Sankens, Trams, and Mickey Twos

Best experience with multiple wireless to date. Good thing, too. I was recording an 8 page scene, shot on film with the director following his actors around a living room with an Aaton XTR Super 16mm camera on his shoulder. The master shot was using all 360 degrees of direction, which means no place to hide microphone cable. The camera was handheld and moving, with no video assist, which means an unpredictable frameline to keep a microphone above. The take was about 8 minutes long, which is far too long for most arms to hold a boom overhead with precision and grace. Fortunately, we just happened to have excellent professional wireless on hand.

I used Sanken COS-11 microphones for the first time. The thin, square, rubber mounts proved to work very well against the evil that is known as cloth noise. We adhered them to the inside of the actors’ shirts with clear and chewy 3M Adhesive Transfer Tape (a.k.a snot). The mike head rests in the open via a cut out in the mount, just behind the fabric without contact, and moves with the shirt so there’s never any friction on the grille. The only time I heard cloth was the inevitable sound of a shirt shifting around while an actor walks briskly, luckily not over any of his lines. Put your ear down near your shoulder and move your shirt with your hand to hear what that sounds like.

Two days earlier we used Trams to wire the talent. I have to say that the voice sounded clearer with the Tram versus the Sanken on that set. However, I suspect different microphones work better with different circumstances. The Sanken on the lead actress yesterday sounded absolutely delicious. Wiring technique is not a hard science because there are too many variables—every voice, microphone placement, and wardrobe is unique. Nina enunciated her words clearly, with pleasant tonal qualities, and she was wearing a cotton T-shirt. We used a backup Sennheiser ME 2, as our fourth lav, for the boy playing her son, tucked just inside his collar to sound more open then on his chest. His voice came through a little less clear. It was sort of like listening to someone talk with their hand over their mouth, only not nearly that extreme. The difference is subtle enough that I doubt an audience would notice, but it’s quite a difference to gear heads. I read that the MKE 2 performs higher than the ME 2, which is the standard issue lav with the G2 wireless kits. I used one once about a year ago, recording customer testimonials for Quickbooks, but I couldn’t tell the difference back then.

Trams rock, Sankens are dope, and Mickey Twos are a’ight, for my fellow ‘up and comer’ sound guys. One thing is for sure, transmission reception is lightyears better with Lectrosonics transmitters and receivers. I’ll write about that later.

The shoot went very well, despite not having many opportunities to boom. I never heard any signal drop-outs, clothing didn’t overlap with any dialogue, and voices sounded more like someone speaking in front of you, rather than someone speaking while your ear is resting on their chest.

Sound Depth of Field

So I was sleepless last night after having been in bed only 3 hours, and decided to try reading on the couch. Good time for the deeper concepts of David Sonnenschein, which I don’t have the patience for normally. I’ve picked up and put down the book so many times, I can’t remember which parts I’ve been over. Terms like "emotional inventory" and "musique concrète" demand a mode of creative thinking that doesn’t jive with my practical side. He’s showing the artistic potential within a mostly technical craft. It crosses the wires in my brain because I know the conditions on the battlefield of production don’t allow for such artistic freedom. It’s like how military warfare could be more like performing ballet. I came to a place where he wrote that people can only subjectively discern one or two sounds at a time, any more would blend together as one sound. “Bullshit,” I thought.

I fetched myself a bowl of leftover spaghetti, and put on the DVD the director lent me as an example of great sound design. I sat with my ears maybe 18 inches from the speakers of my TV, with my face in the spaghetti, and listened to the opening scene of the movie as the light from the picture glowed around me. You can actually hear a lot of distinct sounds without the distraction of the visual sense. I was fascinated that no matter where it was in the movie… no more than 3 sounds were going on at any given moment, and many times just one sound. They actually killed the background sound of cicadas in the desert when a car radio started, and when the radio stopped, the cicadas faded back in. This was the answer I was looking for regarding the sound equivalent of focus, or depth-of-field.

