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Week 4: Recording sound
Build a recording chain that survives gain staging, choose a microphone pattern for the shot, and monitor a take instead of hoping it worked.
15 March 2027
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Sound is captured, not caught by accident — the recording chain from source through microphone and gain to recorder, the choice between cardioid, shotgun and lavalier patterns, and closed-back monitoring all decide whether a viewer can tell where they are and what matters. This lecture works through gain staging and why clipping is unrecoverable, room tone as a mandatory ambient bed, wind noise and windscreen choice, and sound perspective as sound’s version of Week 3’s light continuity across a cut.
Outline
We build the recording chain stage by stage — source, microphone pattern, gain, recorder — then compare cardioid, shotgun and lavalier microphones against proximity effect and direct-to-reverberant ratio. Monitoring on headphones, room tone capture and wind protection round out the technical core before we deconstruct the sound-portrait exercise: establish place with an ambient bed, foreground a voice or sound, then resolve.
Bring headphones and a ten-second recording of ambient sound from your own space.
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor