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Documentary Sound Design?


cory

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Just out of curiosity, where do you think a verite style documentary should draw the line in terms of adding BGs, foleys, etc in order to stay "honest" to a subject/situation?

 

Been watching/mixing a good amount of docs recently and am curious to know other people's opinions on this....

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cory: " where do you think a verite style documentary should draw the line in terms of adding BGs, foleys, etc "

it depends...

and is completely ultimately at the discretion of the movie-maker story-teller...

 

however there may be influences

Edited by studiomprd
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I do a lot of audio post for this sort of film, and in my corner of the biz I would say that the trend has been in the direction of fiction-film style sound design, with some restraints.  There isn't ever a discussion of "honesty" anymore (there used to be), thank goodness since the whole setup is subjective down to which way the boom mic was pointing on location.  The people I'm working with these days want to use sound to highlight the story, but the operant point of view is often "what would the perfect camera mic have captured here if there wasn't a construction site/freeway/airport/rock concert/huge fountain just out of the shot", and so on.  If it seems strange that you don't hear that car door slam you see in the shot from the production track, we add it.  If the HVAC is making it hard to understand a conversation, we attenuate it.  The higher end and higher profile the doc, the more the prod sound (so often captured via a one-man-band, and thus somewhat indifferently, these days) is worked over in post.  Advances in technology have allowed fairly serious sound fix/sound edit and design to be applied to fairly low budg productions these days--necessary because the quality of the original tracks continues to get worse while the standards of networks etc stay fairly high (if kind of arbitrary).

 

philp

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I mostly do production sound but I sometimes do post for documentaries.  It's kind of blurred lines these days in terms of "keeping it honest."  It really depends on the style of the documentary because if it's a traditional, talking heads / interview based piece, chances are there aren't much sound designing opportunities anyways.  But I do do a lot more designing now on a lot of projects now than I used to, and I think that even though it's not real / is a little "Hollywood Magic", it's still worth it and draws the viewers in.

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An example of what I'm talking about re high-end docs these days might be "Citizenfour", the Laura Poitras film about Edward Snowden.  Laura P recorded nearly all the prod sound as a one-person crew.  But there are 12 other people listed in the sound dept. on IMDB, all of them on the post side...

 

philp

Wow! That's nuts. As an aside, I did see our fellow JWsounder Judy Karp's name on the credits helping out with production recording. Do you know where this was edited and mixed? It is a fantastic film! 

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