Earlier today, actually, my wife wanted to show me how clean the Wilhelm Scream* is in Pixar’s Lifted. It was very clean, albeit also very wet because the character falls down a hole, but I noticed something else. When the story continues aurally as the credits burn in on screen, we hear each sound separately, like they each take a turn without overlapping. Alarm clock, bird tweets, yawn, bed creak, Wilhelm, and body fall. That is fascinating! Now, certainly this is partly do to the comedy of a cartoon. Mechanical rhythm from what appears to be organic is funny. However, I think I’m on to one of the secrets to the magic of movie sound.

One sound at a time accomplishes two goals. It directs the audience’s attention to an object and it is heard clearly.

A scene between two people talking in a car came later. The sound of the car running was mixed very low. It seemed to be at most one third of the volume of the voices. The dialogue dominates unrealistically, but it works. Sound design served the story. That’s the key I’m striving to achieve.


*The Wilhelm scream was burned into my emotional memory as a stormtrooper falling when I was very young, because I watched and rewatched Star Wars so many times growing up. It's like your memory of a guitar solo in a song. When you hear it out of place, sampled in another song, you notice! I have been aware of the stormtrooper scream in movies just as long as I can remember but I never really could convince my friends that it was true. Well, I was right.

In The Works

Going to be doing post production sound for WWJD. I'm obsessively organizing myself for the project: contacts, schedule, budget, calendar, lists. My first screening was Monday night; I saw the third cut of the movie. Picture lock should be happening sometime next week. Meanwhile, I'm carefully planning out the hours I'll most likely spend based on past experiences. Also ran a test OMF conversion, which revealed an odd problem that I hope can be fixed before picture delivery. As always, when I'm ramping up to work, I'm reading my technical books like crazy to see what else I can learn to prepare a smoother workflow.

I also met with the head sound guy at a production company, who may have some freelance production gigs for me next month. As fate would have it, I got a call last night for a live event happening tonight. There will be a filmmaking discussion on stage among five people at a theater in Beverly Hills. Today, I'll be running up to Coffey to pick up the mikes, the mixer, and the cables, to hook into the theater's system. Scary thing is, I've never seen this place, nor will I be permitted to load in until 30 minutes before showtime! Wish me luck.

Deva

Let me tell you about the Deva. When I started looking outside of college for professional audio gear, my Google search stumbled upon a blog by Glen Trew. His Memoirs of a Sound Mixer spoke of working on Jersey Girl, a Kevin Smith movie. I like Kevin Smith movies. Cool. Hey, he's working with Vilmos Zsigmond! Vilmos was one of the only 2 cinematographers that visited my school when I was there. So this is what it's like on a "real" set. Glen included some pictures of his equipment, too. It was my first time seeing a cart. I studied his labelled jpeg with boyish wonder, soaking in all the components. I'd never seen a mixing board outdoors before, and my, how boxy it looks. How cool is that? He's got little monitors on his cart, and a surface for taking notes! It all seemed so logical. Of course this is how a sound department should be. Why could I have never imagined it? Boy, I felt like I had just ducked underwater and seen the rest of the iceberg. Names like Sanken, Countryman, Lectrosonics and Zaxcom, names that are industry standards, I had never heard of before. At this point, I pretty much only knew the name Sennheiser, what a Fostex FR-2 and a Nagra was, and my Sony MDR-7506 headphones. I had know idea that the sound department handed out headphones for others to listen, using Comtek transmitters and receivers. Hey, I remember the cans I wore on the ESPN Racing said Comtek on the cups. Curiously, I had never seen a DAT recorder, because its time had come and gone, replaced by solid state recorders. Glen's main recorder was capable of 4 tracks! My first glimpse of a multitrack recorder was Zaxcom's Deva. Today, the Deva is up to 10 tracks, writes to an internal hard drive and to compact flash cards, instead of DVD-RAM. Many of the production sound mixers at Jeff Wexler's forum use one. Phillip Palmer, the first production sound blogger I found and the inspiration of this blog, has gone through about three versions of the Deva. I have been following the mythical machine for over a year now through the lens of the internet telescope. Last weekend, I finally got to try one out.

