Recording a Place Before You Understand It

I did music for fifteen years before I picked up a camera. Of everything I brought across from that life, the part that turned out to matter most is listening: ahead of rhythm, ahead of timing.

Sound gets there first

Walk into a workshop and shut your eyes. You'll know within a few seconds roughly how big it is, whether it's busy, what it's made of, and whether the person in it is concentrating or waiting.

Your eyes need longer than that, and they need you to point them somewhere. Sound arrives from every direction at once, and it arrives already carrying the mood.

That's why, when I get somewhere I don't know, I record before I film. Twenty minutes with a recorder tells me more about a place than an hour of looking through a viewfinder: where the noise comes from, which hour is calm, what the room does to a voice.

Every room has a floor

Rooms have a background noise level, and it's different in every one of them. A fridge, a fan, a road two streets away, the sea.

The instinct is to remove it and make things clean. Take it out entirely and the film goes strangely dead. The ear notices the absence even when nobody can say what's missing. So I record plenty of it deliberately: doors, tools, footsteps on whatever the floor is, thirty seconds of a room doing nothing at all.

The edit then gets built on that bed. It's the difference between a sequence that feels like it happened somewhere and a sequence that feels assembled.

Music comes last, if at all

I reach for music later than most people expect, given where I came from.

A track fixes the emotion of a scene in advance and tells the viewer how to feel about it. Sometimes that's exactly right. Often the room's own sound does the job better, and leaves the viewer some room to arrive at their own reaction.

When music does go in, it goes in after the sound design rather than under it, and usually quieter than the first instinct.

What I'm going to do in Santa Teresa

I move there at the end of September 2026, and I've never worked in that part of the world.

So the list starts with a few mornings walking around carrying a recorder, well before it gets to a shoot: the surf at different tides, a workshop, a kitchen at opening time, the road at the hour when everyone is on it. Partly because I'll need those sounds eventually. Mostly because it's the fastest way I know to stop being a stranger somewhere.

I already know a few things will surprise me. Tropical rain on a metal roof is loud in a way that reorganises a whole shooting day. Insects at dusk are their own soundtrack, and a constant one. Neither of those is a problem to solve. They're the sound of the place, and any film shot there should have them in it.

Try it on your own street

If any of this is useful to you, it costs nothing to test. Record thirty seconds of a room you know well, then listen to it later with your eyes closed.

You'll hear things you walk past every day. That's the whole technique, and it works the first time you try it.

The rest of what I film, and who for, is through here.