After 3 days of run 'n gun shooting... I realized something.

MattinSTL

MattinSTL

Sound Modulator
Coiled mic cables just went up in priority for me 1000%

For the past 3 days I've been covering a robotics competition in Saint Louis for the Science Center. There were teams from all over the midwest, but we mainly wanted to focus on Saint Louis teams. Each team had between 6-10 people on it and the "spokesman" of the group could be anybody. Every aspect of this event had several teams doing the same things at once... each team's robot would have crisis moments at the same time also (usually from mutual damage in the competition... but sometimes simple mechanical failure).

So we were hustling from one area to the next... fighting our way into everybody's face... making friends with some officials and downright pissing off others... (same goes for the fans and parents).

To sum it up... I am exhausted... but I learned a lot working under these hectic conditions... I have a totally different mindset about COVERAGE and HOW TO SHOOT.

Anyway... as it pertains to sound... man you can NEVER get the mic close enough! I mean you gotta' force the mic into somebody's face as if you want to kill them with it... and don't waste time trying to be polite about it or you'll miss the quote of the moment. Our cameraman must have told me to raise the boom a dozen times today... and at the end of the day they thanked me for doing a good job. I know we talk about this stuff ALL the time... but man get that mic in CLOSE! I had the softie close enough that you'd think I was going to wipe some guy's forehead with it!

Another good lesson... if you EVER find yourself in a REALLY noisy area... like an arena or someplace... and you don't have time to lav somebody up and you also don't want to see the mic on cam (like an RE50)... basically... if you get in a situation where you plan to use a shotgun and there's sonic chaos all around you... then boom from BELOW not above! Have 1 or 2 people stand facing the guy/girl you're booming so that the tail of the shotgun is only a foot or so away from them... this was the lifesaver of the day! The bodies soaked up what would have come to the tail of the mic... and pointing the shotgun just over the speaker's chest had all their voice funnelled into the mic's tight pattern. Booming from overhead allowed all the other sounds bouncing around to come in with the voice... and the tail (while not very sensitive) was still picking up the super-loud ambience.

Sorry for not being concise about this... but the 3 lessons of the day are... COILED cable from mixer bag to boom pole! Coiled cable from wireless RX in my pocket to the DVX! Boom noisy interiors (with REALLY high ceilings) from BELOW.
 
MattinSTL said:
Another good lesson... if you EVER find yourself in a REALLY noisy area... like an arena or someplace... and you don't have time to lav somebody up and you also don't want to see the mic on cam (like an RE50)... basically... if you get in a situation where you plan to use a shotgun and there's sonic chaos all around you... then boom from BELOW not above! Have 1 or 2 people stand facing the guy/girl you're booming so that the tail of the shotgun is only a foot or so away from them... this was the lifesaver of the day! The bodies soaked up what would have come to the tail of the mic... and pointing the shotgun just over the speaker's chest had all their voice funnelled into the mic's tight pattern. Booming from overhead allowed all the other sounds bouncing around to come in with the voice... and the tail (while not very sensitive) was still picking up the super-loud ambience. Boom noisy interiors (with REALLY high ceilings) from BELOW.
Click to expand...

Great tip, thanks, Matt.
 
Hey Matt,
Were you covering the FIRST robotics regional competition? I covered the Denver one last year. Talk about high energy! Lots of fun though. I know what you mean about all the action going on at once and high noise levels. This year's game looks pretty cool as well.

-Dan
 
Yeah... that's where I've been.

Listen to THIS CLIP HERE and you can hear the background hum and noise on the girl who speaks first... I was still boomed really tight so it's not bad... but listen to the dramatic change on the very next speaker... that was boomed low with two bodies shielding the tail of the mic... I intentionally left the interviewer question in there so you can hear how dramatic the off-axis rejection is on the AKG ck69... she was standing right next to me... then the last guy is there just to show a moment of extremely loud ambient noise that would normally render this type of audio useless.
 