Hat Trick

Good time last Friday. Thanks to Shahin for insisting on bringing me aboard Gabe Michael's webisode.

I finally tried out a hat rig. Dave was wearing a necktie, and I had originally placed the microphone inside the knot with the wire running inside his shirt. That sound was working, there was no cloth rustling, but his voice was slightly muffled from all the fabric in the tie. I repositioned the lav to inside his shirt, just to the right of the buttons over his sternum. This sound was clearer, but too bassy. It was like resting your head on someone's chest as they talk. Dave was wearing a cap that day. I looked at the brim and my eyes lit up. The brim is tilted downward when he stands, nobody would see a mike capsule sitting just an inch in front of his forehead, the mike would be out in the open more like an overhead boom. I asked Dave if I could try it and he was game.

Here's a close up. Smooth. The wire runs along the middle of his hair and then down inside his collar. It wasn't even visible from the back!
There was a wide shot outdoors of Dave playing guitar and singing. Obviously, my boom placed the mike as close as I could while staying out of frame, which turned out to be diagonally about six feet away. The guitar was loud, and its sound bled out to the concrete steps and the surrounding buildings. The audio mix of the boom getting that and the lav picking up voice louder than instrument sounded amazing. I love when you get two perspectives in a stereo pair. Sounds like the environment is really alive.

Butter

Ahh... Nestlé's Butterfinger. Big name. Big candy bar. Tiny budget. Say what??

Yes. This is one of the lowest paid gigs I've had. It's a scheduled 12 hour day, plus an additional two for those going on the last minute tech scout. The budget for the entire sound department (the sound mixer, the boom operator, and the equipment) was a whopping $300. *Gasp* We pulled favors from three other places to complete the sound package. We wanted five microphones out there: 1 boom, and 4 wireless. Sy's kit so far is a 4 track recorder, a boom, a bag, and the necessary cables. The 2nd A.D. lent us his 3 input mixer, the 1st A.D. lent us his little buddy, and our Alma Mater lent us the other three wireless kits. I bought a roll of snot for $4.25.

Since my last job, I really felt the deep need to be uber-prepared, so I decided to go up to location two hours early for the tech scout. There's not much I could do as a sound guy on a tech scout (since the location is already locked down) other than advise against noisy spots and try to stake out my boom operating territory. However, I liked the idea that I'd have plenty of time to scan Griffith Park for open RF frequencies (the tip of the Santa Monica mountains overlooking Hollywood on one side and Burbank on the other sees a lot of radio-TV signals). The Sennheiser G2's are much less convenient than the Lectrosonics, in this regard. See, the Lectro receivers can scan the 256 selectable frequencies in it's block of UHF and present a graph on the little display screen to give you an instant idea of which radio frequencies are cleanest at your location. It takes about 30 seconds. The G2 receivers can only scan 4 selectable frequencies per bank at a time (There's either 7 or 8 banks plus a customizable User bank), and it only tells you which of the four is best at the time you scanned, at your location. The only indicator of the strength of radio energy on or close to the frequency selected is a row of 7 bars fluttering on and off as a miniature peak meter, and a green LED labeled RF which will be on when receiving strong RF. So, it doesn't scan the area and report back which frequencies are open, it only reports which of your four channels with the least interference. This becomes a ten minute task now, as I go through each bank of four channels looking for the one that is least evil. Stop. Okay, as I am writing this blog, I've been referring to the online manul to make sure I got the facts straight, and I discovered an error in my thinking. Actually, the SCAN feature tells you how many of the 4 channels are free. Boy that would helped to know. Jiminy Christmas. Alright. Well, the only times I get to play with these is when I'm on set, since I don't any, and only when I'm having issues. However, if none of the banks have enough free channels, you're still going to have to find freqs by trial and error through the User bank. There's 1440 different choices! Needless to say, it's not a quick fix. That's why I wanted to be there early.

