Get Great Audio For Your Unscripted Project On Any Budget

Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke.

Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???

Biagio: This episode. It’s episode 61 and audio pro Brett Ulery tells you how to get great sound on any budget. Why more expensive audio gear may not be the best choice for you. The $32 audio trick that made our careers two kinds of noise you’d better know about. Hands on tips for low budget productions, and how lawnmowers can lead to outright bribery. Music courtesy Dave Pelman. Music Dave Pelman.com. Hey, everybody! She’s joke.

Joke: He’s Biagio.

Biagio: We’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same. Hopefully by teaming up with us. All right, well, a couple of things before we get started today. First of all, I want to thank everybody who tuned in for our new series snaps. She made me do it. Turns out we did really big numbers. Yeah.

Joke: Very excited. Oxygen was really excited with the numbers and hopefully they continue. So please keep watching. It comes on Wednesdays at 10 p.m., nine central on oxygen. And if you have DirectTV on the West Coast, I think it’s 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., but everybody else is 10 p.m..

Biagio: Yeah, just check your local listings that you’ll find at snap. She made me do it. And for those of you who are in our newsletter, you know that we had a little a little giveaway. We did. We mentioned to our newsletter subscribers and anybody who live tweeted with us during the premiere that we would take note and randomly pick three people to win some joke production swag from our vault downstairs.

Joke: Yeah, we’ll send Coralie down.

Biagio: To send our assistant Carly down to pick out some really good stuff. I’m happy to announce our three winners. We’re Greg Cherry on Twitter as at par sensation. Producer Mike Sobel on Twitter is at Sobel. Mike and Kiki Weingarten on Twitter as at right coach Kiki. So you three just head on over to Joke Productions. Com click on the contact page and send us your your mailing address.

Joke: And maybe.

Biagio: Maybe, maybe your size because I don’t know what we’re going to send, you know, but maybe include your size information and we’re going to get you some some good stuff. Thanks for live tweeting with us. For those of you who would like to be on the newsletter, not only to get good tips, but maybe win some joke production swag in the future, you can sign up for the newsletter at Producing Unscripted. Com. And last but not least, and this is crazy. I can’t even believe I’m about to say this, but I want to give a special thank you to comedy superstar Ken Jong and Arsenio Hall, who decided to tweet about our movie this past week. For those of you Labor Day, yeah, I’m Labor Day. For those of you who don’t know, Joe and I made a documentary a while back that was invited to qualify for Academy Award consideration called Dying to Do Letterman. It’s now free on Hulu, and apparently Ken Jeong and Arsenio Hall were watching it and tweeting about it. So thank you to them. Ken Jeong, as you know, is from The Hangover. He’s got that show Doctor Ken coming up on ABC. And of course, we all know our central hall, so it was something of a shocking surprise for us. But we’re so glad that you liked the movie. You guys. Thanks for thanks for checking it out. For those who’d like to see the movie, it’s free on Hulu. Dying to do Letterman.

Earnest Young Man: My mom says TV melts your brain.

Biagio: We’re starting something new today, which we’d like to do, you know, every few months, which is inviting some of the production professionals that we hire and work with on our shows to talk about some specific production tips, things that we do when we make our TV shows. And our goal is not only to tell you how these things work on big multi-million dollar shows, but also to give you takeaways you can use on your pitch tapes and sizzle reels and indie productions as well. And we’re starting with what I think is by far the most important department position criteria of any production, and that is sound. So I’d like to introduce Brett Ulery, who in my opinion is the Brett Favre of the audio industry. Or, or maybe, maybe Brett Favre, you know, is the NFL version of Brett O’Leary. I don’t know, I don’t know how to put it, but he’s he’s a great audio guy who we work with on many productions but also does a zillion other productions. I mean, Brett, you’ve been working for like 97 years now in the industry, right?

Brett Ulery: Yeah, like Brett Favre if I’m also retired.

Joke: No.

Biagio: You’re not retired because you just did all the interviews and she made me do it. Not to mention a bunch of other things that we’ve worked on together over the years, going all the way back to Scream Queens, caged commercial kings. I mean, I don’t think there’s a production we’ve done that. Brett hasn’t been around in some way, shape or form.

Joke: Including our pitches and pilots.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah.

Brett Ulery: And all the stuff that you guys will never get to see.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Well.

Joke: And the stuff they see.

Biagio: And the stuff they see. But you.

Joke: Know, were you on dying to do Letterman at all?

Brett Ulery: No, I was.

Biagio: He was not actually on dying to do Letterman. And that was before we knew you. I mean, we shot that over the course of like, years.

Joke: So how did you get into audio? What do you like about your job?

Brett Ulery: Well, a mic drop is so much cooler than a camera drop.

Biagio: So much less expensive.

Brett Ulery: Yes it is. Okay, so. So in the beginning when I was paying, I got asked numerous times by different producers, what is it that you want to do?

Joke: Yeah, that’s like my standard question.

Brett Ulery: Yeah. What do you want to do. You want to know, like how am I going to best utilize this person. And honestly, I never want to do camera or sound because I never wanted to be the person who accidentally missed a crucial moment. I didn’t want to be the guy who wasn’t framed up correctly, and I didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t have that person in the mix I was. I was like, that’s too much responsibility. That’s why I feel everyone is here today. Everyone on our set is here for these two departments. We’re going to film this and we’re going to listen to this. Yeah. And I was like, I don’t want that responsibility. For me, it was all about spending time on set and getting to know the people and kind of learning all a little bit about every department and then just kind of falling into sound.

Joke: But you have since really committed to sound. I mean, you have your own gear now, like. Yeah. So, so clearly it wasn’t just something you fell into, something you fell into and fell in love with.

Brett Ulery: Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed doing sound. It does feel now like that’s my contribution to a production.

Biagio: So let me ask you, Brett, what are some of the challenges anyone faces, whether you’re a pro audio guy or a hands on producer getting your own sound on an indie production, what are some of the challenges anyone is going to face in getting good, good, usable sound?

Brett Ulery: I think the first kind of challenge, I think kind of starts with budget.

Biagio: That’s absolutely that’s how that’s that’s the first challenge on every show.

Brett Ulery: A lot of I think a lot of people feel like because they have a good camera, it’s going to be a great show or whatever, but that sound comes as such a secondary thought, right?

Joke: So if I’m not listening to this, I’m like, great. Yeah, of course. Budget. But what if what if I don’t have a budget to hire you? I don’t have a budget to hire, like a full like sound professional. Does that leave me with just crappy sound and that’s it? Or do I have options?

Brett Ulery: Well, I think it’s important to look at what you do have a budget for ultimately is like, do you have a budget.

Joke: For budget, right? I mean, like for example, and I started we had no budget. It was just the two of us, you know, what we ended up doing instead of just using, like you said, whatever Mike came on the camera was we invested in like RadioShack, which it doesn’t even in business anymore, but we invested.

Biagio: In one of their businesses. I googled before them, so I mention it. You can get that same mic for $32, $32.

Joke: So it was like a clip on mic. You know, we bought the longest extension cable possible because we had no wireless offices. And so, so literally like, you know, through the back of their shirt all the way down on the floor, it was like, just don’t shoot.

Biagio: The floor. Yeah. We literally just we literally just shot our entire first reality pilot using these $32 microphones. But but I think though this this speaks to Bret’s point though, which is like, well, what is your budget? And then unfortunately, I think what a lot of people do is they don’t stop them to ask the question, so how can I get the best sound for this budget? And if you can get great sound for 32 bucks, you can find $32 in your budget. Well.

Brett Ulery: Let’s say you have usable sound for $30.

Biagio: Yeah, well, well. But usable sound is better than a song that not only launched our career endless. And I know you cringe as an audio professional, but usable sound that, you know, I’m not ashamed to say I actually saved their butt in the field a couple times on actual television shows for for sure on Fruity Call, and we had to do some extra.

Joke: Some pickups.

Biagio: Yeah, we use the same $32 microphone now, of course had much rather use a professional, but if you’re just starting out the point, I think your point, though, is that people don’t even stop to think about audio, right? Because putting it a little bit of thought can go a long way.

Brett Ulery: Yeah. Okay. So when I would this be a good time to talk about the two. Yeah. The two types of noise. Yeah. Right. So I think when when it comes to sound, you have two different types of noise. You have your planes and your ringing cell phones and your the echo, the sound of the quality of a room.

Biagio: Sometimes I’m just going to call it the general. I’m just. Yeah, just.

Brett Ulery: Just yeah. You’re, you’re you’re going to not want to set up, you know, a five hour interview next to a train track that has 100 trains through in a day. But the other thing you need to think about is also, if you’re using wireless technology, I know the Sennheiser G2 or G3, there are a lot of people use the Pro Sumer mics, which kudos to you. If you’ve bought those and you’ve made that step, then you have to think about the wireless frequencies that are being used. And I don’t think a lot of people, they’re like, oh, this is a great place, but you don’t have a like sometimes they won’t take a sound person out for, to scout to to make sure that that is an actual usable place.

Biagio: Because sometimes you’re running the wireless difficulties. Right? Yeah. You got to realize it. Like what’s an example of that?

Brett Ulery: Okay. So when we actually on another show that I was working on for Food Network earlier this year, every night, like around maybe like 5 or 6 something would power up and kill some of our frequencies while we were shooting. What was it? We don’t know what it was just.

Joke: Oh, come on.

Brett Ulery: Something was coming on in the area that would kill some signals. And we never.

Biagio: But that’s the point. You might not even be able to figure it out, and.

Joke: You might not see it even on your scout or whatever.

Brett Ulery: It still happens.

Joke: So this brings me to another thing. It’s one thing to put on a mic and, you know, send it to the camera. This is a mistake we see happen a lot. And I’m afraid to admit that sometimes that happened to us is that then you also need someone to actually monitor it, right?

Brett Ulery: Yeah, totally. You definitely need someone.

Biagio: It’s important to actually listen to the sound you’re getting.

Joke: And I think it’s important to know that a lot of times, especially when you’re starting out, like when we did, you hire a cameraman and you’re like, okay, don’t worry about the audio. I got the mic pack and it’s going in the camera, but then no one’s actually listening to the audio feed because a lot of cam obs don’t want to because that’s not what they want to do.

Biagio: And they’re running around all over the place. They don’t want anyone connected to them on these low budget shoots.

Joke: Right. Or they don’t even want an earbud in their ear to just even listen to see if any of these frequency issues come up.

Brett Ulery: I love a camera operator who listens to their feed.

Joke: Yes.

Brett Ulery: I, I have had in so many times where an operator be like, I’m not getting anything right now and they know and something will have come disconnected or a battery will have died or something. And you don’t know that unless they’re listening, right. You know, and that’s well, sometimes you can you’ll see the, the meters on the screen. But.

Biagio: Well, that brings me to another point that I think is really important. And because I want to talk for a second just about deer in general. So, Brett, one of the things that I think is important about gear is a lot of people think just because gear is more expensive, it’s going to be better and they’re going to get better sound. But the fact of the matter is, all gear comes with a learning curve, right? It’s like, you know, maybe a really simple clip on mic that plugs directly into the camera is going to be a lot easier to master than a huge, you know, portable audio mixer that has all kinds of inputs and a bunch of wireless. Is that right?

Brett Ulery: Okay. So I’m going to compare it to video games. You level up, you don’t start beating fighting the boss at the beginning of the game. And when you do get to the boss at the beginning of the game, maybe you understand the mechanics of his fight, but you don’t win. He flies away. He leaves. That’s right. And then you encounter him later in your career and you’re like, oh, this is that beast that I tried to fight earlier, but someone else was there showing me the ropes. And, you know, it wasn’t that wasn’t my time. And that’s how it is with sound gear or any gear for that matter. When you graduate up to other things, go up from there. Yeah. Because I think what I think, what a lot what sound people do a lot of is troubleshooting. Like you can get you get the gear running you, you’re listening to your story, you’re mixing, everything’s working. But what I think you really get paid the dollars for or when stuff stops working and you have to figure out why and you have to figure out why quick and you have.

Joke: To.

Brett Ulery: Fix it.

Joke: And I think the one thing that for, you know, the producers that are listening to this, that do have budgets and are making pilots and presentations, I think one of the things that we figured out really quickly is that it’s worth it to pay for the extra receiver or transmitter so that one of them goes down. You have something to swap out for, you know, like sometimes we’ll like, oh, we’ll go shoot a pilot presentation. And breadth first thing is like, okay, well how many people am I going to get the most in one scene? And we’re like, I don’t know. For it’s like, okay, well at least get five, right?

Brett Ulery: I always bring one extra.

Biagio: I always bring one.

Joke: Because even though you usually fix them, you know, it might take you that night to fix it as opposed to being able to turn that around in five minutes. Because you’re also mixing.

Brett Ulery: Feature falls off a boat into the bayou with his mic on. It’s going.

Joke: To take off or jump off.

Brett Ulery: No, he fell off the first time. The first time he fell off, then I’d Mike Divinity.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah. I’m caged. One of our characters fell in the water.

Joke: And there goes that.

Brett Ulery: That takes a day to dry out if it gets back working again.

Biagio: So what I want to do now is I want to give people some more, sort of like hands on tips that they can use on their low budget productions. And what I think is, is that we can sort of take a lot of the principles that we even use in our big budget productions and just say, okay, think about this and figure out how to adapt it to your budget. So first of all, let’s talk about on a small budget redundancy. Right. Because redundancy is such a big deal. We’re just talking about having extra mix in the field. Like is it ever a good idea to only have one source of audio?

Brett Ulery: No, I think one of your I think one of your. Yeah. Redundancy. The thing with for just say for media purposes only like sound doesn’t take up a whole lot of space. Right. So if you have the opportunity to record sound in more than one location, you should. So that’s like if you can record it into the camera, which is what your your mixer is sending to the camera. And then if you also have a portable recorder that can also record.

Joke: It. Usually, you know, you might end up shooting at least two cameras. Even in an interview setup, you might have a second camera angle. It’s sending it to both cameras. So that right, even if you don’t have the like the mixer recorder, you know, you at least have it within two cameras.

Biagio: Okay, but you might not have any money. So you figure out how to get your $32 to buy your clip on radio, show.

Joke: 64. Dollars.

Biagio: And get two of.

Joke: Them. Get two of them, and then have them each wire go to a different camera.

Biagio: But let me tell you about what I used to do shooting pitch tapes. And it worked great because actually there’s an under there’s an over utilized piece of gear. Unfortunately, that usually sounds horrible. And that’s your on camera mic. So many people will just pop on their on camera mic and they’ll just think, I’ll just get the sound off of this and they’ll be 15ft away from people in a horrible. However, here is a time when I can tell you in shooting pitch tapes and sizzle reels that I was able to get great, usable sound and have a little bit of redundancy was what I would do is I would have either my clip on mic or if we had a wireless mic, I would have that on the person that was absolutely as far away from the camera as possible. And then I would get my on camera mic within 2 to 3ft of the person they were talking to. And what I would end up having was person A on my on camera mic, which was very close to the camera and was fine because you’re two feet away, you’re not ten feet away, and the person who was very far away, I would have on a separate microphone.

Brett Ulery: I think one of the important things to we always do in interviews is we always get room.

Joke: Tone.

Biagio: For those who don’t know what room tone is or why it’s important.

Brett Ulery: Biagio, can you tell these people room tone is and why it’s important?

Biagio: I think I will do that. Basically, room tone is the sound of the room that you’re filming in when nobody is talking or moving around. Every room has its own room tone. It could be because there’s air conditioning. It could be just because of the street noise outside the traffic patterns that have all through the scene. And even if they’re just faintly there, you notice when they’re not. And if you’re editing together an interview or editing together a scene, and all of a sudden the room tone disappears or changes for whatever reason, you need to match that room tone to keep things consistent. That’s why it’s so important to record 30s to a minute of room tone in every single scene that you shoot.

Joke: And sometimes I think, especially with interviews, you want to maybe shoot room tone before and after, right? Because if some something changes, you have it both ways. I know we’ve done that before. If all of a sudden like an air conditioning unit, we have no control over stopped or something, or it’s like, oh great, now our room tone is not going to match what we had earlier.

Brett Ulery: It blends your sound together and it makes it so. It sounds so much more professional and.

Joke: And it’s easier for, I think. The viewer, you know, who’s listening to this happening where it’s like if it’s consistent, it’s easy to tune out, but it’s when there’s changes in that background noise that it starts getting really like more. What just happened?

Brett Ulery: Yeah. If something if something fires up, if something and you don’t know what’s causing it.

Joke: It’s similar to continuity, right? It’s an audio continuity thing where if all of a sudden you’re watching Project Green Light and in the middle of a scene, Ben Affleck changes shirts and then goes back to his old shirt in the same scene. You might.

Biagio: Happen.

Joke: Last night. Last night I go like, what just happened? So it’s the same thing with audio. If all of a sudden there’s some weird noise and it comes out and then it disappears again, you’re like, what just happened? So that’s where room tone definitely.

Brett Ulery: Helps you. Yeah. If something comes up and you can’t spot the source, get a sample of that sound so your editors can use that.

Joke: Well.

Biagio: You know, I’ve seen a lot of shows that think it’s a great idea to shoot a reality scene, like in a club at night.

Joke: Well, wait, seriously, how did we forget to talk about. This important tip background? Can we turn to music off?

Brett Ulery: I always try to turn the music off if you can. I know when we were in in New Orleans for caged, after the fight, we were walking up and down Bourbon Street and these guys were popping into clubs. And that’s when you realize montage.

Joke: Yeah.

Brett Ulery: Well, there’s.

Joke: No you’re even though.

Biagio: It’s so true. It’s the easiest thing to ask anybody when you’re shooting in public. And you’d be amazed how many times it just doesn’t happen. Which drives me bonkers. Just ask the owners to turn off the music. Just ask me. I’ll turn off the music as well to turn down the radio, whatever is playing.

Joke: Because be respectful. Don’t then sit there for six hours. But if you’re like, hey, is there any chance for 20 minutes you can turn this down? People are. Usually.

Biagio: Makes all the difference in the world.

Joke: Or some guy’s mowing his lawn two houses down. You know, sometimes sending a PA and be like, would you mind just, you know, holding this for a half hour?

Biagio: And usually when that doesn’t work, sitting in the back with $20.

Brett Ulery: Don’t get it. Don’t give anyone ideas. People will start a lawn mowers just.

Joke: To get paid.

Brett Ulery: Dominican Republic, they were they were doing construction and we paid one construction site to stop making noise. And then other people who didn’t get paid started making noise. And everyone got paid that day to be quiet.

Biagio: That’s amazing.

Joke: Where were we?

Brett Ulery: We were on we were on ghost, and we were in a neighborhood where.

Biagio: Ghost inside. My child.

Brett Ulery: And there was a neighborhood where the lawnmower, the guys who were running the lawnmower next door, had contracts with pretty much all of the neighbors in town. And we went. We went into crazy ot this day because we were like, hey, can you not be mowing right next to us? And they’re like, oh yeah, sure, no problem. They were nice enough to stop and they went to the house behind.

Joke: Us and it was the same guys, and it was like, oh, well.

Brett Ulery: Now.

Joke: We got to go around the corner down the block and ask these guys to knock it off.

Brett Ulery: But the thing is.

Joke: Is this was their Saturday.

Brett Ulery: This was their and that’s one of the hardest parts in sound too, is you have to try to ask people to also not do their jobs. You got to just sometimes be really nice and hopefully the people will not fire up that would chipper.

