Zachary Willard Film/Blender

The Importance of Audio It's pretty easy to understand why audio is an important part of film. Thats why having good audio is an essential piece of crafting a professional product. One of the easiest ways to tell if something is amateur is to listen to the audio. Lots of the time there will be lots of background noise or hissing. This can be caused by a few different things. There is also a big misconception that this can be fixed later on. More often than not that is not the case. If you get bad audio on location your hopes of fixing it are slim. However, I'm going to discuss the different ways of recording audio as well as solutions to improve quality. Microphones There are many different forms of microphones out there but I will discuss the most commonly used microphones. The first microphone on the list is the shotgun microphone (seen in the photo below). These tend to be long, fragile, and expensive. This falls under the condenser microphone category. The qual...

What makes the Film Look? There are a number of things involved in producing video that appears to be a movie. However, these days the first thing people think about is the letterbox format the film is displayed in. The problem is that online creators go about replicating this effect the wrong way. The following video goes into this more in-depth, but I'll summarize the main issues. Most film cameras shoot 16:9 aspect ratio because most screens (computer, TV, and phones) are 16:9. However, the aspect ratio that we have become familiar with for movies thanks to cinemascope (more on that later) is 2.35:1. In order to achieve this 2.35:1 ratio people have been adding black bars at the top and bottom of their footage. What this does is cover up the footage, which if done to create 2.35:1 ratio, removes 25% of the previous footage! The following video depicts this in greater detail. Cinemascope Cinemascope was a patented way of creating what we now know as widescreen. 21st Cen...