Learning

What does process mapping have to do with Music, Audio, Photography and Moviemaking?

Alan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:49:53 +0000

The Short Answer

Everything

The Longer Answer

The longer answer is that every series of actions we perform can be thought of as a process. Understanding those processes will help us improve, even as individuals, whether we're concerned with Music, Audio, Photography, Moviemaking or what have you. I'll discuss each in turn and set the scene for forthcoming articles.

A Basic Process

Making a cup of tea is a process. It's a set of actions that have to be performed in sequence so that the end result, a cup of tea, is achieved. It's quite a complex process when you look at the detail and document it fully. But it's rare that it ever gets documented to that great a level. Occupational Therapists have a test for clients where they see if their client can make a cup of tea. Sometimes, the client forgets to heat the water, other times they forget to put the tea-bag (or other flavouring) in, or forget to put any water in and so on. The number of activities that we take for granted is astronomical yet we know by habit what the sequence of those activities is.

Every process can be mapped. It will take forever and may not be beneficial, but you can map any process. The trick is in deciding which processes to focus on.

Now back to the title, let's look at process mapping and the other facets of this website.

Music and Audio

Can you remember the first time that you compared your home-grown track against a commercial CD? It was quiet, probably very quiet. You may then have learned that you needed to get your tracks mastered. You may have also learned about dynamic compression and if you're still lucky, you treated it with awe as opposed to applying it everywhere and anywhere.

Mastering is a process. Some of the process steps are applying equalisation, manipulating stereo imaging, applying reverb and applying compression.

If you do this on the cheap at home rather than send tracks out to a mastering engineer, you're then into having to dither tracks yourself as well. Similar to the revelation you experienced with the quiet home-grown track, you'll have probably encountered that distortion resulting from when you reduce the bit-depth without dithering.

Where am I going with this?

There's a process in there. For every track, I follow the same process. Think about that. "For every track, I follow the same process."

If I can automate any tasks, I'll improve my situation greatly. Some of the benefits of automating regular tasks:

Save time
Reduce chance of error compared to manually performing the same tasks
Ability to process changes in batch
Ability to schedule changes
Ability to trigger changes based on events (e.g. inserting a card into a card reader)
Achieve consistency in results.

Learning

More important for me is that I can compare my process against that of others and learn from it. It may be that I learn I'm happier with my process than what others are doing, but at least I've decided on keeping my process. I'll go into that process in a bit more depth in a later article.

Music and Audio Recording

What are the steps to recording a track?

Choosing a suitable room, deciding where the musicians will stand, configuring portable acoustic treatments, laying out the microphones and cable, connecting to the recording equipment and so on. All fits into a process.

Look at most questions by recording newbies along the lines of "what's the best way of recording instrument x". They're looking for a description of the process, even though they may not know it. What the more advanced engineer knows is that the key to a lot of the questions is knowing the how the results from the basic processes sound and then figuring out a good solution from there. That solution may include changing the basic process to meet the client's artistic aims. The article on comparing how different pros recorded guitars provides great insight into this area (article is available to subscribers only at the time of writing this article, although I think it's released months after the publication date).

Photography

Digital Photography software is ripe with workflow. It's one of the few subject areas where I've really seen some real progress in workflow and implementing processes that can be used on a regular basis. Some make use of the operating system's specific automation features, e.g. OS X's automator andscript tools are great for this purpose.

Setting up a shoot is a process. Deciding on studio, lighting, props, models, camera bodies, lenses, positions, aperture, etc. All part of a process. On the other side, if you're hiring out studio space to photographers, you probably go through a process, including processing payment, booking and even the clear-up after the shoot. The more you know about your process, the more flexible you can be to client demands without undercharging them.

As a photographer, you shoot out in the field/on location, bring the images back to a computer. Do you:

Wrap-up

In the above text, there are a lot of questions. Largely rhetorical from my point of view. They're present to make us think about how we perform our activities. By analysing the process - or more plainly, just by thinking through the actions that we perform - we can improve how we work.

In the next few related articles, I'll pick up the specific topics and discuss them in more detail. I'll also publish my processes and workflows.

I've started a series on the Fundamentals of Process Mapping for a wider audience but still useful as background to this article.

