On night, with a few drinks, I may have suggested to a friend, who goes to Met Film School, that I would be more than happy to help him, and his fellow students, with the sound for their first proper short films. Within a week I'd had about six phone calls from people trying to book me for their 2 day shoots. I could only accept five of them due to them overlapping with real paid work.
A rundown of the gear that I used on the shoots is after the break.
So the first day of the first film, and I'm confronted with the gear that has been provided by the film school. The sound gear that I'm going to be using on all of the student shoots over the coming two and a bit weeks.It's pretty basic:
- 1x Rode NTG-3
- 1x Rode boom arm
- 1x Sound Devices 302 field mixer running a stereo out to...
- 1x JVC GY-HM700
The Rode microphone was top notch, excellent dynamic range and detailing across the range. As you'd would arguably expect for a £400 investment. Really very good for the money when you can compare it to much more expensive devices.
The Sound Devices 302, is a really nice compact package. The pre-amps are pretty good considering it's battery operated. But the headphone output wasn't really up to scratch. It seemed prone to distorting itself when the inputs and stereo output wasn't. This made keeping up with scenes with a wide range (talking and shouting) very difficult indeed, especially as I was operating the mixer and the boom simultaneously. The final results that went to the edit came out well, but I'm not convinced that the device is really worth the £1,400 price tag.
For the feature, "The Hike", It was a similar situation. This time however the location audio was unlikely to be used in the final edit. However the gear was a bit more expensive.
The mic was a familiar AKG mic which I have used before, I forget which exact model. An excellent mic with a similar specification to the Rode above.
For this film the method for audio recording was slightly different. I was using another battery powered device, but this time it was the Sonosax SX-R4, which is a mixer and 8 track audio recorder all in one. This is a much more impressive unit than the Sound Devices mixer. About the same size, it also combines a digital display and hard drive recording, with a time-code generator. The mic pre's in here are also exemplary. They're so very quiet compared the the Sound Devices 302's. But again you'd have to expect that for something that costs in the region of £4,500 and eats 6 batteries every 5 hours.
For more about these films check out the link(s):
The Hike - The site will update once the film has been finished and is ready for distribution.
I can't post much on the Met Film student films. But will be covering one or two of them in future posts.
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