RohanHarris.net

So, our shooting escapades went well on Sunday as it turned out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Yesterday, my new Mac arrived. For the first time in the history of Macs-I’ve-Owned, this one is of the desktop variety. In other words, the hard drive doesn’t drag the overall speed of the rest of the system down into the gutter like George W Bush at a speaking-English-correctly convention.

After gutting my Macbook Pro for anything useful and transferring it by gigabit lan (speedspeedspeedspeedspeed… I’m sorry, what? I got sidetracked with awesome) to my new system, I began to install and configure Final Cut Studio and other useful things like that.

After this was done, I plugged in all the external hard drives and opened up my previous project. I’d been waiting to get this new system, you see, before trying to edit the work from last weekend. And, as I started to yell from the roof-tops at the beginning of this post, it turns out we don’t completely suck balls after all.

Coverage of the scenes was done with the lapel mics (fortunately, the materials worn by the actors this time DID NOT suck horribly, and there only two people talking at any given point in time) with a bit of backup provided by the boom.

And the best part? I didn’t have to resort to the boom sound ONCE. The radio sound was so sharp that I jammed a compressor over each track and simply ignored the rest.

However, that isn’t the real fun part.

The real fun part was this - I was able to use Final Cut Studio PROPERLY. No more screaming, “you’re doing it wrong!” at myself while finding kludgy ways to avoid adhering to the methods explained in the enormous four-volume Final Cut manual.

See, my old computer was Too Slow(tm), and I also hadn’t sat down to READ all the blasted manuals, because I got my proper boxed copy (yes, that’s right, I pay for software) right when I was sitting down to edit the crap out of my first feature film. The net result was that, embarrassingly, I’d never figured out how to merge video & audio tracks in FCP. How bloody embarrassing! So, as a ‘quick fix’, I merged them manually in a sequence. So, thusly, scenes in my flick became sequences-within-sequences-within-sequences until I’m sure the unholy God of Final Cut Pro was wincing and rolling over in his grave.

Now, half-way through I learnt the Correct Way To Do It(tm)… but it was too late. Half-way through editing a feature film is NOT a good time to pick a whole different bloody paradigm.

But starting new short film projects afterwards? That’s the best time.

So, using only singularly-nested sequences this time, I was able to send complete scenes over to Soundtrack Pro and, y’know, let it do what it was BUILT for. Leveling and Sound FX placement all got done in Soundtrack Pro and between this and the fact that we got bloody good coverage on Sunday, the simple fact is that this is probably the single best stuff we’ve shot.

Of course, the material might not be to everyone’s taste, but at least this project will be aired on Australian TV rather than some of our random earlier stuff.

I shall finish this collection of connected paragraphs with a quote.

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can’t get fooled again.”

– George W. Bush

(What? I didn’t say it was going to be related. I just find anyone who can have the IQ of a boiled walnut and still get elected for two four-year terms fucking hilarious)

So, it’s time to critically assault the short film we did last month.

Firstly, if you haven’t seen it already, you should probably watch it so you have some clue what I’m ranting about. Don’t worry if you don’t like it - that’s not the point of this exercise.

The point of the exercise was to play with the new sound equipment we had. So, I penned the script quite quickly, knowing what actors I’d have available and also setting scenes all over the place - in every sound environment I could think of. Exterior scenes near a road, interior, gardens, bathrooms (evil bloody reverberation, in other words).

Now, under normal circumstances, you’d probably use your lavaliers as sound coverage and try to get your most usable sound with a a good boom mic. However, as the point of this exercise was to really put the mics through the ringer, I decided that we wouldn’t use the boom at all - just to see where the usefulness of the radio mics really fell down. So - let’s talk about some of the scenes.

The short opens with Jen and myself wandering through a local park. To my surprise, wide, open areas (and wide open shots) were the place where the radio mics really shined. When you got the actors moving, the biggest problem becomes accidently bumping the antennae - which is complete balls, because that means you get squeaks and hisses. On the up-side, those sorts of noises are fairly easy to pick up on the cans and simply get the actors to give it another crack. This does, however, result in this:

Soundie: “Uh, guys… I think you bumped the… yeah. That one. Can you stop deafening me now?”

The biggest problem in this scene is that in some of the later segments, a really disgustingly noisy collection of trucks decided to explain to us just why they had deep personal issues with our little production.

The net result is that some angles have more background sound than the others. Go listen - it’s hard to miss. I guess this is why exterior scenes in Hollywood films tend to all be ADR’d.

The shots of the two guys inside are pretty darn clear. One lav on each actor, good fabric, no rustling and no background noise. Net result? Pretty good sound. The only thing that’d make it better would be a more expensive mic, professional sound post-production at Skywalker Ranch, or a really nice 20-year old bottle of single-malt scotch.

Love this shot. Slightly desaturated, two pretty girls…

Of course, I only bring that up to avoid the fact that the girls are wearing grotesquely frustrating clothing to mount lavaliers on. Hannah, on the right, was wearing a synthetic fabric that kept scratching against the mic. On top of that, she has artificial braids in her hair that mean you can’t hide a mic in there either without the same problem.

