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"Blocking" is a theater term referring to the choreography of movement in a stage play, where the action of a play is "blocked out" on the stage floor. In a monophonic program, the listener supplies most of the blocking. Distance is depth — on-mike, off-mike; fading up, fading. Everything important is on-mike, everything else balanced for intelligibility behind the on-mike position. Simple. Flexible. Mono invites listeners to make the imaginative leap that places the action anywhere around them.
Stereo, being more specific, gives listeners less to do. You lay out the action not only forward and back but side to side. With the action pinpointed in stereo, it always takes place in front of the listener. Listeners are removed from it, like the audience in a playhouse.
The upside is enhanced sound quality and discrimination of sound elements, particularly important for large cast productions and complex sound plots. Otherwise, I find stereo a time consuming head-ache. Most listeners tune in with mono receivers or in environments that compromise the stereo signal. Therefore, you have to block, or choreograph, action so that production values hold up in mono. If it weren't for the commercial draw of stereo and the added clarity it gives sound, I would work exclusively in mono.
Stereo lays out action before the listener. Binaural and true quadrophonic technologies can place the listener in the center of the action. I believe that both will remain rare in audio drama, though binaural systems may become important in virtual reality. Therefore, I won't dwell too long on either.
True quad captures and plays back sound on four channels. The listener is in the middle. Theoretically, the action can take place anywhere around the listener. True quad works only for non-broadcast audio.
Broadcast quad is matrixed, not true — that is, there are only three channels, two in front of the listener and one in back. The third and fourth speakers on the listener's receiver play back the same signal, doctored to sound like two discrete channels. Matrixed quad renders the two back channels useless except for environmental overtones. Both forms of quad have largely disappeared with the advent of "surround sound" and "home theater" sound systems.
Binaural captures sound on two channels in a way that imitates human ears. Typically, two special mikes rest in the ears of a head-shaped shell, the kunstkopf (German: "art head"). The mikes react to sound resonating in the shell like ears reacting to sound resonating through the skull. Listening with earphones, the audience can discern not only left and right, forward and back, but also up and down. Over speakers, everything sounds distant, unless you compensate in the mix, which compromises the binaural effect.
Used with restraint, the ability to place the listener in the center of the action has immense possibilities. However, these are the same possibilities of mono, in which listeners put themselves in the center of the action by force of imagination rather than of technology, a far superior system, in my opinion.
The principles outlined here hold true whether you record the performance under controlled studio conditions or before a live audience. Realistic or complex stereo placement and movement, however, become more difficult for live performance. This is because you have a stage picture as well as a stereo picture to worry about. You want everyone on stage to "uncover" to the studio audience — that is, to position themselves so that the "house" can see their facial expressions and actions. One has several options for accomplishing this while giving the home audience satisfactory stereo, though correctly positioned stereo "foley" (mechanical, as opposed to pre-recorded, sound effects) is almost impossible. We cannot go into the subject in detail here, except to advise against attempting realistic and precise stereo placement when performing before a live audience.
The general principles of stereo blocking resembles those for stage blocking. The conventional proscenium playing area is divided into a checkerboard of fifteen equal blocks. The area closest to the audience is said to be downstage; the farthest is upstage. Right and left are treated from the actors' point of view as they face the audience. Important action takes place downstage, the most important down right. (Because we read from left to right, down left is considered the strongest playing area.) The next strongest playing area is down center. Strongest area for entrances and exits is up-center. Sets are frequently in forced perspective, because a shallow stage carries sound better than a deep one.
In blocking, stage directors concern themselves with the stage picture. Even when the action takes place on only a portion of the total stage, the stage picture must balance or dress the playing area so that the audience can see. Sight lines and aesthetic symmetry from the perspective of the "house," or audience area, are very important. Actors and objects "cheat" to the house to keep action uncovered to the audience. For instance, as an actor you learn to gesture with your upstage arm, stand partly facing the audience and partly to the person to whom you're talking, when turning always to turn downstage, etc.
All this helps the audience focus on the important action. To divide focus weakens the action. For instance, while one character is saying or doing something important, the other characters are often blocked so that they are still, because their movement could divert attention, or displace action. Lighting and other production values can enhance or detract from focus, but the blocking is the principle focus tool.
In a similar way, I divide the stereo field into a checkerboard of 21 blocks. Instead of down stage and up stage, we have on-mike and off-mike. Left and right are determined from the listener's perspective. The blocks are not equal, because stereo is an illusion. There are only two real channels of sound played back on two speaker assemblies occupying but two positions of real space. You create the stereo illusion (partly) by the balance of sound levels. When the levels of the two channels are equal, the sound seems to originate from stereo center. When the sound is louder on one side than on the other, it seems to come from stereo right or stereo left. When the sound is recorded only on one side, it seems to come from stereo far left or right.
