[Tech1] Some details of the Pye desk in Type 2 scanners.

[Alan Taylor]

Location drama was inviting virtually any extraneous sound to be picked up. I’ve had everything from jet fighters roaring past at rooftop height in a Victorian drama, through to another film shooting a civil war battle scene with canons etc near to us while we were doing a modern era night shoot.  Neither production was aware of the other.  However I’ve been mercifully spared too many dropped hammers. 

On the other hand, some locations were so quiet that they would put most studios to shame.  For The Bell, a scene was shot in a cellar where one problem was not just the ticking of the crew’s wristwatches, but the echo of them ticking. The dialogue wasn’t much louder, but was still delivered and captured clearly.  

On The Russian Soldier, a remote farm in Dorset was similarly quiet and some of the dialogue went from barely whispered to full-on screaming in an instant.  Personally I rather like these extremes of vocal range and tended to encourage actors to do it when it feels appropriate.  The performance is all the more compelling when they do.  I’ve looked back at some of these shows and been pleased by how quietly the dialogue can be spoken without compromising the clarity for the viewer. 

Using large panels of acoustic tiles on location sometimes paid dividends.  They could control the worst aspects of the acoustics, while still conveying the acoustic character of the space. The biggest drawback was that the better ones were bulky and difficult to transport in my car. 

I sometimes used figure of eight capsules, but the appeal for me was just how dead the dead spot at the side was.  For instance, if you’re doing pick up shots, the dead spot can be aimed at the OOV actor feeding in their lines and on occasions has allowed the two actors to talk over each other while still capturing a pretty clean recording of the in-vision actor. One frivolous  drawback with a side firing figure of eight capsule is that people notice where the mic is pointing and assume that the boom op must be rubbish.

Alan Taylor



> On 6 Apr 2021, at 13:22, Roger Long <relong at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> Delicious notice!
> Particularly like the hammer dropping!
> How many times that hammer has been dropped in my recording life  is beyond me.
> If you listen to well restored movies from the30s and 40s you will hear the sound of ribbon microphones in large dead spaces , and very effective they were 
> Admittedly the voices are projecting but the sound stages were well designed and those mics had a lot of gain from the 3 ch Westrex mixer.
> Why cardioid mics overtook fig 8s is a mystery to me , the suck of a fig 8 is considerable , better than D25 or STC 4033, even taking their rear field into account 
> 
> Roger