"A Different Kind of Love" was shot by students from the ECA. I noted the hugely different approach we have at the Academy to the way they film from ECA. Their focus was continually on the image. The sound was clearly a necessary evil, and the performances were neither developed or concentrated on. Everything was about the composition of the shot. A strong-willed DoP, a weaker Director and the absence of a 1st AD meant that we ended up with an average of about ten takes for even the simplest of shots. I very quickly grew to despise the phrase "One more for the camera". After all, what is the point of getting a repeat of a shot in which you change nothing. If there is a problem in the first shot, it will very probably still be there in the second identical shot. Nevertheless I got through it. I got some basic knowledge of how to operate a Marantz solid state recorder (very much a crash course in that I had to figure out the buttons by trial and error - cue lots of distortion). I was unable to find a way for the Marantz to accept a line signal coming from the mixer on an XLR cable, so I had to set the mixer output to Mic level, which is less good for signal-to-noise ratio but which at least allowed me to get some signal recorded!
"Doritos: Share" was a 30 second advert done last weekend. Due to a lack of actors (out of the five required we ended up with two) I had to act, as did the runner and the director. So I can add "hand out the window, boom back in the sunroof" to my list of awkward sound recording positions, especially when trying to act with the right half of me. Being Sound Rec and an actor is far from an ideal situation. For the wide shots, I had to prop the boom pole up, wedged between C-Stands, and hope for no sudden gusts of wind... Beyond that, I'm not sure I learned anything of note about sound during this shoot. We had to use 6 AA batteries for the SQN as the MP1 battery had been omitted from the kit request: these required replacing half way through the shoot.
1 comment:
Re your comment about 'one more for the camera'. One good definition of insanity is doing exactly the same thing over again and expecting a different result.
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