The second clip does sound amazingly better. Good tip. The last clip is easily understood. Sounds like you did a great job.
-Dan
 
Thanks guys... trust me I'm not saying that's great, but it 'aint bad... and all day the camera guy and the interviewer thought I'd lost my mind when I was booming from below. They were litterally laughing at me and I said "we'll see who's laughing after you log this stuff and realize we should have done this the ENTIRE time!"

Oh yeah... also from now on I'd only consider a digital audio recorder that jams timecode. Unless you plan to either a) free-run ALL day b) carry a notepad and jot down key moments and mark the recording c) manually search out key shots after the edit.

My next digital recorder will sync timecode for sure.

And again about the coiled cable for boom? The boom end should have a RA FXLR... and I'm going to actually screw-mount some sort of special bumper (like half of a rubber ball) onto the back of the RA connector. It's stupid to run a straight cable from the mixer bag to pole in run 'n gun... and it's even more stupid to use a straight XLR into the butt of a pole.

Another product idea... why not a PLASTIC XLR at the mic end of the pole? Today was the first day that I thought my graphite pole was worth every penny.

Finally... my rig thingy is gonna' be kicked in HIGH gear this week! I REALLY needed something like that for the last few days. A situation like this is perfect for anything like a FigRig type of thing... but honestly, the FigRig hoop would have been too big... I was constantly barging through groups of people holding my cam verticle as I did. I used a Stratos bracket (similar to a WonderCam bracket) for most of the time and it worked out okay... but I got some ideas throughout the day.

If you dig a ditch for 3 days and by the end of the third day you haven't thought of some improvements on either the shovel or your digging technique... then you and I will never understand each other. By the end of today I thought of a bunch of things that I need to make happen before I find myself in this situation again... just for my own enjoyment of it.
 
usually my short xlrs dont have any housing at all on the mic side , the pin plate only with epoxy glue on it to short the connector and make it less in weight
the gram you start the day is much lighter then you finish it .
 
thanks matt.. thats interesting.. just to clarify, the boom from below technique - you're saying get some people behind the rear lobe of the gun to soak up 180degree off axis sound, right?

sounds reasonable to me... but i want to ask a question. a lot of people say that booming from below will give you a higher bass emphasis due to proximity to the chest - you dont think maybe that guys voice-type was maybe a good portion of the reason the strategy worked?

please, im not trying to be irritating or anything, im keen to hear your opinion. did you shoot any other women speaking with this technique? im curious...

here in south africa this type of job is what i get most often, so as far as techniques for using shotguns in high noise environments go, im ALWAYS hungry for better methods to dig that trench...
 
there are no rules where do you work from , only the situation you are in tell you what is the best way to boom .
usially there are 2 problems to work from bellow - the guys hands and the frame . when its only half body or tight medium stand up shot in eng i work from bellow - usially you get less reflection from the surface, the object you shooting also block unwonted sounds which come from behind , sometimes it even block the wind .
for normal situation , shot gun that sits about 50-60 cm from the mouth will make wonderful job , if you make it closer ,the proximity effect start to blow the low fq .
dont forget that we depend on the sun or light which limiting us to work normally , so every situation has it own limitation .
for drama recording the boom from bellow is limiting the actor movement or his hands limiting yours, the head turns become quit dificult to make the sound beconsistent if you cant go in paralel .
not that on some occasions when there is no other possibility we dont do it - we do .
 
Yes... everything George just said.

There were lights from all directions and sometimes we'd get an odd shadow across the face... but there were also so many people moving around that I had to boom with my arms totally locked straight up so that people could squeeze between the subject and myself. On the 3 days my role changed every day... on the second day the main dp (if you'd call it that in this case) had the CS3e... and I first suggested booming from underneath. They thought I was stupid then also.

Tim... yes you are correct! I was intentionally using the chest-bass emphasis! I cut out loud bass with the bass-cut on the mic, but booming from overhead all the voices sounded somewhat thin because of the wide-open environment... then I put the presence back into the voices by using their chest to may advantage.

