our tutor Andy Conway. Conway claimed that the audio and mixing in Jurassic Park was of low quality and that Spielberg was more focused on Schindler's List at the time, and that Jurassic Park was an after thought. This sparked much debate in the class due to many of the students loving Jurassic Park and was quite amusing to hear everyones different arguments for and against the quality of Jurassic Park.
Though audio seems to be the outright favourite, I want to find more and understand more about why video is the dominant output when viewers are concerned. Eric Lamontagne works in the sound department for many big productions in TV and Film, and was interviewed on this topic and I looked into his responses.
"Saying sound is more important is quite a statement! Many storytellers would argue that moving picture started silent and that audiences were entertained. That said, I believe I do understand the need for sound that supports the image but sound must only carry the story naturally."
Lamontagne believes sound is necessary to support the story, if and when its used. He goes on to talk about how many blockbusters now are overshadowing that with their visuals and it can take away from the storytelling. Of course there is ADR and replacement processes but Lamontagne likes to capture the best audio he can, on the day.
"It has been my goal to capture as much live performance on the day of production as possible, a personal and professional goal that I share with many fellow sound crews. At the end of the day though, my role is to do my best to capture the performances to support the story."
This got me thinking about silent films again, and how is the music and score that accompanies the film, necessary to support the story? In many cases the audio can add comedic and dramatic effect with its timing in certain instances. I believe this certainly supports the entertainment of the film, it helps keep audiences engaged, but does it support the story? This gives me three ideas. A silent film that is completely silent with no music, a silent film that is accompanied with random musical score, and a silent film that is accompanied with an original synced score.
The outcome of this will help me understand how audiences will rank the viewings of silent films, and if audio really does matter and support the story of a silent film.
"But for the most part a silent film was silent unless accompanied by live music. But was the music always there? When films were first exhibited commercially, in 1894, via the Edison Kinetoscope peepshow, they were silent. You peered down into the machine, paid your cent or penny, and thirty seconds of so of silent miniaturised action played before your eyes. Edison wasn’t happy with this, and in 1895 introduced the Kinetophone, an adaptation of the Kinetoscope with accompanying (though not synchronised) phonograph recordings. Yet for the most part people started seeing silent films silently." From the early days of silent film, most of the audiences were seeing them silent and still enjoying them. For a time, unless accompanied by a live orchestra or such, the film you'd be watching was in complete silence. I want to find out why this changed. Sources: http://www.reelmarketer.com/interview-how-sound-is-everything/
https://thebioscope.net/2011/08/29/when-silents-were-silent/
When researching audio vs video, there is an absolute handful of books, websites and articles that are pushing the point of audio been better. This one is no different. But this one gave me new ideas.
Why Audio Matters Most for Audiences by DaCast.com goes with the argument that "our sense of sound is the most integral when it comes to communication, making audio an essential aspect of any broadcast." I can't debate that at all, it's a hugely valid point. Our main sense of communication is talking to each other, which for lack of a better term, is sound orientated. It only make sense that the easiest way for us to follow a story would also be through sound. The page goes on to offer a test to any readers that doubt their opinion. "Don’t think sound is all that important? Try this exercise: pick your favorite scary movie and watch it on mute. Meanwhile, play a nice, relaxing song in the background, or a comedy track from your favorite standup comic. Stripped away of its intended audio cues and music, which are designed to build suspense, tension, and terror, it’s doubtful that scary movie will have the same impact." This exercise is a great insight into the modern horror film, that features too many jump scares and not enough actual scary footage. Although there are plenty of horror films known for their hauntingly visuals and films such as 2015's The Visit which actually as no score or soundtrack at all. I'm really interested in doing something like this for my experiments. Using some horror footage and seeing how much of the audio actually elevates it from just the visuals. Showing the clip with high quality video and low quality audio, and then low quality video and high quality audio, will show which of the two is more important to the production and the audience of a horror film. Then if in the future if any of us are making a horror film, we'll know to maybe focus or lean towards one because the audience get a bigger kick out of that one. Sources: http://www.dacast.com/blog/audio-matters-audiences/
I've started research looking into debates and discussions of Audio Vs. Video to help me understand both sides of the argument, and where I should start and go next in my experiments and work. Many of the articles and videos I've found heavily lean towards audio been the dominant answer to this debate. Video Entrepreneur Magazine have an article that backs up the argument of audio been a higher priority than video. In their article "Audio is More Important Than Video Picture Quality" by L. Scott Harrell, he talks about how video picture quality is some what mistaken for been more important and gives tips on how to improve you audio quality.
