Location sound recording requirements
For this post, I am going to detail the requirements for location sound in the movie Petal Child. The media and FTV Students requirements are to have at least a third of the production being on location. The rest of the film is to be filmed in the Lincoln TV studio.
For the purposes of this film, being set in the 1960’s, the locations needed to be very specific, in that they needed to be away from any present features such as modern cars, overhead aircraft and trains etc. We had to go on a location scout, and chose places that were the most aesthetic in regard to how much background sound there was. In some cases this was unavoidable however, and I will detail this when talking about particular locations that we chose.
To log what recordings we used for each take, Jack and I used a “sound log form” which details the scene, the shot and the take, and the name of the recording on each microphone used.
Location recording equipment that we used
Sennhiesser with Boom:
Zoom H4N:
Zoom H6N:
Sony Radio Mics
Cardinals Hat
This was the first of the locations and was set in the back of the bar, the outside smoking area. This setting was visually pleasing because it was an old-fashioned style setting, perfect for what we wanted. The background sound here though became a challenge. There were fans from buildings that were opposite, aircraft noises and loud bird noises (as it was an old building it had a birds nest on the roof). All of these interrupting sounds meant that the director had to cut the takes. In this setting, there were 4 actresses, and this was the only take that we used the sony radio clip mics. We encountered some technical problems in using these microphones in that there were some fuzzy frequencies that popped up in the takes. This is something we tried to eliminate by changing the position of the microphones and also replacing the batteries. This still was an issue, so in the end we relied on the recording from the boom.
Garage
The garage scene was the most challenging set of all in all of the groups opinions. Apart from the fact that the day was absolutely freezing, the location made the sound capture an absolute nightmare. The garage scene had all 5 Actresses in, the scene where they are looking to buy the garage as a place for the band to hang out. We didn’t use the radio microphones in this scene due to the problems we had previously with them. In this scene we used the boom microphone and the zoom on a boom pole. This garage was next to a road, which appeared quiet on the time of the location scout, but on the day it was absolutely awful because cars were driving past every few minutes. This meant that even more than the last shoot at the Cardinals hat smoking area, the director had to keep cutting the shot. We had windows of opportunity between the cars driving past, and this took a long time to get moments of silence. Even when it was quiet without cars (which was a rarity) there were dogs that barked, and a low-pitched aircraft/ electricity hum. After a while, we managed to get most of the sounds we wanted, but we will need to use Izotope RX Audio repair software on some of these recordings to eliminate the hums.
Street
This scene we were most pleased with the sound and got the best results. It was a nighttime scene. We used both the boom microphone and zoom h4n to capture the audio. It was one of the longest shoots based on the amount of takes, but this was based on the actresses roles being quite difficult and getting the camera shots perfect with the actresses. This street, in Lincoln, had only one car drive through, in the 3-4 hours we were there. This meant that we could get a clear sound. The worry is how we are going to match up this clarity with the rest of the shoots.
Bedroom
This was possibly one of the easiest and shortest shoots needed, with only a few words of dialogue involved, so we had only used the boom microphone in this part of the shoot. This took about an hour, as the actresses (Stephanie and her mum) took a while to learn lines. The set wasn’t in the studio either; it was in a member of the group’s house that had a bedroom most reminiscent of the 1960s.
Field
For this part of the shoot, all 5 actresses were involved, and we had to go out to the field ‘west common’ in Lincoln at night. This took ages to set up and it was raining on and off as well, so recording was a challenge here. Also, it was fairly windy too. We had to use umbrellas over the microphones because of this rain, and wear plastic bags over our feet because it was so muddy and wet on the ground. In this recording we used boom microphones only and for short bursts of time. It was rather frustrating as there wasn’t actually that much dialogue, but we would have preferred to do this seeing as ADR is an issue (the main actress lives near Glasgow and could only act in the short space of time that we had)
Huckleberry’s (Kitchen scene)
In this scene, which was also quite short in terms of dialogue, we captured audio using a zoom h4n and the boom microphone. There were certain issues with this setting though, in that there was background noise that fluctuated in the background. This noise was the sound from the fridge in the background in the kitchen. Jack and I hope to remove this in post production with Izotope RX.