Chapter 15 — Exercises

Location sound is a doing-and-listening skill, and it rewards repetition more than almost anything else in this book. Most of these exercises need only the mic and headphones you already have — a phone with wired earbuds is enough for every listening exercise and most shooting ones. Take the starred and room-tone exercises seriously: they build directly toward locking Project 1.

Exercises are graded by effort and depth:

• ⭐ Warm-up — a few minutes; locks in a concept.
• ⭐⭐ Core — the real practice; do as many as you can.
• ⭐⭐⭐ Stretch — deeper or more ambitious; where the biggest gains are.

Model solutions and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises are collected in Answers to Selected Exercises at the back of the book. Try each one before you read its answer — a mistake you made teaches more than an answer you only read. Above all: put the headphones on. This chapter cannot be learned with your eyes.

A. Training the ear (Eye & Ear Training — no camera needed)

These need only your attention and, ideally, headphones. They build the listening reflex the rest of the chapter depends on.

1. ⭐ Hear the room. Sit still in three different rooms (a bathroom, a carpeted bedroom, a kitchen). In each, close your eyes for thirty seconds and list every sound you can hear that you normally ignore. Which room is "loudest" when you actually listen? (Answer discusses what you should notice.)

2. ⭐ The clap test. Walk into five different spaces and clap your hands once, hard, in each. Rank them from most "ringing" (longest reverb tail) to most "dead." Write one sentence predicting which would be easiest to record clean dialogue in, and why.

3. ⭐⭐ Become the microphone. Put on closed headphones plugged into your phone with its mic live (a voice-memo app monitoring, or record-and-play). Walk around your home listening only through the mic. Write down five noises you can hear through the mic that you had completely tuned out with your bare ears. (Answer provided.)

4. ⭐⭐ Sound continuity hunt. Watch three minutes of any dialogue scene in a film or show with headphones on. Listen under the voices for the continuous background of the room. Does it ever lurch or drop out at a cut? (It shouldn't — that steadiness is room tone at work.) Add one line to your Frame Log about what the background sound was doing.

5. ⭐⭐⭐ Diagnose by ear alone. Find three pieces of amateur video online with bad audio (easy to find). For each, name the specific fault from the §15.3 checklist — reverb, hum, wind, clipping, off-mic, rustle, rumble — and prescribe the on-set fix from this chapter. (Model diagnoses provided.)

B. Reading Described Shots (Read the Sequence)

6. ⭐ Name the fields. Re-read FIGURE 15.8 (miking the Café order counter). Without looking, list the four things the plan captures the dialogue with (two lavs, one boom, and what else — plus the thing recorded after the dialogue). Why two lavs and a boom?

7. ⭐⭐ Critique the boom. A Described Shot: "Two people argue at a kitchen table; the boom is held dead-center between them, level with their chests, and never moves for the whole scene." Name two things wrong with this booming and the fix for each. (Answer provided.)

8. ⭐⭐ Read the meter. Study FIGURE 15.6 (the dBFS meter). A described take shows dialogue averaging around -6 dBFS with peaks flicking to 0. Diagnose the problem, predict what you'll hear on the loudest word, and give the fix. (Answer provided.)

9. ⭐⭐⭐ Write your own. Write a full seven-field Described Shot for a location-sound moment you could stage: a person interviewed beside a busy window, boomed from above, in a room you've deadened with blankets. Fill THE SOUND field with real detail — what the mic hears, where the room tone sits, what you're rejecting. (Model answer provided.)

C. Recording on location (Shoot This)

This is the heart of the chapter. Record things and listen back.

10. ⭐ The scratch-and-clap. Shoot one 20-second clip double-system: picture on your camera (mic left on as scratch), a lav into a second phone for clean sound. Clap once, in frame, at the start. Confirm you can see the clap spike in both files. (Guidance provided.)

11. ⭐⭐ Boom it overhead. Boom a 30-second monologue from overhead (real pole or a broomstick), mic a hand's width out of the top of frame, aimed down at the mouth. Review on headphones: does the voice stay even? Is there a boom in the top of frame anywhere? (Model self-critique provided.)

12. ⭐⭐ Favor the talker. Boom a two-person exchange (30–45 seconds), swinging the mic to favor whoever speaks and leading the next line. Compare it to a version where you leave the mic parked dead-center. Which sounds more present, and why?

13. ⭐⭐ Set levels the right way. Record someone talking normally, then delivering their loudest line. Set gain so normal speech sits near -12 dBFS and confirm the loud line peaks under -6. Then deliberately record a version too hot (peaks at 0) and listen to the clipping. Keep both — the ruined one is the argument for headroom. (Answer provided.)