"Most inexperienced video entrepreneurs make the mistake in the beginning of their careers focusing a lot on capturing the best quality visuals for their videos and, all too often, completely blow the sound."
This can speak heavily towards students such as myself who are just starting out and developing their filmmaking skills. From an outsiders view, audio isn't talked or thought about much when discussing a film or it's production but its one of the most important elements, and If done correctly, its quality will go unnoticed because it's done its job. For many of us on the course, it wasn't until the editing stages till we realised just how important and skilful audio capturing is to the final edit of a film. Now this is not to say that you can neglect the video quality of your production also, but the misconception of a videos quality needing to be high for it to be successful just isn't gospel. L. Scott Harrell goes on to talk about how that even if the video component turns out to have flaws and be less than perfect, that with the right quality audio, that is clear and free of distractions, that production can still go on to be a success. This talks mainly more to the pre-production and production side of making sure you always capture high quality audio. The article however goes on to discuss the opposite side of this and how studies have shown that even if the audio quality of your production is just medium to marginal quality, then no matter how high quality or good looking the video picture turns out to be, that audiences are likely to react to the production as a whole negatively. But again, just another reason to be precise in your audio recording. The article is accompanied with a short list to help you capture audio better.
Tips for recording superior quality audio:
1. Voice-Overs are Easy and Reliable!
There’s no doubt that while shooting video and sound in an outdoor location, recording high quality audio can be quite difficult. However, with a little preparation, you can prevent a potentially disastrous situation. Perhaps your best option in windy or noisy outdoor environments is to record most of your audio track indoors, or in-studio, and simply apply it is a voice-over. In other words, you will be recording the audio off-camera separately in a different location and later add it to the video during the editing process. I know several very successful video entrepreneursthat don’t even bother shooting video and use only b-roll or stock video clips that they’ve either shot previously or have purchased online instead. They tend to focus more of their time developing a killer script and recording great audio for their projects.
2. Set Up a Sound Booth
It is best to record audio in a small, carpeted room with wall treatments (pictures, curtains, etc) in order to avoid a harsh sound characterized by an echo. If audio is more important than video for you then you should be recording in some sort of studio. When it comes to make-shift recording studios, closets are actually the best choice.
3. Be Prepared and Have the Right Equipment
If your video production requires you to record your audio and video at the same place and time, then be prepared for the wind and ambient noises you may very well pick up from the background. Try to choose a quiet location and shoot the video when there’s no wind if at all possible. Definitely use a dead cat, or wind muff, windshield which are microphone covers designed to minimize wind noise when recording in less than perfect wind conditions. Keep in mind that a little wind noise is enough to ruin your audio track and is almost impossible to edit out. With most camera configurations you can monitor the quality of your sound during or immediately after recording using a pair of headphones. They’re a pretty cheap insurance policy against leaving the shoot only to find out that what you’ve recorded is essentially garbage.
4. Get Close!
Getting the microphone physically closer to your subject ensures better audio quality, less background noise and better fidelity in your sounds. Although, a full length body shot may seem like a better option, the audio quality will be affected, since you will be far away from your mic. Make it a point to plan your outdoor shots at a closer distance to the camera if you must use a smartphone, iPad, tablet or other mobile device or your camera’s onboard microphone.
5. If You Are Going to Be a Video Professional, Use Professional Gear
Most of the microphones built into cameras are omnidirectional and record unwanted sound from every direction, the microphones in mobile devices like iPadscan be even worse. When recording audio dialogue a uni-directional mic is really best. If audio is more important than video in your situation, the perfect situation is to use even a decent quality off-camera directional microphone plugged into a separate audio recording device. The second best option would be to use a microphone plugged into your camera. For professional video content creators and entrepreneurs running video businesses, we consider an external microphone a MUST HAVE piece of gear.
