Chris Watson lecture

Chris Watson is a wildlife sound recorder and designer that often gets hired to do wildlife programmes such as any David Attenborough documentary, or anything similar. As well as recording and sound designing he archives all of his recordings and companies approach him to buy the rights so some of his recordings to use in their programmes. In this lecture he is talking about some of his previous projects and certain types of sound recording, and how to achieve them. As well as this he mentioned some good practices to keep that are directly relate-able to industry standard techniques.

The main point that was emphasised by him was to use an atmosphere track with a low dynamic range so it doesn't distract the audience from what they are supposed to be focusing on, but it still fills in any gaps that might leave a strong silence. To get this atmosphere track you just record the silence for a couple of minutes, and it has to be at a similar level to how we might naturally hear it, this gives a much more natural feeling than any spaces that might contain black silence.

The best way to get a successful stereo recording of an atmosphere is to use two radio mics attached on either end of a wire coat hanger and bend it so the two mics are at an angle facing each other, depending of the scale of how wide apart they are, and the materials in the room that bounce the sound off each other it will provide different acoustics, so it is important to experiment with the scale, positioning, and direction of the mics.

There was so much more in this lecture that I have been able to talk able and have already put into practice, for me, in terms of sound has been one of the best experiences of the year so far, i would hope that we get other professionals of a similar level to come in and talk about other aspects of filmmaking (e.g. cinematography, producing, directing, editing, writing). If we were to have experienced all of these talks i beleive that is the best way for us to make our choices for next year - hear it from the pros.