Recording ambient sounds and dialouge

Ambient sounds
People who have the job to create ambient sound have to record the sounds of what they want to hear to then place into the film. Ambient sounds are used to be in the background of films to keep it realistic and help tell the story better. Ambient sounds are really important because without them you'd only hear music and dialogue when watching a film and it would be very confusing. It creates atmosphere and background. For example, if a film was shot in a busy city the ambient sound would be people walking and talking, cars and sound of outside life.Hard cuts are when the clips flick from one to another very quickly to change location but with hard cuts it is much more difficult with audio as you can't cut them off and change them as quickly as flicking to another film. What they do in the hunger games is to merge the sounds together between the clips. For example, if they were going from one scene which was in the jungle to go to the city, when coming to the end of the jungle scene they would put in some quiet city ambient sounds to lead the story into the next scene which is in the city.Recording ambient sound in a location over finding sounds on a sound library works out mush better because it sounds more realistic as it is the actual sounds you want also if you know what you're looking for it's easier to go to the location and record yourself instead of searching for different sounds in a sound library. This also means you get the right "room tone". Another advantage of recording in a location is that you miss out all the silences that you'd get if you were using a library, recording in a actual location means that there is noise every single second of the scene, this makes it more realistic. The Hunger Games use a software called Atmos by Dolby. Atmos has high definition and makes the audio feel realistic and like it is coming through everywhere in the scene.

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Recording Dialogue

Recording dialogue is much harder than you would think, there is a lot to do and think about to get it just right. You have to work out if you want to use the cameras microphone or over the top microphone to get a clearer sound. Both are good but have troubles like the cameras microphone will pick up everything around the dialogue being said and that might make it hard to hear what is being said clearly and with an extra microphone you get a really clear sound of the actors speaking but then you have the trouble of matching up the audio to the clip. To correct things when trying to record dialogue, looping works really well. This is when the actors watch back the recorded clips in a studio, and they re say their lines while watching the clips in front of them to get them correct. This helps a lot because of the the unnecessary ambient sound in the background that you don't need when shooting on set. When recording dialogue while shooting in location it makes it very difficult as their is obvious ambient sound that will get in the way with this, in the hunger games they use looping because in the beach scenes the waves and wind were too loud to shoot the dialogue then and there.