How would you record the sound here?

I'd say it was either done with ADR afterword, or everyone in the background was really quiet, and didn't have shoes on, dancing all over a quiet floor, and there was no music playing while shooting.

The opening is a VO. When he's walking through the crowd it's probably ADR; it sounds almost exactly like the opening.

harmonica44 said:

... or everyone in the background was really quiet, and didn't have shoes on, dancing all over a quiet floor, and there was no music playing while shooting.

Click to expand...

The audio mix was rather agricultural, relatively low budget commercial documentary standards rather than high budget theatrical standards. It's unlikely (in the extreme) that a documentary would have the time/budget to shoot this scene as you describe. It was almost certainly shot as it appears, with a lav or even MOS and then ADR'ed/dubbed. Even the music/crowd was almost certainly an audio post creation/addition rather than any of it being production sound.

G

That's a much more complex shot than it initially appears to be - it's very difficult to tell how it was actually constructed due to the low resolution of the youtube video. On the audio side my guess is that it's not ADR at all.

Look at the crowd around him - they're all moving in slow motion. He's not. Right away that suggests that it's two different clips that have been composited together. My guess is that there's actually three different elements - the crowd behind him, him, and the people in front of him. It's most likely shot on a motion control head that was used to first shoot the background crowd with nothing in front of it, then shoot the foreground people with a temporary green screen erected along the path where he was walking, and then finally to shoot him with no crowd at all and the green screen behind him. It's also possible that the foreground and background people were all shot in one take and then the foreground was rotoscoped to insert him between them - but again, the low res video makes it hard to tell.

In any case, I'm pretty sure when they shot his part there was nobody else there - so it would make sense just to capture his audio live.

interesting.

It sort of had me puzzled when I first saw the suggestion of green screen, shot composition, etc... because I don't associate Winterbottom with that sort of stuff. But when I look at it again it appears likely.

the shots of the crowd moving at a different speed, and his clear path through them all look unnatural.

When I first saw this I didn't notice anything odd, which I suppose was the point.