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“The Gift of Room Tone” is three minutes of people being told to sit in silence in front of the camera

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Room tone is literally how the name sounds. It’s a recording of the room’s tone. Its background noise. What’s going on when people are quiet. It’s the hum of the air conditioning unit, the hum of a PC fan whirring away in the background, the dull roar of traffic driving by outside the window. It’s used to help fill in the background of silence and audio dubs recorded elsewhere in a clinically noise-free studio as well as help to transition audio from one scene to another.

It’s one of the most boring parts of filmmaking, visually speaking, but The Criterion Collection made a short film out of it anyway. Called The Gift of Room Tone, this almost three-minute video shows people doing what they do when told room tone needs to be recorded. While the video below shows quite a few relatively unknown faces, it also includes some popular famous ones like Christopher Walken, Martin Scorsese, Frank Oz and Jake Gyllenhaal.

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Here are the satisfying shutter sounds of 18 different cameras from 35mm to 8×10 large format

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With so many cameras offering completely silent electronic shutter these days – which is understandable for things like weddings and events where the noise of shutters can be quite distracting – it’s easy to forget just how satisfying the sounds of some camera shutters can be. It’s also quite interesting how these sounds can take some of us back to our past when we hear certain sounds from cameras we’ve shot and have pleasant memories of.

In this video, photographer Sails Chong has recorded the sounds from 18 different camera shutters, and various other noises and compiled them into a very relaxing 5-minute video. The video covers everything from 35mm SLRs through Fuji, Hasselblad and Phase One medium format up to 8×10 large format.

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The “Amplified Fence” makes birds landing on a wire sound like something from an alien sci-fi

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For those of us who shoot video, we know what an important element audio is to the overall production. Often we’ll set up elaborate recording setups with shotgun mics all pointed at our subject or we’ll record sounds to add later in post to really sell an effect.

But what musician Graeme Leak has done goes far beyond that. He’s attached a couple of contact microphones to either end of a 50-metre long high-tensile fence wire to record the noise of birds landing on and shuffling around the wire on the way to the bird table. And it sounds absolutely incredible. Along with filmmaker Hazel Palmer we get to see and hear that surreal beauty.

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The lightsaber sound was inspired by a video projector motor and a TV set

We learned before that the original lightsaber was made from a flash handle ‘40s Graflex camera. That’s about its looks – but have you wondered how its sound was made? Sound Designer Ben Burtt recently revealed that the sound of the iconic movie weapon was inspired by a film projector motor and a TV set. He shared a story about how he created the sound, and if you’re a Star Wars geek, you’re gonna love this.

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Audiio is a new production music platform offering a lifetime subscription for $199

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One of the biggest struggles with making video content is finding good music at a decent price. There are two main models out there for music licensing. On one, you pay per song and on the other, you pay a subscription which provides access to all their content for you to use in your videos for as long as your account is active.

A new music service called Audiio appears to be based on the latter, offering an annual subscription for $199 per year (pretty standard these days), but to celebrate their launch, this $199 price will get you a lifetime subscription to their service if you sign up within the first 60 days.

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Here are 10 microphone tips to improve the audio quality in your videos

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Audio is often the biggest challenge for filmmakers, especially newer ones. Most people just coming into the world of video don’t realise how much of a big deal it really is to get good quality audio. And while can be quite gear dependent, you don’t always need the most expensive kit to get decent quality sound. In this video, filmmakers Parker Walbeck and Nick Sales talk though their top ten tips and techniques for getting good quality sound for your videos.

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These “AudioPhotographs” combine a sound recorder with film photographs

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Personal and experimental projects can be a lot of fun for both those who create them and those who view them. This particular project was created by Italian film photographer Mario Cipriano, and it’s definitely a little bit odd, but pretty cool.

He combines film photographs he shot with his Leica M6 with a sound recorder to capture the five seconds leading up to the shot being taken, and the five seconds following it. Each photo then has 10 seconds of audio to accompany it. It’s fascinating to watch played back in video form.

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