But that didn't happen. I hitched a ride from the A.D.s that day, but they got held up at Budget because the 12 passenger van they reserved was not there. Had to go to the downtown office to pick one up, holdiing us back about an hour and a half. Got to location about a half hour early, but my partner in crime had volunteered to pick up walkies from Wilcox, fire exitinguishers from another place, and make a stop at Location Sound for adapter cables. The poor guy showed up about 20 minutes after call time, (missing breakfast) with most of our gear, including the wireless. The D.P. was going to use natural light during the day, so with no lights to set up, the whole crew had to wait on us for about 30 minutes. Luckily, the mixer brought a print out of L.A. TV stations' frequencies, so I knew which channels not to even try. The snot tape worked great on the ME 2 lavs. I never had to change the tape, and they stayed put under the talents' shirts for the whole day. I just left the wires on them and removed the bodypack transmitters during breaks. We had just a bit of drop-out at one spot on one actor, but otherwise, the wireless worked perfectly. Good thing, too. Booming was another story.

Normally, on a shoot that's been prepared, a scene will be covered from several angles (wide, medium, close) and there's plenty of chances to get the best sound, which is always from a well-placed overhead boom.* This shoot was so run and gun, that the D.P. operating the camera wouldn't know what his frame was supposed to be before shooting. That makes it a challenge. I want to get in close but I have to keep one eye on the camera and guess how wide or tight he is, so I can ride the frame without dipping in. The focus puller had it bad, too. It was all guesswork for us during the day.

*Lavs can save your soundtrack sometimes, but they don't have the same response, and they often must be placed on the chest, making actors sound a little bassy. It's like putting your ear on someone's chest and listening to them talk. Booms sound amazingly clear and natural comparatively. There are techniques to help this trouble with lavs, but generally you can always tell which track is a boom and which track is a lav.

After lunch, and our transition into night shooting, the rest of the day went swimmingly. Great sound. We won. There was a fun moment on one tracking shot of feet running through the woods. The Gaffer took a china ball on the end of a pole and boomed the feet for a little extra fill. Naturally, I'm doing the same with a microphone on the end of my pole. We ran together on opposite sides of the tacks as the dolly glided alongside the running actor. Just before the take, with our arms up in a mirror image I looked at him and he looked at me and we smirked.

Rough

7 wireless on a dead man's mixer...

This job was a quick response to a request from Richard. I got a call just after 5 PM Wednesday for a Friday morning shoot, covering a room of advertising folks talking about the creative process. Seven actors, seven lavs. What are our options? Got it. I immediately called Coffey Sound to figure this one out.

I could have rented a Deva 5.8, and had 8 isolated tracks (7 lav, 1 boom) and a stereo mix. That was the most expensive option at about $150 for the Deva. I could have gone dirt cheap and rented an 8 channel mixer ($50) and 7 hardwire lavs ($20 ea.). Instead, I went sort of middle of the road and asked for wireless lavs and a mixer. That may have been a mistake.

On Thursday, I was still waiting to get confirmation of the shoot. Once that was greenlit, I coordinated between the producer and the rental man to make sure our rentals were covered with the credit card authorization and the certificate of insurance. It's part of the biz, although not my direct responsibility if a producer is renting the gear. On my way to North Hollywood from Long Beach I still didn't know if I was going to be walking away with rentals or nothing. It all worked out. I walked away with Lectrosonics UCR411As, UM400s, M152s, and a Mackie 1604VLZ-Pro. I was so excited I had to drive to Pasadena to show Shahin. Beautiful stuff.

