Location Scout With Your Ears, Too

As a production sound mixer, my priority is to capture pristine dialog. It’s rare to work in a location that is free of noise issues and so I employ every tool at my disposal to separate the noise from the performance. What shouldn’t be rare, however, is avoiding locations with significant noise issues altogether.

Imagine this:
You walk into a space – it’s got high ceilings, spacious rooms, amazing detail, and even as a bonus, really good electric. But did you stop and listen?
Is it near an airport? A highway? A train track?
Does landscaping come by on the day of the week you’ll be filming there?
Is there a parade coming through town?
Are you allowed to move the antique grandfather clock?
Can you turn off the wine fridge long enough to shoot?
Do the next door neighbors have a dog that barks constantly throughout the day?

Visuals are only half the battle. I’ve seen too many (mostly low budget indie) films die in post because they didn’t consider that their sound has to be just as good (if not better) than their visuals. They get into the edit room and are quickly overwhelmed with audio issues. Even higher budget films which can afford ADR shouldn’t use that as a crutch when they could have just avoided or solved noise issues in pre-production. Besides, nobody likes doing ADR. It’s costly, dull, and the integrity of the original performance won’t be matched.

Consider this:
You’d never send a blind location scout to assess a location, why would you send a deaf one?

So when scouting, please take a moment to not only look, but also listen to the space and keep an ear out for noise problems. Better still, invite somebody from the sound team along for the scout to add their input. Thank you!

Sincerely,
The Sound Dept.