Hearing Voices (Broken Bubbles, from that guy with the microphone)

It's a new dawn for my learning as a sound recordist. On Wednesday last week I arrived on set to a piece of kit which i had never even touched before. Many a time had i watched Mic Kearney change settings and operate the equipment brilliantly but never did I have a chance to find out how to use the recorder during my time on the grad films.

So there i was sitting down to a new piece of equipment and we are to be turning over in an hours time. Time to get to work. As i was in the same position Murdo was during the shoot of Breathing Room, he was able to take ten minutes out of his busy schedule to help me a little on powering the recorder and giving me a very basic set up. I also had notes that Mic had sent me the previous night about the recorder and how to do a basic set up. But I'm a little more curious than Murdo about the new shiny things i have in my possession. With the lighting set ups using their time wisely, I was able to explore the kit carefully (well sort of). It is a huge difference from the SQN, with the sound clarity being immaculate and very little feedback hiss from the recorder (as opposed to the feedback from a 570 camera). The sound levels can be brilliantly controlled, with 4 separate pots for each of the four channels on the mixer (one for Gain, one for Bass, one for Pan and the master channel pot). This is much more controllable than a three way switch. I found myself in many situations where navigating each pot managed to channel out or reduce the noise of an unwanted element. For example, when shooting in Mugdock Park, I was able to reduce wind noise and pick up more dialogue than the surroundings, and I am happy to say that the dialogue is very easily recognizable and for lack of a better word, good.

Obviously with my curiosity came problems. I managed to create quite a fuss twice on the first day while filming in the props store. When getting a little too familiar with the buttons on the recorder i managed to reset the entire thing, wiping preset slate names and reseting the recording channels, which was a pretty big pain. The problem took half an our to fix, with Gavin Rizza coming on set to help. This happened once again, through complete carelessness of myself, during the day. Only this time i was able to correct the problem within fifteen minutes and get the film rolling again.

This problem also caused some of the recordings to filter into different folders, which proved to be an annoyance with DIT. But the next morning I was able to create some time to rename all files recorded and take a note of where they had been stored on the recorder.

The recorder is a fantastic piece of kit, but if put into the hands of a rookie, such as myself, it can prove to be more difficult than it appears. Thankfully by the end of the shoot I was starting to get the hang of it and was growing more confident by the hour. In the end I did what I could, and i think I did a satisfactory job, and also this proves to be a good push into third year, as now i know roughly how to use the kit.

On set was a strange feeling. It had been a while since I had recorded sound on a film, and this was the first time I was completely independent from the camera. My problems caused a set back in the schedule, which is understandably annoying. The team were not thrilled with the problems that I was causing on set, but in any case who would be. I just did what I could with the knowledge that I had.

Mic has been keeping me up to date and has been continuing to give me good advice on both the kit and how to operate on set as a sound recordist. He has been a fantastic help and I hope to work with him again soon in August.