The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs. A Lesson in the Use of Audio for film.
I came across The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs and I feel that this is a great way to see how audio can be used in film.
The scene starts with a man singing to a guitar from a distance. Then together with the close-up the guitar and the voice lose the distance (and this is not a simple use of reverb). As the camera distances itself again from the performer, the ambience of crickets takes over, made to sound louder than the song. The next shot is on the horse's hooves pounding on the ground louder than the song, but this time the singer and guitar are closer and set to come from above. The next shot is from the back. One must understand that a man's voice and the sound of the guitar from behind is always a little more muffled. The Coen brothers are treating diegetic sound to the letter. The relationship between the camera and the sound source is kept up to the maximum degree.
If you still have missed all this, the following shot is of an extreme closeup of the hands strumming the guitar and its reverse shot coming from inside the guitar which is more percussive and hollow, whilst the singer's voice is once again lowered and distant in volume and reverb as the strumming takes over. The funny and comical aspect is that when he sings water and looks up at the ridge above - the ridge echoes 'water, water, water,' This is again repeated with the singer singing the line and the echoing ridge chiming up the chorus with a delay effect and then an even more extreme delay and reverb chamber effect from a drone shot of the valley.
Then the actor looks right at us into the camera to say:
'A song never fails to ease my mind out here in the West, where the distances are great and the scenery monotonous.'
There is nothing monotonous about the scenery, but the distances between the microphone recording the song: mainly the guitar and the voice are great because they should be great. This is where a lapel microphone will not work because it is too close to the source even when the camera is distant. In this example, as an audience we are with the camera, hunting the song with our ears from different distances. It is not only the eye that perceives and understands distance, but the ear too, perhaps in a more accurate, sharper or direct manner.
On the technical front: It is not possible to achieve this with only one boom mic. It is actually impossible to record sound with such clarity in an open environment. The sound was recorded in a sterile studio, using different mics in different positions - one at the furthest distance and others at different distances. The guitar must have had an internal mic, and mics moved at different distances from an amplifier. It is not a post editing sound effect - the delay and the reverb effect added to the mix only contribute to the ridge and drone shot. The rest is cleverly thought out mic placement at the studio recording stage, preplanned with the shot list.
From Wikipedia
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a 2018 American Western anthology film written, directed, and produced by the Coen brothers. It stars Tim Blake Nelson, Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson, Jonjo O'Neill, Chelcie Ross, Saul Rubinek, and Tom Waits, and features six vignettes set on the American frontier.
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