14. ⭐⭐ Deaden a bad room. Record a sentence in a hard, ringing room (tile bathroom, bare kitchen). Then hang blankets/coats around the mic and subject, move the mic closer, and record the same sentence. A/B them on headphones and write down the difference in your own words. (Model answer provided.)

15. ⭐⭐ Tame the wind. Record 15 seconds of speech outdoors in a light breeze with a bare mic, then again with wind protection (a foam cover, a furry cover, or literally a sock) and your body between the wind and the mic. Listen for the low roar and thumps. Which fix helped most? (Answer provided.)

16. ⭐⭐⭐ The full clean-dialogue take. Record a 45-second interview answer running the entire discipline: mic close and off-frame, monitored on headphones, levels at -12 with headroom, room tamed, motors off. Then grab room tone. This is a rehearsal for the Production Checkpoint — treat it like the real thing. (Model checklist-critique provided.)

D. Diagnosing and prescribing (Fix the Shot & Settings Drill)

17. ⭐ Fix the plan. A friend says: "I'll interview my grandfather in his living room tomorrow — I'll just put my phone on a tripod across the couch and hit record." List three location-sound problems they're walking into and the fix for each. (Answer provided.)

18. ⭐⭐ Fix the shoot. A described failure: a subject filmed in a glass-walled conference room; the air conditioning is running; the lav is clipped to a stiff nylon jacket; the recordist watched the meters but wore no headphones. Name every fault and its specific fix, sorted by whether it's a room, a mic-mount, a noise-source, or a monitoring problem. (Answer provided.)

19. ⭐⭐ Settings drill: three rooms. Write your starting levels-and-protection settings (dialogue target, peak ceiling, AGC, safety track, high-pass on/off) for: (a) a quiet seated interview; (b) a wedding speech you get one take at; (c) a windy rooftop piece-to-camera. Explain each difference. (Model answers provided.)

20. ⭐⭐ The clipping autopsy. You're handed a recording where every loud word crackles. Explain to the client, in plain language, why this cannot be "fixed in post," what should have been done on set, and what one recorder feature (§15.4) would have saved the unrepeatable moment. (Answer provided.)

21. ⭐⭐⭐ Rescue triage. For each described fault, say whether post can reasonably fix it or whether it had to be fixed on set, and why: (a) a steady air-con hum under a whole interview; (b) heavy bathroom reverb on every word; (c) a single clipped laugh; (d) wind roar on an exterior; (e) a phone buzzing once mid-sentence. (Answer provided.)

E. One subject, many treatments (Five Ways)

22. ⭐⭐ Five distances. Record the same person saying the same sentence with the mic at five distances: 15 cm, 30 cm, 60 cm, 1.5 m, and across the room on the camera mic. Listen to all five back-to-back. At what distance does the room start to win? Which is the most usable, and why? (Answer discusses the trade-offs.)

23. ⭐⭐⭐ Five rooms, one line. Record the identical line in five different acoustic spaces (a closet full of clothes, a carpeted room, a bare room, a tiled room, outdoors). Rank them from most to least usable and write one sentence on what makes the best one good. Then predict which the "get closer + deaden" trick could rescue and which it couldn't. (Model answer provided.)

24. ⭐⭐ Five ways to sync. For one clip, demonstrate (or, if you lack the tools, describe in writing) five ways an editor could sync double-system audio: (a) line up clap spikes by eye, (b) software waveform auto-sync, (c) timecode, (d) matching lips to the scratch, (e) a visible in-frame action like a hand tap. Rank them by reliability and speed. (Answer provided.)

F. Stealing techniques (Recreate It)

25. ⭐⭐ Recreate the invisible background. Pick a dialogue scene you admire whose location "feels real" (a café, a car, an office). Recreate the sound approach with your own subject: close dialogue over a captured bed of that location's tone. Show it to someone and ask if the place feels believable. (Guidance provided.)

26. ⭐⭐⭐ Recreate a boom-op's day. Boom a three-minute scene (or three separate one-minute takes) without lowering your arms between resets, keeping the mic out of frame and out of any hard light's shadow throughout. Note when your arms fail and your consistency drops — that fatigue point is your current limit, and it moves with practice. (Answer discusses what to expect.)

G. A first taste of post (Cut This)

You don't need advanced skills to prove these to yourself. Any free editor works (DaVinci Resolve is the book's reference from Chapter 26 on).

27. ⭐⭐ Sync it. Take your double-system clip from Exercise 10 into an editor. Line up the two clap spikes so the picture and clean audio match, then mute the camera scratch. Confirm the lips and the clean voice are locked. Note how much easier the clap made it. (Guidance provided.)

