A Keynote SpeEch by Midge Costin

As the American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has said: “The audience will forgive you for bad picture quality but they won’t forgive you for bad sound.” The way we experience sound in the world is through a filter we call the brain. A microphone records sound technically, but not necessarily the way we actually experience sound in our lives. This is why sound design is a crucial element in reality-based filmmaking. With the common use of heavily edited voice-over narration created from much longer, on-location interviews, it’s important to have well-recorded, well sound edited, and well mixed dialogue.

Midge Costin will discuss the use of well recorded and edited sound in documentary films from the perspective of her role as a documentary sound editor and through her experience as the producer/director of the award-winning feature documentary MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND.