Review of Location Recording

Location Recording 

Whilst the filming was in process I attended the shoots and acted as a boom operative. Rory helped a lot with teaching me how to use the sound devices 633 mixer, which lead to me leading a few of the shoots. I have also had a look through the sound devices field mixer manual and now feel confident using it and will be sure to use it more for my semester B project. I enjoyed the role of boom operative and picked up some great techniques which I will use in future (for example boom and radio mic placement). Although there wasn’t a lot of dialogue within the film we tried to pick up a lot of ambient and movement sounds on set. Another valuable aspect I learnt from being on location was recording the shot and scenes that went with our takes – we set up the sound devices mixer so it would label the takes for us, but it was also very useful to take note of the location, date, microphones, take and scene when it came to post. This helped us find useful takes in post and all the takes for a specific scene’s easily.

I felt we worked well in communicating with the film crew, they always knew our needs and were told if we thought it would be a better to get another take. We also attempted to take care of the actor/s by making sure they were comfortable, this was what we felt a necessary part of filming as it made the whole process a lot more fun.

At the start of the process we did have some issue’s with the original director. A few examples being failure to give us scheduled breaks, then also failing to tell us when they were ready to start filming amongst other events such as lack of time schedule with shots and storyboards. However as a sound team we worked through this well by being well prepared with microphones and being set up before hand ready to record. This also led us to communicating more with the editor who was in charge of noting all the shots, scenes and takes to keep us informed of what shot we were on.

When the director changed and the rest of the group took charge there was a much better working atmosphere and with this we found it easier to communicate with the director.

All in all throughout the location recording I learnt a substantial amount about what it is like to be on a film set, how to use the field mixer and how boom op successfully. Although we had some challenging incidents within the filming process I felt we tried our hardest to help the film crew when needed through offering them our advice and opinions. As a sound team we worked well together all finding our own roles within the first couple of shoots and all performing to the best of our abilities.

Sound devices mixer manual http://cdn.sounddevices.com/download/guides/633_en.pdf