Trial and Error- Background Audio Levels

I filmed several clips of Scene 2 in Costa Coffee, I did this on a Thursday evening at around 5:30PM, I did this because of the warm lighting within the cafe and because there would be less customers as the cafe closed soon after.  The setting of the scene was perfect for the mise-en-scene I wanted as the two characters are sat in the far corner where they could not be overheard. The few customers in the cafe were quite loud and appeared louder on the video than my two actors, as well as this the staff were packing away for closing so I had audio of cutlery, murmurs, shouting and visuals of the staff working behind the actors.

I tried to overcome the background noise problem by importing the audio of the video onto Audacity software, when I imported the video onto the software the wave frequencies were very distorted, instead of the dialogue being spoken white noise had replaced it, this was unexplained, when I listened to the audio all that could be heard was the 'clinks' of cutlery separated with long intervals of white noise. 

Unfortunately after experimenting with different setting I was still unable to correct this error.  In order to over come this problem I will have to film in a different location, the dialogue will be much clearer, I will be able to record some audio from a coffee shop and lay the dialogue over the top of this audio.  In doing this I will be able to focus on the dialogue whilst still having the atmosphere.


In order to film this scene in better quality I could give the actors a small microphone each to capture the dialogue more clearly, I could also talk to the manager at Costa and ask for permission to film after opening hours for 30 minutes; now that my actors have worked in the space and are familiar with the scene and their scripts, I have also now had practice with the camera so the filming time should be quicker and more rehearsed.