The net result was that, normally, a boom would be your ideal choice. But like I said - we were doing this with just radio mics. So, one is mounted on Jen (and even that kept going slightly off-mic due to where we had to mount it on her) and the other is slightly off-camera, clipped to a mount and kept as close to Hannah as possible.

The result is generally off-mic ickiness. But it still sounds vaguely okay - the result of being off-mic in a bathroom is that you get more reverb than you might normally. And reverb in a bathroom tends to sound fairly natural. Cause, y’know… there IS echo and reverb in a bathroom.

Now we’ve got the worst of them. No really, this is terrible. The camera, obviously, is out the window (let’s just forget that we were running out of light and criticise the sound instead) and the sound kit is all inside. But when two actresses wearing synthetic attire (and not much of it at that) are trying to LEAN OUT A WINDOW, you get scrape-scrape-scraping against the mics themselves.

The net result? It sounds like somebody’s scraping a cheese-grater over the sound equipment.

Total. Shite. Oh well.

The end of the short, at least, before the post-credit sequence, has a final discourse between Jen and I, back on the pedestrian bridge.

I bring this up for two reasons.

Ending on a wide shot like this would have been truly painful when stuck using boom sound. I mean, how the hell would you get a boom in close enough to hear anything other than native wildlife with a shot this wide? In the past, when getting these kinds of shots, I’ve got the sound separately and just hoped to high monkeys that it vaguely matches up. But now, with radio mics, we were able to get good, matching sound that really worked fairly well.

However, the second note is this: the bridge is partially made of metal.

At the best of times, these radio mics seem to have a range of about 25-40 metres before you get the occasional bit of static intereference. However, when you have both human bodies (being, as they are, made almost entirely of water - a conductive material) and metal objects between the transmitter and receiver, it was hard to avoid some interference.

Fortunately, most of it came when Jen walked off to one side - so that could be remove. But if you listen hard enough, you still get a brief hiss over her last line.

The walk-and-talk bit at the end was also surprisingly good - only a bit of cars in the background cause anything resembling problems. And Laurel, seen above, didn’t bump the mic once. Not a bad effort for someone not used to working with mics.

So to sum up - Bastard Ending was a pretty interesting shoot, and a great way to test the kit out. Lots of fun was had by all, we got pissed after we were done shooting, and in the end we turned out what I think is a pretty not-half-terrible short, all shot in a day.

In future, I’ll certainly pay more attention to the fabrics different people are wearing, and when shooting in a bathroom… I think I’ll just use a darned boom.

I just had the experience of editing the multi-camera shoot we did the other week. We’ve shot with a B camera before, sure, but not quite the same - the B camera has usually been wild (which means getting random b-roll kinda crap) and we never bothered sync’ing the sound.

Anyway, multi-camera editing is very different to ‘traditional’ editing. I kept thinking of watching shows like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which show off ‘live directing’ of SNL-like shows and so on. Mostly, you sit there like it’s a video game, hitting hotkeys to switch cameras whenever it feels ‘natural’ to cut to the other person - y’know… if you feel you’ve lingered too long on the interviewee, or the interviewer is saying a reasonable amount of interesting things. (And it really is like a video game - but then, lots of filmmaking reminds me eerily of The Movies, anyhow)

Traditionally, I avoid shooting in public. I know part of ‘indie’ or ‘guerrilla’ films is shooting around cops who want to beat you up for not having official permission to shoot, or around security guards who’ll harass you for not having insurance and growl in frustration that the building owner let you shoot “off the record”…

But fuck it, that’s annoying, so I avoid it. It’s always on private property, on a constructed ‘cheated’ set, or something to that effect.

That said - having now edited the interview AND had the sound mastered by a professional, I was surprised at how good it sounded and looked in the end - good enough that with ever-so-slightly fewer screaming babies and drunken twenty-somethings in the background, I might actually consider shooting like this again for a fictional piece.

(Nah, just kidding - no more Filming-In-A-Restaurant for me!)

Last Sunday was our first day shooting with the new kit. After ascertaining who was going to be free that day, I sat down and penned a short based entirely on whoever-the-hell-could-make-it. So, probably not exactly an award-winning screenplay (or even an internally consistent one) but then for a test short, it worked fine. It was written to contain exterior shots, interior shots, near traffic, in the quiet, in an echoey bathroom, more pleasant less reverb-prone interiors and also right next to someone using a fucking leaf-blower (not actually in the screenplay, but they were nice enough to oblige is anyway with on-and-off five minutes demonstrations).

Our first tests were of the range & quality of the radio mics. Line of sight seems to be important - or close-enough-to-line-of-sight, anyway. Certain things between the transmitter and the receiver (such as chunks of metal or warm chunks of meat such as, say, an Actor) cause static hisses. Not all the time, mind you, but if you’re 30 metres back getting the widest shot since the scene in Jersey Girl where the wife dies (oh yeah… spoiler alert), and your Warm Props (read: actors) are pacing back and forth, with the wireless transmitter on the far side of their torsos AND they’re behind a metal safety fence… well, things get bad.

