Plan sound recording

What this is about

Planning sound means reading the shotlist once purely for audio: which scenes carry dialogue, which need ambience or wild tracks, where playback or timecode enters the day. From that reading follow the mic plan — redundancy wherever a moment cannot repeat — the wireless situation at the location, and the schedule's quiet windows, because ventilation systems, deliveries and school bells have timetables of their own. Post inherits every decision made here: sync method, file naming, whether room tone exists. The mix can hide many sins, but only the ones that were recorded around, not over.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Redundant micing is standard where a moment cannot repeat — lav and boom are colleagues, not rivals.
• Silence is a scheduled resource: ventilation stops, delivery pauses and quiet hours belong in the plan as time windows.
• Room tone per location is a listed deliverable of the shoot day, not a leftover.
• Sync decisions — timecode, naming, who jams which device — are post-production decisions made on set.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Read the shotlist once for audio only: dialogue scenes, interviews, ambiences, wild tracks, playback moments. Each category books different gear and different minutes.
2. Mic doubly wherever a moment cannot repeat: lav plus boom on interviews and one-take actions — redundancy is the cheapest insurance sound can buy.
3. Check the wireless landscape on the recce — house systems, other users, dead zones — and pack wired fallbacks for the channels that matter most.
4. Schedule the quiet: when the ventilation can stop, when deliveries pause, which hour has no school bell. Write those windows into the plan as bookable time.
5. Prepare rooms where dialogue matters: soft materials against slap echo, blankets and rugs in the kit, and the microphone closer than habit suggests.
6. List room tone at every location as a task with a minute count — the mix builds its transitions from it.
7. Settle sync and naming before day one: how many devices, who jams timecode, how files are labeled. Post inherits every shortcut taken here.
8. Give sound a veto moment in the schedule: a five-minute silence check before the first take costs less than an afternoon of unusable answers.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Trusting the camera microphone for anything a human says.
• Discovering the refrigerator hum in the edit — in every single take.
• No room tone recorded, so every cut breathes differently and the mix cannot hide it.

With TillyGen

TillyGen's shotlist carries sound needs per shot and the schedule holds the quiet windows — the sound plan stops living only in the mixer's head.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.