This week I worked on a film shoot with some Swinburne students for a project called “Fugue State”. It was shot on locations around Kilsyth and Croydon in the outer Eastern suburbs, set in the late 90s, and follows the dramatic plight of a young man who learns of his brother’s violent death. I have been asked to take on the post-production and sound design as well, so this will be a great folio piece for me. I will be directly responsible for the audio in the final product, and am very keen to see how my location recordings come up in post. The shoot days all went very well, (although once again the weather was freezing) and the audio rig held up nicely. The guys from Swinburne supplied a 788t recorder with external battery packs, 2x Lectrosonics radio packs with Sanken mics, a nice lightweight boom pole and an NTG3 with blimp. I brought along 2x Sennheiser radio mics from SAE to use as a spare character mic and camera feed. The only headache was that the lectro receivers didn’t hook up to the DC power bricks, and I was going through 4x 9v batteries in about 3 hours of use. I became very good at switching them off for any downtime whatsoever, even between takes. Next time I will check that the DC supply is in place for those mics. The Sennheiser ones seem to last for a day and a half on two AAs. I ended up using the third character mic in two scenes, so it was great to have a spare, and having a wireless camera feed should prove useful in post and for the data wrangler. A big challenge came up when a major outdoor scene had to be rescheduled for weather, and moved a day earlier. This meant I would not have the SAE mics, and miss out on a tute class. This scene involved an armorer and shooting a rifle as well as firing a charge in an old TV set. It was important that I capture those sounds, and a unique experience for me so far. I found an old plug-in-powered interview mic and attached it to the RED Epic camera for scratch audio, which seems to have worked well enough. I brought along my H6 recorder with a 57 and Beta52 mic to grab the impacts, and had two NTG3s in blimps in a spaced pair going in to the 788t, and two lapels for the actors. Listening back it would have been good to place a stereo pair much further away to catch the echos from the surrounding hills. These are in the zoom’s XY mics, and sound great, but would have been better further away and possibly facing away from the action.

At school I’m putting together the ideas for my major project which will be a soundscape narrative. So far I know that it will follow a character’s struggle to get to work in peak hour, with different interruptions and interactions along the way. I’ve been experimenting with a quadrophonic mic setup and thinking about the unique possibilities for character mics considering there is no camera to worry about. I put together my Project Initiation report with some reference material and inspirational scenes, such as the street drummer scene in “Birdman”. I’m feeling good about this project, and need to learn a lot more about screenwriting to keep developing the idea.

Regarding dealing with a difficult client that rejects good ideas, I think that is actually a positive. If the roles have been established as to who is the client, who is the producer and who is the engineer, then these creative decisions have their place. If the client knows what they want, or at least that they don’t like something, then you are a step closer to the right thing. I think it would be more difficult if the client wasn’t sure, allowed things to progress, and then became unhappy with your work afterwards. I think this is why it’s important to be able to give constructive criticism, and receive it professionally.

Thanks for reading!