For Life’s Waltz, we use two microphones to record sound:

The first microphone we use is our Sennheiser MKH 416. The MKH 416 is a short shotgun condenser mic. This means it’s designed to be super directional, so when you point it at something, it (mostly) records sound from a narrow window directly in front, while at the same time it rejects “off-axis” sound. Because it’s used for picking up sound from the specific source that it is pointed at, it’s ideal for dialogue recording. Not-so-coincidentally, the Senn 416 is known in the Hollywood industry as the traditional workhorse found on sets everywhere.

We hook this bad boy up to a boom pole or use a pistol grip for hand-held audio. It sits inside a muffy blimp (in the lingo, a “Zeppelin” with a “windjammer”) to create dead air space around it and to block disturbances such as wind, etc.

Secondly, we have an AKG CK93, which is powered by an SE 300B power supply. The microphone is actually a tiny capsule (as you can see–above the blue line is the whole microphone!) that can be changed out for a whole series of capsules that have different ideal uses and pickup patterns.

This microphone is attached to the camera itself (cameras generally come with low-quality mics). The CK93 is a hypercardioid mic which means that it picks up sound in a broader, heart-shaped patten. Think of its “pickup pattern” (the field in which it best records sound) as an upside down heart.

We first slip it through a rubber shock mount and then attach the shock mount to the camera using a cold shoe mount. A cold shoe is one that doesn’t supply power. You may have seen flash bulbs for still cameras that mount to the top of the camera and draw upon electricity from the camera to produce the light flash–that would be a “hot shoe”. Our on-camera mic also has a mini-blimpy, or a baby ball gag (I don’t know where they got that name from!), over it to create dead air space around it.

equipment

Well, tomorrow is our first day of shooting! Since my arrival, Jared and I have been familiarizing ourselves with the newly arrived equipment, setting up our work flow, and goal-setting. This process has involved anything from reading manuals at seemingly laborious page-by-page speeds, assembling each and every part, and actually getting both sound and picture up and running and doing “tests.”

As tedious as some of this preparation may sound, the plus side is that we certainly have found many awesome features to our Panasonic HMC150 ! For example, the camera offers three ways in assisting focus:

1. The frame “expands” or zooms in (punches in, in the industry lingo) on the center of the original frame. You can then focus on that original center, and it quickly punches back out.
2. You can also choose to place a graph in the top right of the flip-out LCD screen. The graph shows a fuzzy, exponential-like curve that becomes more circular as the object comes more into focus.
3. Lastly, there is a focus-assist feature that accentuates the edges/contour lines of anything in the frame that is in focus. So, when your object is finally in focus, those lines jump out a lot to indicate the achieved focus.

Isn’t that awesome?

I might as well add/admit, that if our Manfrotto Tripod was actually a real man, I would already be head over heels, weak in the knees, falling for “him”. I’m that in love with it!

Our work flow in this context is the way that we will operate as a team from the beginning of shooting through our final cut of the film. To start, we will be filming anywhere from 3-6 hours a day. This is dually convenient since we will then have the remainder of the day to both transfer our footage to the hard drives for editing; and also, these shorter days will give the individuals with whom we are working with a chance to get comfortable with us and our equipment (the last thing we would want to do is impose on anybody’s home!).

As we continue shooting, we expect to spend more time with our participants (the “stars” of the film!) through conversations, activities, and their respective lifestyles. Much later in production, as we accumulate hours and hours of footage, Jared and I will take breaks to generate some “rough cuts,” or some loosely compiled scenes around 20-30 minutes to see what direction our characters are taking us in. These rough cuts will in effect re-direct our shooting, and so forth. As we discovered while making the previous, shorter version of Life’s Waltz in our final semester at USC, a documentary’s story is created in the editing room. Unlike fiction film, where you start with the story/script and create the film based on that, documentary (at least for us) is the opposite: shoot a bunch of footage, then find the story/script in the editing room. This then has bearing on how we will proceed with shooting, so it’s a reciprocal process of “writing” the story in the editing room with footage already obtained and then refining our focus of what we shoot based on the emerging story.

Lastly, Jared and I have some personal, creative, administrative, and technical goals. These goals include everything from maintaining our Life’s Waltz blog to learning how to transcode footage and exercising some self-discipline in getting enough sleep (my body likes 7hrs minimum as we essentially dedicate our lives to this project.

Technical Goal #1 for Ashley:

1. Improve sound mixing skills and boom operation while shooting.

That’s a mouthful, but basically, I’m a less experienced with sound and other technical components of production than Jared. I’m sure this frustrates him at times, so I’m making it another goal of mine to observe and absorb as many of his superhero-gonna-figure-out-just-about-anything googolplex of skills to help improve our production efficiency too.

equipment, status update, workflow

Initial unpacking… wow, we were like kids in a candy store!

All of these boxes came today.. and this isn’t everything.

The camera.. the fabled Panasonic HMC150.. we’ve spotted it…

Untouched.

It’s so unexpectedly lightweight – I can feel the power!

Bogen/Manfrotto tripod (sticks) with 503HDV fluid head

Yay, K-Tek 110CCR boompole! (This is what the Sennheiser will be mounted onto so it’ll look like one of those microphones you notoriously know the image of from Hollywood sets, with that grey blimp on top and the sound guy with the headphones on.)

LaCie hard drives to store our footage; Trascend 16GB SDHC 6 Class flash memory to record onto from camera (goodbye tapes, hello solid-state!)

Sennheiser 416 Short Shotgun Mic; AKG CK93 Hypercardiod Mic plus SE300B power; some XLRs cables for good measure!

Wow… this is incredible. This whole weekend will be dedicated to getting used to the equipment and workflow.

More later! (And more equipment tomorrow!)

equipment