Last week myself and Sid undertook the location sound recording for the first film i’m working on, Petal Child. This was a 5 day shoot and we had to overcome a range of challenges that were threw at us.

The first main challenge we were faced with was regarding the use of radio microphones in the TV studio. I wasn’t aware that we weren’t allowed to use them due to clashing frequencies in the building. This was an issue because we were pretty much relying on using radio microphones throughout the shoot as the main pick up source of sound.

The studio has their own radio microphones we could use, however as far as i was aware, the system wont let you record onto multitrack, limiting us to two microphones (one L and one R). (I was later informed of a way to group tracks into four separate tracks, however time didn’t allow us to experiment and figure out how this worked.)

The polar pattern of the radio microphones are omnidirectional, therefore what I did was hide the two of them in two different areas of the set. The problem with this is that they are made for attaching to a subject with boosted high frequencies, therefore can sound quite tinny. Therefore I would only be using these mics in post production if the sound i got from the other microphones isn’t as good.

As a result the main source of recording was the boom microphone. This was very difficult to get close to subjects because of boom shadows, multiple camera angles, and that fact that there are 5-6 subject all with dialogue in one shot. Therefore rehersals were key in find out where the place the boom for that shot.

In one shot, (bedsit scene) the 5 actresses were spread out through the set. Therefore was very difficult to place a boom in the set. To overcome this problem I placed another two static booms far left and far right (where the actresses were sitting in the shot) and had the main boom pointing in the middle (where the main speaker was in the shot) This seemed to work rather well.

Unfortunately the TV produces a lot of unwanted noise that we cant get rid of from the lights. And throughout the shoot there is bits of unwanted noise that we couldn’t control. Therefore to resolve this issue as best as possible, some of my research will look into Izotope RX, which is industry standard software for cleaning up dialogue in post production.