Sound is Super Difficult!
When someone asks me what was the hardest part of making Shining a Light on Teen Vaping, I think they expect me to talk about the research about vaping or story boarding the film or learning to use post-production software. Honestly, these were the main areas that I was most nervous about before I started work. My answer, however, is recording sound.
I am in my third year of theatre class at Westlake High School, and I have acted in many plays with Westlake Theatre and performed many times in our improv troupe WIT. It has been an amazing experience with a wonderful and inspiring teacher in Ms. Yanchak and so many talented classmates, who I enjoy spending time with. While this has also exposed me to set design, costumes, makeup, lighting and sound, it all seems to get done magically around me by a team of my peers with boundless energy, who are invisible to the audience. I have good friends who have focused on the theatre tech side and others who take film classes, but my focus has always been performing. I knew that taking on producing this film would be a big challenge even with the help of these friends with more experience behind the scenes.
I tested out several microphones for recording my narration of the explainer videos and draped my room in blankets to simulate a professional sound room. That was the easy part. I had planned to shoot my live audio/video narration in a controlled sound environment, but the pandemic made that too risky. Instead, I decided to shoot these parts outside at my school, but I had no idea what I was in for. I could make an hour long outtake video of stopping mid-sentence as a motorcycle roared by or we threw stones into trees to get loud birds to fly away. If you listen carefully, you will hear a bit too much wind, leaves rustling on pavement or birds chirping in some shots. We even tried shooting the audio and video separately with the camera on a tripod and my iPhone poking out of my pocket to record sound. Will Ashcroft spent many hours syncing up the separate audio and video tracks, but I did not like more than half of the best takes. Also, since that day of filming, I finally got a haircut my mom had been begging me about, so it would have looked strange to just reshoot just some scenes and lose continuity. So we left all of that work (apologies to Will) on the cutting room floor… digitally speaking.
Once we had everything we wanted to use, there was still a lot of audio to manipulate. Volumes were distractingly different between my scenes or even amongst interviewees in the Zoom recordings, so we had to manipulate volumes and try to smooth out distracting noises. Finally, for the interview of my friend who vapes, I wanted to be sure that his voice could not be identifiable but still understandable. There are a lot of voice manipulation effects available in Final Cut Pro, and I tried all of them. Eventually I found a combination of effects and manual settings to alter his voice enough that I could not recognize him but I could still hear what he was saying. It required that he speak very clearly, so it lost some of the informal quality of the group Zoom interviews. Given the more serious tone of the interview, I felt that it was more important that his story could still be heard with enough clarity even if it lost the casual tone of the other interviews. I also gave him the questions in advance, so that he could be prepared to articulate his answers with clarity.
In the end, I gained a lot of respect for the work that sound crews do, particularly when shooting on location.