Today I visited one of the locations we will be shooting on next week. This was a garage, and i wanted to visit the location to see how reverberant the room was and if it was going to be an issue. Luckily the room wasn’t too bad and doesn’t seem like wit will cause any sonic issues.

We also booked out some of the equipment we will be using to re-familiarised  ourselves with it. This included the 663 mixer, rifle microphone, and radio microphones. One of the issues with radio microphones is the clothing noises it generates, therefore we were experimenting to determine the best way to place these microphones on a subject to eliminate clothing noises.

Myself and Sid both had a meeting with the director of Petal Child. With the shooting process taking place next week it was vital for us to sit down and go through the film, get details about locations and shots, to plan how we are going to capture the sound and determine the equipment will will be needing.

After discussion it may be very difficult to get the boom microphone in on certain shots, due to lighting reflects and multiple cameras moving. Therefore to resolve this, we will be radio miking all of the actors as well as placing some hidden mics on set.

Here is some of the diagrams of the sets we overlooked…

I also wanted to discuss specific details so we have a better sense of timing and can plan the process better.

• The deadline for this film is the 5th May, however the Director, Jane has said ideally this would be in for the week before that.
• A rough edit will be done by the 15th March, the edit without special effects will be done by the 20th March, and the edit with the special fx/animations should be completed by the end of the easter break (beginning of April.)
• We have arranged to visit some of the locations. One of the spaces is a garage, therefore we want to make sure the the space isn’t to reverby, if so we will need to plan a way to tackle the dilemma
• The mixing desk in the film studio only records into a stereo feed into the camera. This means we will need to record externally using a recorder. Therefore this will need to be clapper boarded to sync the dialogue up with the picture.

Today I attended a couple more meetings around the film. The first was a tutorial with the Petal Child’s project tutorial. I also met with a second year AP students and he agreed to assist me with the second film regarding location and post-production.

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“This was an impressive artefact, completed to a standard that would have not been possible had you not approached the project with diligence, maturity and professionalism. The nature of the film meant that you had some difficult creative and technical challenges to overcome, largely due to the very minimalist nature of some of the scenes (hardly any dialogue going on at the beginning of the piece), as well as challenging outdoor locations for filming (the cornfield for example).

On the whole, the location capture was good, although I think you would have probably thanked yourself during mix-down if you had captured some more wild track material. This would have given you substantially more ammo when trying to create compelling atmospheres – particularly at the beginning where the tension was utterly dependent on the audio. There were some technical problems that were a little distracting, which could have been resolved with some more diligence in the edit. There were sync problems @ 4:25 and 4:31 where Schafer’s cutlery noises didn’t lock with the picture, and some transitions in ambience were clunky (1:26 for example). As mentioned though, the level of detail required here was high given the fact that there was hardly anything going on, and as a result the audio ambiences were very exposed to the audience. However, that was the nature of the film, so a little more attention to detail would have helped here.

On balance, though, your music mix levels were very good and certain bits of foley were very well executed (10:32). Whilst watching, there were times where it was impossible to tell what was foley and what wasn’t. Job done!

On occasion, I found that the tonality of some of the speech was harsh and could’ve done with some more refinement in terms of compression and EQ; 6:24 and 8:07 were examples that stuck out for me. There was a nasty HF glitch noise @12:28 which should have been filtered using a low pass filter.

Personally, I found the overall mix a little too dynamic for my tastes. I would have compressed the mix and its elements a little harder. However, this was not the opinion of the director of the film (as mentioned in your blog), and I’m impressed that you were aware of and took on board these mix instructions from them.

Please bear in mind that these details do not detract from the hard work that was put into this project by you. In short, I think that what you’ve achieved here is an impressive accomplishment, especially in light of the fact that you got involved with this project quite late in the day. Well done Jack.”

Attach Link from previous project.

I will be using the feedback from my previous project to determine the type of research I will conduct. Just using the feedback the kind of things I will need to look into include:

• Capturing more wild-track material during the location sound recording process
• Pay more attention to details such as sync problems
• Research more into EQ and compression used in films and how to use it effectively 

One of the main issues in my last project was time and labour issues, and these issues really did effect the quality of work. Therefore I will need to ensure I recruit some help, especially on the location sound side of things, and ensure that I am managing time effectively.