Shooting and recording stage

For this film we planned to shoot four days of interior and one day of exterior in Portsmouth. Due to scheduling I was not involved in the last day of exterior, so my friend was responsible for the sound recording of the exterior. However, the sound recorded on location for the exterior part ended up being a reference track, as their exterior shots were one-shot motion shots and there were too many factors need to control. So there was no choice but to synthesize the sound for this section in post.

The equipment was a Zoom F4 recorder with a Sennheiser K6 ME66 and a Sennheiser EW100 G3 microphone. There were two guys on the recording team. I was responsible for the recorder, controlling the volume of the input. The other guy was responsible for the movement of the microphone. 

The film crew arrived on set a day early and had a meeting. The director and I determine the sound details for each part through shot list, such as which sounds could be recorded during the shoot and which sounds needed to be re-recorded after the shoot was complete. As I need to produce the sound post of the film, so I also confirmed with the director what kind style of sound that he wanted for each sequence.

The shoot didn’t start well, because the actor couldn’t be there on the first day. So we had to change our shooting schedule and the four-day interior shoot was reduced to three days. Inevitably, we had to stay up all night shooting. So I recorded all the ambient sounds and sound effects on the first day. The sound audio numbers were written on the first line of the shot logging form for the first time, the clapper teased.

At this time, the only difficult thing for me was adjusting the knobs, as there were a lot of storylines that need the actor sudden outbursts. I needed to turn low the input in time to prevent the blow up(damage) of recorded sound. Fortunately, we had rehearse each scene before shooting it. After the rehearsal, the guy in charge of the microphones would know exactly how the microphones would move, and I would know at what point I needed to turn low the input and at what point I needed to go back to the previous value.

I used two microphones during the shoot, the Sennheiser K6 ME66 to record the sound of actors’ movements and the Sennheiser EW100 G3 to record the actors’ lines. And I used the Sennheiser K6 ME66 for record ambient sounds and re-record sound effects.