Joke: Yeah.

Brett Ulery: That’s been parked across the street since you pulled up that morning.

Biagio: Please don’t go Fargo on her ass right now.

Joke: Yeah, and that’s something that, you know, you can’t always, you know, prepare for. And scouts, you know, there’s only so much preparation you can do and then you show up. I mean, we had an entire interview set up in our back room, and then the city decided to, you know, I don’t know, jackhammer the whole street up in front of our building. So we had to move it to, thankfully, our. Other room.

Biagio: That’s a good point. Yeah, yeah, thinking about thinking about that background noise. So a couple of things I think that we mentioned that are important today is number one, always remember to actually think about your audio. I can’t tell you how many tapes we see. They have horrible audio and don’t need to. Just by putting the thought equity into how can I make sure that this sound is clean and clear? You can greatly improve the value of whatever production you’re doing. It could be as simple as what joke. And I did years ago, which is spending 32 bucks on a Radio Shack or Best Buy. Mike plugging it in and hiding the cable, you know, or actually renting or buying some wireless mix. That sound great? Number two redundancy. Whenever possible, try to have your audio going to more than one place. Can you have it going to a camera and an iPhone or two different cameras? Can you get a couple of of clip on mikes and even put them on your same interview and just send them to different cameras so that you’re sure you’ve got it? Number three, try to think about recording your sound from a couple of different mics. One thing that Brett does is he always records from a boom and a clip on mic, because if there’s clothing rustler or something goes wrong, you know you’ve got the clean audio in one of those other mix. And if you can’t do that, worst case scenario, do what I’ve done on occasion, which is just make sure you’re on camera. Mic is also getting the sound, even if you’re ten feet away, and if someone yells or screams or get some clothing. Russell, sometimes you can salvage just enough of that piece of the sound that it’s not too noticeable when you crossfade between the two of them. You know? Another important tip think about the background noise. Whether it be a radio playing, whether it be someone mowing their lawn or somebody doing some work, if you can possibly get them to stop or even temporarily turn down the audio or stop mowing that lawn, it’s going to make a huge difference in your shoot. Be brave. Go and ask them to stop. You will be so glad you did.

Joke: Yeah, and it just comes back to producing one on one, right? Just ask what’s the can say is no, you know, you’re not any worse off than you were before you asked.

Biagio: Yeah, but but potentially a heck of a lot.

Joke: Better I. Think that covers it. Yeah.

Biagio: Anyways, Brett, thank you so much for being here today for everybody listening. As you know, if you’re interested in breaking into unscripted television, the reason joke and I started this podcast on our blog is because we wanted to make it easy for people breaking in to pitch shows. And if you would like to pitch us in on scripted television show, you can do so by signing up for our newsletter at producing unscripted and following the directions. Before we wrap up, I’d like to offer Brett one last chance. Do you have any closing words? Brett?

Brett Ulery: I did, I did like being in the room when you guys did the cheese joke and he’s viaggio part.

Biagio: Oh, you. Actually, he actually asked me if he could do that.

Joke: Go ahead.

Biagio: Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot.

Brett Ulery: Well, I was I thought it would be cool if all three of us did it. All right. Each one of us introduced a different person. Like, if I said, like, she’s a joke and.

Joke: She’s Biagio.

Biagio: And he’s Brett.

Brett Ulery: All right. That’s right. That’s what I wanted to do. All right, all.

Biagio: Right, take it off, Brett.

Brett Ulery: All right. She’s joke.

Joke: He’s Biagio.

Biagio: And he’s brought.

Brett Ulery: My dreams have come true.

Biagio: Yeah, it’s a good thing we stopped there. Because the next line is we’re married. We’re making. Work. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you again in two weeks.

Joke: Bye bye. Keep watching. She made me do it.

Biagio: Oh, yeah. Keep watching. She made me do it. Wednesdays, 10 p.m., nine central on oxygen. Please keep watching. Thanks so much. Producing Unscripted with Joke and BiagioAjo.