28. ⭐⭐ Build a tone bed. Take two dialogue takes recorded in the same room, cut them together, and hear the seam at the join. Now lay your recorded room tone as a continuous layer underneath both and listen again. Describe what the tone bed did to the cut. (Answer provided.)

29. ⭐⭐⭐ Patch a hole. Record a sentence with a deliberate cough or stumble in the middle. In an editor, cut out the cough — hear the hole it leaves — then fill the hole with a snippet of matching room tone. Listen: is the deletion now invisible? This is the single most common real-world use of room tone. (Model answer provided.)

H. Interleaving and synthesis

These deliberately mix this chapter with earlier ones, because real shoots don't come one skill at a time.

30. ⭐⭐ Sound meets light (interleave Ch.11/13). Set up a talking-head with a hard key light and boom it overhead. Deliberately let the boom cast a shadow on the wall, then reposition to kill the shadow without losing the close mic position. Explain how the sound and light constraints fought, and how you resolved them. (Answer provided.)

31. ⭐⭐ Sound meets coverage (interleave Ch.7/9). You're shooting a wide and a matching medium of a monologue for coverage. Explain how you keep the sound consistent across both sizes so the editor can cut freely between them — mic position, levels, and the one thing you must record for both to intercut cleanly. (Model answer provided.)

32. ⭐⭐⭐ Teach it back. In about 200 words, explain to an absolute beginner why "you can't fix it in post" is especially true for audio. Use clipping, reverb, and room tone as your three examples, and connect it to the throughline sound is half the picture. Teaching a concept is the strongest test that you own it. (Model answer provided.)

33. ⭐⭐⭐ Lock Project 1. Complete the Production Checkpoint if you haven't: record your final Project 1 talking-head audio running the full discipline, plus 30 seconds of matched room tone. Then write three sentences grading your own recording on the §15.3 checklist — what's clean, what you'd re-do, and whether the room tone actually matches the dialogue. Keeping this note lets you hear your progress when you assemble the piece in Chapter 26.

I. Deeper drills (anchors, interleaving, and your own system)

34. ⭐⭐ Settings drill: the Café order counter. Using FIGURE 15.8 as your reference, write the complete audio plan for recording the Café Scene's order-counter exchange: system (single/double), which mics on whom, where the boom favors, your target levels, what you do about the espresso machine, and when you grab room tone. Then answer the constraint question: if you had only one phone and one lav, which element would you sacrifice first, and what would you protect at all costs? (Model answer provided.)

35. ⭐⭐ Fix the shot: the lost toast. A described failure: a wedding toast is recorded on a single wireless lav; halfway through, the receiver drops out for six seconds and the best line is gone forever — one take, no recovery. Name the redundancy that would have saved it, the pre-shoot battery habit that prevents it, and what you'd honestly tell the couple. (Answer provided.)

36. ⭐⭐⭐ Read the sequence: boom from below. Write a full seven-field Described Shot for a scene that must be boomed from below — a wide two-shot with a low ceiling where an overhead boom can't get close without entering frame. In THE SOUND field especially, name what you gain, what you risk (what's on that ceiling?), and how you'd mitigate the risk. (Model answer provided.)

37. ⭐⭐ Eye & ear: the HVAC census. For one full day, in every room you enter, spend ten seconds identifying every continuous motor or drone — HVAC, fridge, fans, computers, a buzzing transformer, an aquarium pump. Count them. Note how many "quiet" rooms secretly have two or three, and mark which ones you could switch off for a shoot. This is the reflex that keeps a drone off your dialogue. (Guidance provided.)

38. ⭐⭐ Interleave (Ch.13): mixed light meets clean sound. You're shooting the Café reverse (window key, warm counter lamps left on — Chapter 13) and recording the order dialogue. Describe one concrete way the lighting choice and the sound choice could physically conflict above the subject's head, and exactly how you'd resolve both without sacrificing either. (Model answer provided.)

39. ⭐⭐⭐ Build your own checklist. Write the one-page location-sound checklist you will actually run before every shoot, drawn from this chapter — the things you personally forget. Then compare it to the key-takeaways.md card. What did you add that a generic list wouldn't have, for the specific kind of video you make (vlogs, interviews, events, weddings)? Tape it inside your kit bag. (Guidance provided.)

When you've done these — especially the ones with headphones on — you've built the habit that most reliably separates professional-sounding video from amateur: you now capture clean location dialogue on purpose, and you never wrap without room tone. Project 1 is in the can. Move on to Chapter 16, where we plan a real shoot so the day itself runs on rails.