Now, two of you very kindly pointed out that I was supposed to write about this, oh… I dunno, five days ago now. It’s actually not a matter of laziness - I put off penning the rest of this until I’d finished a rough edit, and had therefore seen and used all the footage. I figured this’d give me a more definitive answer of the quality difference between shooting with lavaliers versus shooting with shotgun mics and former-WWF wrestlers holding boom poles.

And after listening to what we filmed, I’ll say three things.

1. There’s an art to this. Just as much as boom placement, except that boom placement can be fucked up on the fly slightly easier. With lavalier placement, you get a chance to get it right in testing, and then just pray to Dogg that neither actor nor soundie bumps microphones, aerials or 3.5mm jacks.
2. In general, even with cheaper mics and transmitters like ours, the sound quality is much richer than anything outside of using studio mics and looping all the dialogue in post-production, and the ability to… oh, I dunno… PICK SHOTS based on creative merits rather than going, “We’ll get terrible sound if we’re too wide here so let’s just go in tight, shall we?” is a very liberating experience, much like the first time one discovers the 7-day return policy at EB Games and uses it to stave off boredom for a solid 12 months. My third and final comment…
3. OhmyfraggingDoggThatSoundIsNice. (WhenItWorksRight)

So, in summary, with just a rough edit and no sound sweetening to speak of, we’ve already gotten a short that sounds much more professional - something I’m pretty chuffed about.

Oh yes, and with regards to battery life - I’m definitely buying more batteries. After five hours of shooting, our receiver began to die - good thing we had two spares floating around. We probably need double as many, though - just to be sure.

Anyway, as I have had no reason to post any photographs in this blog post so far, and feel rather bad about this, here - have a picture of a scary clown, courtesy of some random site that google indexed.

In the bad old days of my first few short films, sound was captured by waking up whichever friend was least hung over from the night before and getting him to lock his arms in an upright position while vaguely waving a shotgun microphone toward the actors. From the boom mic straight down to the camera, it’s pretty straight-forward. At least until a setting at the mixer or on the camera is wrong, or any number of other things go pear-shaped, and soon you’re staring at great imagery with nothing but hisses and pops where the dialogue should be.

At about that point you run off to a party and get smashed by mixing spirits, then the next morning you find yourself trying to figure out why your brain grew about six sizes too large for your cranium overnight.

Anyway, the point is that after this, we have stuck to the concept of recording sound externally. The two big advantages to this are that a reasonable external recorder (or, in our case on both Insecurity and Dead Man Drinking, our laptop) will record sound losslessly and as many channels as you want.

However, our mixer equipment had the big problem of running off mains power - the net result was a complex collection of extension leads coming from wherever we could manage to the sound recordist’s den. Not so good for exterior scenes. Trust me - morning dew settling on a power-board and drizzling down into the sockets themselves may sound lovely with all that hissing and crackling, but it scares the living fructose out of you when those cables happen to be hooked up to a $4500 MacBook Pro and you’ve still got a good hour left before you could conceivably get the scene in the can.

So, thus enters our next two purchases.

The first toy is an Azden 320 lavalier system (not an expensive one, but one of the few out there that can run two channels off a single base-station and still come in priced less than a reasonable second-hand car with six months left on its registration.

The next is an Edirol R-44 4-channel SD-card audio recorder.

Both of these kits run off NiMH AA-sized batteries (4 for the recorder, and two for every other unit) which means that for once our audio kit will be fully portable.

So anyway, rather than review these things like a tech site, I’ll talk a bit about my first night’s experience playing with my two new toys.

Firstly, the recorder. This thing is fucking mind-blowing. No, really. If there’s a better type of recorder out there, it must cure cancer or something because I seriously can’t think of what more you could want out of a recorder. Firstly, it records to SD or SDHC cards, which means you can happily keep dozens of 2-4gb sticks in your cargo-pants pockets and have enough room to record weeks and weeks of film audio, completely uncompressed. Then there’s the complete interface for file management, filtering (you can do 3-channel and graphic equalising, plus a half-dozen filters that you’d be used to seeing in Protools or Soundtrack Pro or what-have-you). Four XLR or unbalanced inputs. RCA out. Digital in. Digital out. Separate physical sound levels and…

Hey! Wait. I said this wasn’t going to be a tech review.

So onto the practical stuff. I did tests with my existing boom and with the lavaliers and was fairly impressed with the way the whole system came together. There were some issues when I kept wandering about wearing a lavalier in a different room to the base station, but the actual microphones with the lavaliers are nicely sensitive. I might yet replace them with something better, but I’ll wait until I’ve shot a short with ‘em this weekend.

There’s quite a learning curve with this recorder - I read the manual from cover to cover tonight, but I think it’ll really take a weekend of dicking around before I’ll have a good idea of just what settings to use for what.

So, my goal in the next few days is to make this kit truly portable. The base station and the recorder need some kind of mount so I can hang them from my belt. Combined with the weird three-in-one steadycam rig I got from the local photography store and my home-made fig-rig, I think we’re about ready to take our filmmaking out into the wilds of suburban Sydney. 

I’ve figured out what the recorder is missing, though.

Solitaire. And maybe an espresso machine.