It's shocking to discover how much of a disruption bad audio can be to a film production. In the early days of cinema, quality was not to the standard to which we have it today. During the silent film era, the quality of the video was not incredible high, it would be grainy and somewhat shaky but it was very often accompanied by backing music. This might be one of the first experiences of filmmakers using good audio to attract and audiences attention. Silent films completely silent are not the easiest films to watch and keep your attention, but suddenly with the addition of sound and music, they become interesting and easier to view. If this was switched and a silent film had amazing video quality and low audio quality, even though its a silent film, I think the switch would be negative on the film.
Raindance Canada uploaded a video to their YouTube account in 2014, showing their own example of why they find audio quality to be more important than video quality. He discuss how in some cases the bad audio can be forgiven in such a purpose of stunt videos where a man might be skydiving, the audio here could be forgiven cause its main focus is on the video. Vice versa with found footage films, the video quality is not high but thats to support the style in which it is been filmed. The video discusses how with bad audio, the content is hard to take seriously, insinuating that bad audio may lose you professionalism and give a sign that your work is not legitimate. The video ends talking about how you shouldn't have to choose but if you have to choose, maybe good audio is the way.
The majority of my research so far has strongly sided with audio quality been inferior to video quality, and have made very strong arguments to why. I want to continue my research into this argument and search more for reasons that a film might consider having better video than audio for a legit reason. A case where its more important to its purpose for the picture quality to be stronger than the audio. So far my research has given me new ideas to what my experiment is going to entail, and to try and make it dig deeper than just the surface question. Hopefully finding some useful results worth reporting.
Minor project, along with dissertation, is the first module of our third year studying Creative Film and Moving Image Production. It's main aims as a module is to helps us focus on a single practice within the industry, and enhance and develop technique and skills within this role. It's a research based module primarily and helps establish opportunities in the future. This is also one of the modules that is heavily focused on the technical aspect of the course. My main area that I want to specialise in throughout my third year of university is writing, but this module I'd like to focus on something else, something that can match the aims and goals of the module better and more suited to the objectives, so I've decided to focus on editing for my minor project.
Specifically, audio quality Vs. video quality. On the surface this doesn't appear to be the most ground breaking area I could've chose, but with been a film student I wanted the area to apply to me as a student now and to be able to have instant results and effects on my work while still at university. It will also be going deeper than just audio vs video, and into editing software, and featuring more technical aspects that can develop and provide solid research that'll support my ideas throughout the module. From my basic research, there is already talk online about this debate, especially on the YouTube space, with content creators wanting the best audio and video quality they can get for their audience. There are articles online discussing the argument and we've also had quick talks about it in sessions and lectures, where the primary consensus seems to be that audio quality takes priority over video quality. An audience would rather be able to hear whats going on clearer than see whats going on clearer. If you can't hear or understand the dialogue, then you're struggling to follow the plot and it takes you out of the movie, no one wants to listen to horrible audio. Whereas if the video quality isn't good but you can still hear whats going on, it makes it a little easier on the audience and helps fill in gaps here and there. I want to be able to put this to the test. I want to experiment with audio quality and video quality to see which means the most to the audiences, but I also want to experiment with different types of genre and different styles of filming to see if this changes from what you might expect. Some genres may find it more beneficial to have better video than audio and this will be an aspect I would like to explore.
I'm hoping to look into how this affects styles such as found footage and audition tapes etc. Different methods and styles of filming but may reflect on how one area maybe more important than the other. The results from this module will help me determine how to improve student quality audio and video and boost it up to an acceptable standard, if not already, and also learn on depending what you're editing that maybe you should focus on one area more than the other, cause the audience is going to appreciate that more and altogether will improve better storytelling through the edit. The finished product of the module along with all the research and development will be a final 3-4 minute video featuring clips and genres with bad audio and good video and vice versa to present in front of an audience with a survey to gather findings. It will range a variety of genres and storytelling styles and will also include my efforts of improving low quality audio and video and trying to restore them to a high level, through the industry and my own techniques.