Far left and right are narrower than the other positions and rarely used for anything, except to fill the background. This is for two reasons. A variety of transmission or reception conditions may make sounds on only one stereo channel disappear. Far sounds will seem out of balance or non-existent when heard on a mono receiver, or when the listener does not listen to stereo from a position exactly between the two speakers. You should always position important sounds so they pick up on both channels. Only ambient sounds, atmospheres can be, and ought to be, spread out the total width of the stereo field. Doing so gives the illusion of a playing area much larger than the one the principle sounds are using.
Important action takes place on-mike, the most important on-mike center. This is because the closer to center the louder you can make the sound. (A gun shot far left just below saturation point at +3 db (decibels = units of sound volume) on the one channel is only +3 db overall. A gun shot at stereo center can be +3 db on both channels, or effectively +6 db.) The next strongest playing area is on-mike mid-left, 3rd strongest on-mike mid-right. All other positions are relatively weak.
Like the playing area of the stage, the playing area of the stereo field should also be shallow. A subtle sound plot, with full use of the dynamic range will play as badly as use of the entire lateral stereo field, because:
human ears do not hear amplified sound the way they do acoustic sound; they cannot compensate quickly for loud and soft amplifications — making, for instance, staccato delivery of lines hard to comprehend — and they will adjust to moderate louder amplifications, simultaneously pushing down softer ones;
when broadcast, the often primitive over-compression on many station transmitters will destroy a subtle mix, squashing all levels into an even mezzo-forte stream;
the listening environment contains its own ambient sounds that can mask your softer levels, and characteristics of the receiver, such as EQ response, can totally wipe them out.
So, depth becomes an illusion, too, like the forced perspective on a stage set.
The Effective Stereo Field
The effective, or apparent, stereo field somewhat compensates for the limitations of the real stereo field. It retreats in perspective. The farther away from the listener you go, the more sounds fit within it. Four characters fit comfortably on-mike, five or more have ample room only slightly back.
When blocking, cheat towards the on-mike position. The affective field is very shallow. The affective on-mike, off-mike, and background positions consume about two-thirds of the real depth.
Grouping
Group voices, sound and source music in the stereo field according to the following considerations:
The stereo picture. For the reasons stated above, action rarely takes place far left or far right. Whenever possible balance the stereo picture. Make all but background sounds orbit around stereo center. Push for stereo symmetry, grouping action evenly on either side of, on, and near stereo center.
Relationships. Group a sound belonging to a speaking character with the character's voice. In real life, you do not hear a footfall and a voice coming from the same place. In stereophonic audio, you do. Groups of voices and sounds assume more or less natural, common sense positions. Defenders of the fortress are inside, say in various positions left of stereo center; the insurgents are outside, in various positions right of stereo center. Or, if you wish to view the scene from the point of view of the defenders, spread them evenly from left to right down-field, and group the insurgents spread left to right up field. Two couples dining in a restaurant would sit evenly spread down-field boy-girl-boy-girl, with perhaps the boy and girl closest to center slightly up.
Perspective. Place the stereo vanishing point on or near up center. As sounds retreat, the stereo width narrows in an approximation of 3-D perspective. A pinpointed sound will give the illusion that it is narrowing as it gets softer. Sound groupings will sound as if they are widening as they retreat, unless you narrow their stereo width as you lower their volume. For instance, tourists walk away from a Mariachi band. The mike is supposed to follow them as they go. Their voices and footfalls will remain stationary in stereo. Other sounds will go by them, and the band will get not only softer, but also narrower as they leave it.
Perhaps you have a scene that begins with two sets of characters calling to each other over a space, and ends with an extended sotto voce conversation among just one set. The simplest alternative is to place the action entirely from the point of view of the set you end up with. The other characters are off-mike throughout, as in the first example charted below. Perhaps you want to delay taking psychological sides by beginning with an objective perspective and then dollying or zooming in. You'd open the scene with both sets of characters in narrow arrays up-field and equidistant from stereo center. As the conversation between them ends, you would begin a cross fade. During the crossfade, the first set of characters gets softer and pans far to one side. The other set fades up and spreads to balance the down-field area.
Movement
Blocking is not the principle tool for focus — dynamics, EQ, and sound mass are. The stereo picture can, however, add or subtract from focus. A great deal of movement or panning weakens focus. On stage, physical movement is often imposed on verbal actions to give audiences something to watch and keep them visually involved. Audio does the opposite. Characters move only when they must to complete an action. Arbitrary movement confuses the listener.
Further, nothing moves in silence! A sound location cannot suddenly change from stereo left to stereo right. Listeners have to hear the pan, or cross. Avoid small crosses, they will not be heard. When they move, characters should move broadly across the stereo field. Block to facilitate clean, uncluttered, unambiguous pannings and crosses.
