What do you think of the short film I helped on with sound?

I helped out on a short film earlier this year with production sound recording, so mostly the dialogue, plus recording some of the sound effects, but not all.

I did not do any of the post production audio mixing or editing though. I did a little bit of the video editing, but mostly made a few suggestions, and then the producer/director took it from there, and made the final cut. Since this is someone else's short I cannot comment on certain aspects of the movie, other than mostly my work on it. But I figured I would show it, since this is the first time so far, I have been given permission to post someone's short for my own feedback.

Let me know if what you think of the production audio. Thanks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNv3RH5iDHI&feature=youtu.be

The real question. How do you think it is?

Dialogue sound is pretty damn awful in those echoey locations.

Yeah unfortunately, I was called on the spur the moment, and did not have sound blankets. I might get some later on for my next project, if I cannot find a PSM. Not sure if they would have helped much though in a location like that where you still want to see the walls around you.

The situation is more to do with which tools you used for the situation at hand.

There were times where you weren't holding the boom in the right area to capture the dialogue. When you've got a shoot where there will be minimal coverage (if any), multiple subjects wireless mics become more important to ensure you don't miss dialogue and have those lines captured cleanly. The lavs may also help reduce some of the echo issue.

When you don't have the equipment needed for the situation, the production needs to change the situation and get more coverage if they want clean sound captured. As a sound guy, you need to let them know that you didn't capture lines and they need to be recorded again, through wilds, more coverage etc.

Okay thanks. I let them know it would be a challenge to boom between multiple people. Especially the scene in the washroom. But they didn't have time to get more shots other than a few. But I let them know, and I also recorded a lot of wild dialogue and gave it to them. It doesn't sound like the may have went with the wild takes though. Also, we agreed to do some takes of a few actors first, get their dialogue, then get dialogue of the other actors on the other side of the room. However, it sounds like they went with the takes where the mic was not on the actors. I did get their lines in different takes though, but sometimes it sounds like they did not use those takes, and went with dialogue that was recorded off axis, even though we got their dialogue later. I did a lot of coverage, where the audio takes were not used it seems, and they may have used audio from the master shot takes only, where I unfortunately did not catch it all.