Friday morning traffic was exceptionally bad. I left at about 7:15 and did not arrive until 9:15 AM in West Hollywood. There was only about 30 minutes to set up. Normally, this is not a problem. This time, however, I had to wire seven people, each taking about 2 minutes. The boom had to be placed, the cable had to be run out to the phantom, and then to Shahin's 744T recorder. Seven outputs from the receivers needed to be connected to seven inputs on the mixer, and the main outputs of the mixer had to be connected to the recorder as well. Sounds simple enough.

"Complications arised when..."

1. One mike clip was in two pieces.
2. One antennae was not the right length.
3. No signal from lav #5.
4. No output from lav #'s 1, 2, 3, and 4.
5. Overload on random inputs, weak on others.
6. Main out did not sound as clear as Control out (used for monitoring).
7. They want to shoot right now!

All I could do was attack each problem one at a time, following the signal flow. Shahin carefully reconnected the two microphone clip pieces. I attached the only antannae that was left and hoped the discrepency of 2 or 3 millimeters* would not matter at such close range. I went over to the man wearing the #5 transmitter and checked what the dials were set to: 1 and 4. Sure enough, the corresponding receiver was not set to 14, it was set to 88. Fixed that. All of the receivers had different output levels in their menus. I set each of them to +4 dB, which I was told would be standard line level. It wasn't quite right for the Mackie, as I had to turn the trim pots down almost all the way, but the seven inputs were consistent and I didn't have time to fuss with it. No output from the first 4 lavs had me stumped for a few minutes. Mind you, at the same time I'm doing all this troubleshooting, I'm getting distracted by the producer asking me questions. I hear "What's going on?" and "I need solutions." The solution, without allowing time to explore fixing the signals, is to go with the boom only. The line is direct, clean, and will get everyone in the room. Not what he or the executive standing across from me wanted to hear. The executive said he wanted that close-up sound, "That's why we have this here." He walked off, and I told Richard, "I understand where he's coming from--" and he cut me off with, "He is the vice president of this company," and "He's my boss." I was attempting to get across that I acknowledged the demands and was working towards getting them satisfied. The pressure to go even inspired me to offer this alternative, "Would you like to take a look at it?" Daniel told me to try swapping inputs to determine if the cables or the jacks were bad. A good troubleshooting idea that had not popped in my head just yet. Lav #1 did come through when I plugged it into input #5. Then Daniel pointed out the routing buttons beside each fader. Aha! The little grey rectangle labeled "L-R" had not been pushed down to route the signal to the main output (stereo). One at a time, I quickly pushed each fader up while the others stayed down, to be sure each line was loud and clear. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Suddenly, Richard is calling for picture up... but I'm not finished yet. There's still the matter of the muddy sound we hear from the mixer via the recorder.

People were too anxious. The executives wanted to just document a casual, seated discussion about some of their successful advertising campaigns. However, they did not really know what they were going to say in advance. So, tape would just roll and hopefully, some little gems would pop up in the staged casual conversation. They didn't want anything fancy, which hindered Matt from creating a Rembrandt with every frame. Poor room choice, flat lighting, and improvised content. One thing they were decisive about was getting done by 2 o'clock. Did they even care about what they were making?

I bet if one of the cameras was off color balance, they would wait.

The next 3 hours Shahin and I pulled at our hats for a rabbit. New problems surfaced. The main outs: one line was definitely louder than the other, the other crackled a couple times from a bad connector or cable, and the sound was still muddy compared to the clarity of the phones out. I did, of course, try plugging in to that jack but it caused terrible distortion. Looking back, it may have worked had I turned down the monitor volume. There was just not any time to experiment. We were shooting 15 minute takes. A strange intermittent buzz showed up about halfway into our session. Shahin discovered it was coming through the 744's power cable. Once detached, and on battery only, the intermittent buzz went away. I chalk it up to dirty power from the office building. To put a Band-Aid on the muddy mix, I boosted the highs from my end so that more would come through to the recorder. What a mess.



*We needed an antennae for a block 21 transmitter (brown tip) and we had an antennae for a block 22 (red tip).