We had to function as a welcome/unwelcome distraction. The entire time we had people happy to have us there and others upset that we were in the way. So in order to boom from below I needed a relatively calm team who was already standing around as part of the shoot... I also (as George pointed out) had to keep the mic outside of the constantly moving hand gestures of the speaker... but I couldn't go ABOVE the hands because then I was in the shot... so I had to ride the line. Where our director/interviewer was losing confidence in me is because of the increased mic to mouth distance versus normal booming. The mic was almost a full foot farther from the mouth when booming from below... that is why she thought I didn't know what I was doing. I had to finally tell her to put on the headphones and listen for herself... only THEN was she bothered that I hadn't done it the ENTIRE time!

So yes booming from below DOES emphasise chest resonance... but due to the increased distance it still works out for a good balance... at least it did with this AKG mic and I'm sure it would with any other good shotgun from 4073a on up. I was playing the line of ambience introduced with longer mic to mouth distance versus ambience REDUCED due to aiming a very directional mic in such a way that the speaker's body blocks unwanted sound. It was the constantly tight group of people who provided the background blocking... a bunch of clothed bodies (even moving ones) created a much better sound absorber then the open air that the mic tail is normally in.

I recorded some girls in this way also... I'll post that later today because yes, the african american kid had an especially good presence in his voice. I'll find something where I'm switching back and forth because sometimes I had to boom overhead just to allow the flood of people to their robots.

Perhaps I should have better explained the reasons this approach doesn't feel natural at the time... aside from simply being low versus overhead... it's the increased distance needed due to hand gestures and other interferrence that is avoided from above. As I was saying booming from below meant an additional FOOT of distance from the speaker... my director was bothered by this... she kept saying that she wanted really clean audio that would "pop"... and like I said, after she heard the difference she was bummed that I didn't do it like that all the time. (the other factor is if somebody was explaining something about their machine the cam would be sweeping down to the part and back up to the face... so no low boom then either)

George said it best... you gotta' do what works best at the time. For run 'n gun that's gonna' mean shotguns indoors when you wanted a hyper... longer mic to mouth distances versus traditional booming... and God knows what else. No rules.
 
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yeah, tell me about it, no rules. thanks george and matt, good inputs.

im keen to hear a girl with this technique to A) see if she wound up a bit thinner sounding from the extra distance and B) to see if the backgrounds between the buy and the girl remained pretty constant because of your technique...

so you were using the cs3e and the akg on this shoot? did the cs3e wax the akg?
 
I guess this is good enough... the conditions and crowd were ever changing... it's hard to create any "rules" out of this... even for this day I didn't do the same thing the whole time... it all changed... even during an interview.

The moral of the story is to TRY booming low when possible and booming high seems like it could be improved. I've gone through my recorder and I can't really find an exact instance of really fair comparison.

Trust me and try it or don't... it'll take you 2 seconds to try it the next time you find yourself in a situation like this.

Girl low at distance CLICK

Also... I was freelancing so I handed over all my tapes at the end of the day... it was hard to go through the recorder and remember exactly how I did each person w/o the video... in the first clip I posted I remembered exactly... and in this one it was at the end of the day. The rest of my recorder is just sound to me... I was so focused on the tracks that I don't remember many of the setups.
 
i reckon thats still pretty darn good, but its amazing what the bass boost in that guys voice did to help him cut through the background muck..

thanks for the samples matt.
 
thanks for taking time to explain everything to us.

i find that anything i do "live" i learn more from the experience than doing staged narrative stuff like shorts.

one of the biggest reasons i got the sd 744t was so i have a copy of my work to review later.

i was working on bigger and bigger movies where i was just doing sound vs. being dp or doing everything.

but i found it unfulfilling because at the end of the day i had nothing to review to see how i was doing.

i always like to learn from my work how to do thing better next time and to see what works well and what could use improvement.

with the digital recorder even if i'm feeding into a camera i still have a copy to review later on!

plus if something goes wrong and they say the audio didn't make it to the camera (which is hard to imagine because i use the sd 302 feature of the return monitoring at least once on each take) but it has happened, so now i have a backup copy on HD and CF.

i'm going to get setup so i can put the CF into my laptop and burn a cd on location with all of the files.

next toy i have to get is a denecke digital slate...

matthew
 
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