A full lesson on wiring lavs on talent
ing interiors and with only two actors. In the warm living room, we had a 4 6/8’s page, heavily dialogued scene between two people across from each other; one in a chair, the other on the couch with about eight feet between them and possibly lots of overlapping dialogue. We haven’t had a rehearsal and there won’t be one. Remember, this is the new trend: point and shoot. The two RED cameras will be doing opposing closeups now rather than the wide two-shot originally proposed. We haven’t seen any kind of blocking or rehearsal, and we start with individual close-ups. She has an extra-tight skimpy outfit on and a wireless isn’t a good option. Did I mention this is a twoman sound team? The 1st AD is calling last touches. My boom op and I look at each other: we are in Hell. Quickly, we find someone to do second boom, put up two Sennheiser MKH 50s and we had our scene with no worries whatsoever. Heaven to Hell to Heaven in about 90 seconds. Another Heaven to Hell situation was a night exterior we did with a rain gag. Another sub35-degree night with actors in the rain—hellish conditions for them and Robert “Red” Corbett, my boom op, who has to boom James in trunk of car the scene. Heaven for me as I stay in the warm house with a 150-ft feed to Robert and no actual dialogue to stress over. It’s tough mentally when certain conditions like rain or FX fans, for example, prevent me from doing the best job I can. It’s a time when one has to accept that a scratch track will have to do. Bad locations are another killer—you do what you can but eventually say to yourself that it’s beyond your control and they picked the location, not you. It reminds me of a different feature where we had a scene between two people in a quaint hotel courtyard. The location LOOKED great but it was right in the middle of the busiest area of downtown Los Angeles and on each side of two really busy streets there were huge driveway openings which let all the Friday midafternoon traffic noise in to do its worse. (It was a union show, but they didn’t want to pay me for location scouting.) Even lavs at their throats didn’t do much to expand the noise floor unless they yelled out their dialogue at the top of their lungs: 30
WINTER 2011
CAS QUARTERLY
MAN: WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME UP FOR A DRINK?!!! WOMAN (demure): WELL, SORTA; NOT SURE; SHOULD I?!! MAN: YES. I WILL BE A COMPLETE GENTLEMAN!!! WOMAN: HMMM, YOU SURE?!! MAN: YES!!! I’M VERY GENTLE!! Anyway, it drove me to invent the “Etooth” mic, an extremely small mic and transmitter that fits just behind the upper front teeth. Look for it at this year’s NAB. The nose hair mic will be available next year for $17,295 in 13 different shades. The last night of production was quite wrenching as we shot two highly emotional scenes between the two sisters, and quite exhilarating as it was the end of the job for most of the people on set. I’m sure most sound mixers have been in this situation at least once: the last take of the day, or in this case, the last take of the entire shoot, and the second the director yells, “Cut,” the entire cast and crew cheer. That is until the sound mixer says, “Sound needs another one.” What a downer. But it’s a very nice crew and after I yell out for another take, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Lindsay Lohan again?? No, it’s the director saying, “OK, let’s do another one.” That take was great for the sound boys and so the cheers rang out again. Why that take wasn’t good enough and why I needed another one was that the mic position was not right for one of the actor’s last lines, although it was in a great position to get the exhale of the other actor in the scene. Now, Robert had been doing a pretty good job of booming but was just a bit late in positioning for the very first word of that last line so I asked for another take. I was fortunate early in my career to have worked with a guy named Adam Blantz and he taught me that every single syllable counts and almost every single syllable has the possibility of needing a new mic placement. Blantz was always moving that