Movement and stereo position can enhance illusions of time, place, and psychological condition:
Example #1. The same character ends one scene and begins the next. Making his/her stereo position in scene 1 different from that of scene 2 helps establish the switch of time and/or location.
Example #2. The character narrates a scene that s/he appears in. To help the listener discern narration from participation, place the narrating voice hot on-mike center, back the in-scene voice off slightly, and place it off-center.
Example #3. Events are growing too big and changing too fast for a character to keep up with. Keep him/her stationary from scene to scene or during the sequence, while events, people, and locations keep shifting around the character.
Ambience
Ambient sounds, or atmospheres, hug the background area. Exact depth and width depend upon the fictive environment and physical relationships. For instance, bird calls in the open on a clear day may be lively but will not intrude too far down-field — that is, they will not be so loud as to obscure or displace action from on-mike voices and sounds; neither will they be so soft as to form a flat sonic backdrop rather than an environment. They may, however, extend the entire width of the stereo field for the impression of wide open spaces.
On the other hand, bird calls in a pet shop or the bird house of the zoo will be much farther down-field, partly because they are actually closer to the on-mike sounds and voices, and partly because interior surfaces amplify them. For the impression of confined space, you may take the sounds in a little on the far left and right.
Perhaps action takes place indoors where a window is opened up field mid-left. The bird calls that fade up when the window opens will be farther up field than the window sound. It will also be farther up than if the action took place outside. Width-wise, the sound will originate mid-left, where the window is, not the entire width of the stereo field.
Music
Background Music. It is not necessary to indicate the stereo position of background music in your blocking. Assume that you will spread it across the entire width of the stereo field. You will make exact determinations in post.
Source music. Pinpointing the stereo position of source music helps differentiate it from background music. When a speaking character plays an instrument, his voice and music should originate from the same position.
I use two methods to mark the stereo blocking graphically in my script. Both methods seem clear not only to me, but to the engineers I work with. They use the notations to set up for the day’s session, to ride relative levels and to guide post-production. Therefore, I copy the blocking not only in my script but also in those of the engineer and foley walker.
Here are facing pages of a script showing how the notes look in the director's binder.Do not put stereo notation of any kind in the talent's scripts. If you are adding stereo in the mix, the blocking doesn't concern them. Or, if you are blocking them around a stereo mike, they should make their own blocking notes; yours will only confuse them. You will waste more time by explaining your blocking notes than by teaching the blocking orally.
The Clock Dial
In the first method, particularly useful for simple productions with few sounds and little movement, I simply make notes in the margins of the script, or where ever there’s room. I draw the circular top of a pan pot as my basic icon. It looks like the face of a clock with only one dial. Five or five o'clock is stereo far right, nine o'clock is stereo far left, 10:30 is left center, noon is center, etc.
I indicate pans with a curved arrow.
The Stereo Grid
For more complex productions where depth is as important as width, I paste full charts in the script opposite the pages to which they apply. Upon putting the director's script in a three ring binder, I can see the blocking and the lines at one glance. In an identical fashion, I bind the engineer's script with the blocking. This frees the script pages for numerous other notes that the engineer and I will eventually need to make.
A full stereo grid, such as the one above, defines complex stereo set-ups. You can draw up the basic chart and knock off a bunch of photocopies. Zip one out as needed, draw in the foreground action and paste in the script. Or, as I do, you can use computer graphics, which my collaborators find more satisfactory than my lousy handwriting. Color isn’t necessary, but I find it helpful. The legend in red above, @ 6/10, means that the movement shown occurs on page six paragraph 10.
Examples
Let's say we have a scene in which Antony and his companion Dolabella row out to Cleopatra's barge, and we see it in our mind's eye like this:
We could diagram the scene as follows:
Suppose we had an action sequence:
We could diagram it like this:
Abbreviated Grids
Simpler blocking requires only something like this:
This single-level chart assumes that all sounds shown occur at the on-mike level. The notation shows that Stearn enters and leaves left, Ossman enters from right, Fish is stationary.
Now, if only two people, who do not move, appear in a scene, we need only show:
or simple note:
CORWIN = l.c.
OBOLER = r.c.Of course, we could forgo illustration entirely and simply write the blocking into the script, somewhat as follows:
You need not prefer one notation method to another. Adopt whatever system or combination that provides you and your co-workers the most easily read instructions. In fact, that's exactly what I do.
Contents •
Intro •Gimme a break! •Overview •Management •The P.A. •The Text •MS Formats •Mike Acting •Casting •Stereo •Directing •Production •Foley •Appendices •Author's Bio • NATF home page
