Freesound Forums

Since my last blog got tangled in some mySql errors which I dont care to resolve i might go to a commercial thingy like blogger.com but i dont really care for those so perhaps ill just write some stuff here on the forum.

btw Bram, if your reading this, could you make this thread so that only I can post to it?

Ok great, now that the logistic have been taking care of, whoo, in 30 seconds flat, instead of the 72 hours i would have spend on setting up yet another CMS or blog whatever, lets get to the good stuff.

I ran into a good friend of mine, and she told me her brother was about to shoot for a short of his. He somehow managed to get some funds from the goverment thru a foundation or something. Anyways, it means he has some cash to blow on set and actors. Sounded pretty good so I called him up the other day to see what he was doing soundwise. Since sound, and esp location sound, is usually not the first on people's list for things to do right I hadnt expected him to have a crew for it yet.

That hunch turned out to be the truth and he seemed pretty happy when I offered to see if I could lend a hand. Now, I dont have any experience doing location sound for film/video so this is going to be a quick school for me...

This afternoon i met up with the director, Gijs, and his brother in arms, Boudewijn, the producer, to see what the plan was. They are shooting part of the final film for a kind of promo and to get a bit more of a feel for what its going to take to do the whole thing.

There is going to be 2 shoots, one in an empty warehouse (incidentally in another part of the building that houses the rehearsal studios that i frequent with my band). The other shoot will be in a car. They are going to get a car worked on so that it has a remote controllable camera on the outside.

The gear that I have available at this point is 2 wireless lavelier mikes (so-so dependability) and a MH66 Sennheiser shotgun with a boom. Brrr, this means that first thing tomorrow mornin im off to school and try to beg Jamal, the great arab keeper of the gates to the great hardware field at school to lend me for yet another couple of days the Tascam DA-P1 Dat recorder and a rycote. Although the sets are both inside I still think im going to be needing the rycote (if only for the suspension mount) but also because of the potential for big drafts inside the warehouse.

Because they want to take advantage of the sound of the warehouse I'm thinking of not using the laveliers on day 1 but get another mike, maybe and omnidirectional one, and use it to record the ambience from a bit of a distance. I suggested this to Gijs and Boudewijn, after they explained that they wanted a lot of the spacious sound and clear dialogou (although all the language will be jiberish, it still needs to be clear jiberish.

Some tech just goes absolete very quickly, DAT seems to be one of them. Being one of the main pro means of recording it now seems impossible to get a tape in a city like Utrecht.
I couldnt even locate pc backupdrive tapes which are supposedly equal. Fortunatly I have some tape myself (about 130 minutes) available.

I dont have a lot of itme at the moment as i have to rush for Day 2 in a coupel minutes but I just gotta say a few things before i spud off.
All in all things went well, there were some logistic issues at first when we didnt have enough power cables but ones that got sorted things went smoothly. We got lucky as somebody made an effort to help us out with that. We were borrowing power from the rehearsal studio meantioned earlier. However we didnt have enough cable as I said and no more money to get a lot of expensive cables either. One of the people at the rehearsal studio decided to help us out and (illegaly) create some power outlets directly from the bigass switchboard in the factory hall.

One of the nice suprises when i showed up there in the morning was the HD Cam they rented. Very cool, shooting at 1024 is nice

I had a lot of trouble with the ME-66 Sennheiser giving me lots of handling noise, and very ugly noise too. Maybe it was overloading the DA-P1 notoriously crap pre-amps, i dont know, but i never had this problem with my MKH-415T, so after awhile i decided to switch to that mike.

Ok, i gotta run now, ill post some pictures of the set in a few days.

After my initial experience of being there way to early I decided that today i would call in advance and be sure that they were ready (allmost) ready to shoot. Todays plan was to record some scene's of a taxi driver with his passenger. They rented a mount for the camera that was impressivly mounted were the hood of the car used to be. (pictures will be here soon). There was only a need for recording the driver's voice. The camera man was laying very uncomfortably in the trunk. They also had installed several big lights inside to make the actors visible.
All i really did was tape the rycote to the glovecompartment trying to tilt it towards the driver. As they informed me their equipement wasnt informed I decided not to use my own MKH-415T but the 66 that I had so much trouble with yesterday. As I remembered typing here that it sounded like the pre-amp was being overloaded I put in a 20 db pad. This seemed to resolve the issue. Although i didnt try how it handled with a boom later on.
Listening back now while the DAT is being transferred I hear some lessons being learned. There is some heavy clipping on his voice when he suddenly starts screaming: I forgot to turn on the limiter. Thats the problem ofcourse when the recorder is just laying htere in the car and you dont have time to listen back to the whole recording. You cant really gauge its quality. I wonder how expensive it would be to get some kind of transmitter that I could use to record from a car nearby and what kind of quality loss that would result in.
After the mount was taken off we went for a couple shots passing the car, and i was no longer recordist but driver of the camera car. We ended the day in a quiet rural area where the car stops to drop his passenger and then takes off.