How to record your story? Sound

4) sound -- microphones, production sound, ADR, sound libraries, ambient layers

Smartphones now shoot 4K, but the sound recording still stinks.  But even if it gets really good somewhere down the line, you will still, most certainly be creating your sound in post on a $4k budget.  The main reason for this is that the sound where you are recording most likely with stink.  So it doesn't matter how hi-fi the wi-fi camera sound gets, if the sound at recording time is terrible, you will be replacing it in post.

All of it -- ambient sound, location sounds, foley, dialogue.  This means you need your actors to come back much later after you have an edit and do their dialogue to the edit.  Either that or replace them all with other actors.

But there are many cheats.  The actors speaking Russian in Holiday were not speaking Russian on camera.  With careful editing, however, it works.  In other locations, like the Venice boardwalk, the wind was always peaking out the sound at some point in every take, so those had to be created from a mixture of actual camera sound and layers of other ambient crowd tracks usually about six tracks deep.  More on all this later.