How should I approach audio on this shoot?

egproductions

egproductions

Veteran
I'm going to be working on a a project that is similiar to the following episode of Modern family:


I pretty decided I'm going to film with an iphone but haven't finalized audio yet.

I kind of like the idea of having a stereo setup (and maybe even mounting to the iphone rig. Since the talent is relatively close to the camera, the stereo will feel very pronounced and immersive.

Thoughts?
 
Sadly as I am in the Uk I can't view the whole video but I can see the still shot.

As this seems a mainstream drama what you see is not what it seems and I suspect it is all shot with full HD camera's and then sorted in post to emulate a skype type call.

Stereo is not really useful on dialogue and doing it with an i-phone will probably just cause more problems than keeping it simple and doing it in post prod.
 
Actually from memory I think this was done for real and there were multiple iPhones and iPads. It was incredibly sophisticated and done in real time. Not surprisingly it won many awards.
 
The production dialog on that did not come from the FaceTime recordings. They may have shot it in realtime with their laptops and mobile devices, but I’m pretty confident that they recorded dialog separately and as they would on any episode. They may have used plant mics instead of lavs mounted to chest/torso, but either way they approached sound separately.
 
Ya, I'd think they'd record audio in a standard manner... You could stick lavs in the actors' hair, and for the guy, you could hide a lav behind or in his headset. Heck, you could boom these three shots. You can hide lavs on/behind/near smartphoness; I've done that. Then in post tweak EQ, add some compression, etc. I've done that on jobs where we wanted talent to sound like they were on a phone; it's no big deal and in post we have a bit more time to get things how we want.

Not sure how much you'd gain with two channels/stereo. If the mics are super close to the source (as in talent holding a rigged smartphone), you might have some phasing issues to deal with. But try a test: record each channel separately, have the talent move the phone around a bit as people do when on one, and see how things sound in post...if you have phase issues, drop one channel and see how that sounds. But again, mono dialog works great...you can make it more immersive in post.
 
Thanks for the responses. The final videos is actually going to emulate a real facetime call for the viewer who watches on their smartphone. I’ll be shooting 4k at 60p so it has that super realistic look. I want the audio to sort of match that idea. I’ll play around to see if I get phasing. Thanks again.
 
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