Indie Filmmaking Resources

Alan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:42:51 +0000

I've been involved in some indie filmmaking over the last year or so and that's meant I've had to learn about activities that I would otherwise have missed out on. For instance, I'm comfortable with studio recording for music but not recording speech for a drama, similarly location recording has its own obstacles to overcome.

Here's a collection of articles and resources that I've used over the last year.

Books

Despite some of these books being a few years old, there's a wealth of information in there. All have a few pages missing, but in general you should be able to find something of use.

There's a book which is recommended on almost every online forum

Location Audio Simplified by Real World Audio

Forums

Sites and articles

Filmsound Audio Post FAQs

Actually the whole of Filmsound is worth a look at, not just the article above.

studiodaily.com

Apple Learning Interchange - Videography for Educators

Mediacollege.com

Sound, camera, makeup tips at DVUser

DIY

Make your own Steadicam

Make your own boom 1

Make your own boom 2

Lighting

Strobist is the place to check for learning about lighting. It used to be purely about still photography; the principles are all the same, just that you have to cope with motion in a different way for movies. With the article on Robert Rodriguez, Strobist is taking a long-awaited venture into aspects of cinematography as well.

If you look around on that site, you'll notice mention of decent powered DIY lights as suitable lightsources. We've been thinking of using some 10 million candlepower rechargeable torches so that there's no need for electrical mains on location. Add a couple of battery packs, or at the price of the torches, it may even be worth buying several times as many as you need in one go so that you can swap them over when the power runs out.

Then get a couple of stands. Jury-rig a way to hold them on, even bungee cords could work, better still would be reusable nylon cable ties. Add a couple of home-made diffusers and reflectors and you'd have a portable lighting system.

As for reflectors, a good thing to get is the reflective car windshield covers you can get for about £1.00 on most markets. The inner-side is often reflective silver. You may need to add some bracing, just depends what materials you've got to hand; UPVC pipe, short strips of wood, even a plastic ruler or bamboo cane could work.

Management/Production

Gantt Project is an open source software similar to Project. Could be very useful for letting everyone know what they need to do, by when and understand they're not available, etc.

Scriptwriting Tools

Project Central at Celtx has facilities for collaborative scriptwriting and peer-reviews

Editing Software

Ubuntu Studio

Cinelerra, etc

For some understanding of how these compare, have look at my experiences with the free software editing packages and specifically with Cinelerra.

Equipment
I'm sure this will cause discussions about what counts as indie, but I think this is the camera to have. I admit, I haven't worked with one, but from looking at the specifications, the Red One looks great. There are cheaper cameras out there, yet this one seems to be the one to aspire to.

Green Screen
An article on how-to-greenscreen using Final Cut Pro, but still useful whatever editing tool you're using.

More Pro Information

Alan — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 07:11:14 +0000

Adding to the short article on how the pros do it in the Learning the Ropes series, I'd like to introduce another book.

Behind the Glass gives interviews with top mixers and producers. There's a lot of insight to be found in the interviews, ranging from which kit they used, how they used the kit, through to how they have to interact with the people around them. Although you can't read it as a recipe-book (there are no detailed instructions), it will give you a lot of information about how you can achieve.

I referred to Bob Katz's book in an earlier article because it provides a great foundation in why we have to do things in a certain way. Read the two and you'd be well on your way to having a better idea of what you need to know.

How the pros do it

Alan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:11:14 +0000

Ever wondered how a certain drum track was recorded? Well there are several sites that will get you a lot further than just using your favourite search engine.

GearSlutz Expert Q&A has many interviews with professional mixers, producers, engineers, etc. These have a vast amount of knowledge and between them a bewildering array of hit records.

SoundonSound run a series of articles interviewing producers and arrangers about how they achieved the produced sound track by track.

MixBuss is provided by SSL and has good tips and interviews again from pros.
I'll add more to this as I come across them.

Learning about sound in films

Alan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:52:23 +0000

I'm generally against just posting a link to a site without some useful commentary (i.e. add more than just "check this out"), but in this case the site http://www.filmsound.org is so good that it warrants a link on its own. More so, it warrants a permanent banner on the site. No matter how experienced you are (or how good you think you are), you will find something new to you on the site. Before asking questions on any site about how a sound effect was made or how the overall sound was designed for a blockbuster movie, read the articles on http://www.filmsound.org