Today was the first day of filming for our student piece… Wow. I never thought i’d learn so much in one day, it really has been a crash course in location sound recording! We met at 10 am at 62 Richmond Road and began setting up. We had picked up the equipment the day before so we were ready to go straight away, apart from the fact Luke had had a power cut in the night so his alarm didn’t go off! This wasn’t an issue as Ben and I are comfortable working together, until we realised Luke had the headphones! As soon as I realised I literally ran back home to get my own and fortunately made it back with plenty of time to spare.
The actors arrived and after a while setting up we were ready to record. We had planned on Luke being the operator for the first session as he had had marginally more practice with it but as he wasn’t here (yet) I stepped up and decided to take control as I was keen to learn as much as possible about on location sound recording. I plugged direct into the camera and then checked the levels and I was all set to get started. In terms of audio, there were no real issues apart from fatigue! The actor who played John, was our director, Tom Faulkner’s Dad. He was not used to acting so it took an extremely long time to get a useable take out of him. However after a while he got used to it and managed to produce more consistent takes, which the directors were pleased with.
There were few issues in terms of sound that we noticed on the day but again we were slightly worried about the reflective surfaces providing too much reverb. We will have to listen to the takes carefully when we get them.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the day and it was great to get started and meet the actors personally and I’m excited for the next shoot!
