The Power of Ambience: Don't Overlook This Key Ingredient
Bryant Falk has been a producer
and engineer for over 12 years working
with such clients as The Ricki Lake
Show, Coca-Cola, Sports Illustrated,
Valley National Bank, and MTV’s The
Shop. His company Abacus Audio
(www.abacusaudio.com) handles many
aspects of the audio production field
from creative and production to mixing
and final output.
When recording sound for our film,
more often than not we overlook a few
key ingredients that could allow us a
painless editing process in post. One
ingredient is ambience. This audio is
typically the kid forgotten at home while
everyone else travels across the world to
have fun.
Simply put, ambience is the sound
of a location when there is no sound.
‘No sound’ being no dialogue. Locations
include: Coffee Shops, Libraries, Schools,
Restaurants, etc. Even ‘outdoors’ has
an ambience. An example is shooting
a scene near a parkway for instance.
On a smaller project it may be cost
prohibitive to shut the parkway down
and choreograph all the cars traveling
through the scene. Better to capture
five minutes worth of the ambience so
you can have options when creating
continuity within the scene. Ambience
also pushes the reality of a moment.
Feeling the location around your actors
can be invaluable in pulling your
audience in.
Another plus in recording ambience
is to help remove it. Today’s digital audio
systems allow many ways to remove
noise. One way is to play a selection
of ambience into your noise reduction
software, so it learns what you want
to take out, and then, apply it to the
audio you’re cleaning. Another way is
to reverse the polarity of you’re clean
ambience and mix it into the source
you’re trying to minimize. Reversing the
polarity of an audio clip can be looked
at like a mirror image. It looks the
same, but if you try to read something
the words are backwards. In audio if
you look at two audio waveforms with
one being the reversed polarity, they
will look exactly alike but exactly the
opposite of each other. Mixing these
two in varying amounts may achieve
a quieter ambience track should the
original be too overwhelming.
One more power of ambience
that is effective is using it as an
emotional adjuster. By adjusting the
pitch through time and adding effects
you can use ambience as an indicator
that something is just not right in your
scene. Whether it is an emotional turn
between two characters or the need to
increase dread at the fact the nightmare
character in the closet is about to spring
out.
I always recommend cataloging
ambience after you’ve finished a
project. There may be more than one
occasion when someone yet again
forgets to record ambience, and the one
you already have may work just right.
This article may not be reprinted in print or internet publications without express permission of StudentFilmmakers.com.
Check out this article in the August 2008 print edition of StudentFilmmakers magazine, page 30.
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