In order to meet any training objective, you need to be sure the trainee has the opportunity to hear everything they need to hear, and pick out the vital details.  That means you need to capture clean and clear audio.

• clean audio is audio that doesn’t overlap; one actor is speaking at a time, or extraneous background noise (such as a passing airplane) doesn’t drown out the important dialogue. Clean audio is much easier to edit later.
• clear audio is a consistent volume, loud enough to hear and understand, free of wind and traffic noise, etc. Clear audio will be much easier for your trainees to understand.

Capturing clean audio comes down to awareness and discipline.  Listen for background noise that might obscure important pieces of dialogue.  If you use pauses in dialogue as moments to give stage direction, you can edit those out later.

Capturing clear audio is a matter of having a mic suitable to your shooting situation.  The built-in microphone on most HD or 4K cameras will usually do the job just fine. If you find your camera struggling to catch everything your actors are saying, consider adding an on-board shotgun mic.  This attaches right to your camera, plugs into the audio-in jack, and functions like an “audio zoom lens”: It picks up what you’re pointing at (likely the person delivering lines you need to capture) while largely ignoring sound coming from other directions.

But good audio technique is only as good as what’s being captured. Before you can apply good techniques, you need to have planned a good immersive training scenario–one with emotional punch, and a sharp focus on your training objective.  Want to learn the keys to planning and filming a high-impact immersive police training scenario?

Download your free copy of the latest ebook from MILO Studios: Training with Impact.