Sisters in Law
Sometime in August 2004 after much anticipation a small team of 3 of us left for Cameroon, our mission to make a feature length documentary for Channel Four. We were planning to stay for two months but it ended up being three for reasons that will probably not become clear in this particular article. I often work as part of a very small team in situations like this where I have no chance to see the likely locations in advance and often with little idea of what recording / filming situations I am likely to face. All I knew was that the film was likely to include a large amount of scenes filmed in a courtroom. Potentially quite a large courtroom, and potentially involving quite a number of people.
So, let me segway for a while into the kit I chose for such a venture. I was working with my friend Kim Longinotto who directs and shoots her own material on a super 16mm Aaton. Fantastic! That means I get to do separate sound with no cable tying me to the camera. Useful in all sorts of situations but nice in the courtroom because I can move around independently to get any sound in the court as long as I am out of shot. But, Ah, I hear you say, how are you going to sync up that material? Clapper board? In a courtroom? Or in a big emotional scene of documentary? No I don’t think so. We have a marvellous invention called an “Origin C+” it generates continuous timecode which I set each morning to the time of day, both the camera and the sound recorder “jam” to that timecode. The same timecode is recorded on both picture and sound so they can by united in post production. I use a DAT machine, one day soonish it will be some kind of hard disk recording system I’m sure, but for the moment DAT works fine. On this type of shooting I would rarely get through more than 2 one hour tapes a day and more often only one. I’d always replace the tape each day so the time code always increases for each take. ie. does not change from 18.00.00 from one evening to suddenly back to say 09.00.00 when we start again the next day. Computers and people who sync up film rushes don’t like that sort of thing. In order to help with the syncing up and editing I would keep basic notes during the day and write them up in the evening detailing the scenes we had shot and what film rolls they were on and relate that to the timecode on my DAT tape. I’d also include notes about the microphones I had used and which sound channels various characters were on in order to help with post production. The timecode jamming technique works well for us and the way we work, it can also be used to provide separate sound for video production but does incur an additional post production time and cost which tends to put people off. The DAT machine I use is the Fostex PD4, I’ve had it a while and I chose it because with three sound inputs I get away with using it without an additional mixer. I’m carrying less so am more mobile for the type of “on the hoof” shooting we do, and I’m also swinging my own boom as well as having a couple of radio mic channels on the go.
How do you mic up a court though? There’s a Judge and a State Prosecutor both important main characters. There’s an accused, a defendant and several witnesses. I have 3 microphones where do they go? Luckily he had a chance to see some action in the court before we had to film. Kim chose a camera position and from that potentially a lot of the court was in shot. If I stood fairly close to her I could reach the State Prosecutors position and the Defendants box fairly easily with the boom ( a standard Sehnheiser MKH60 on a pole). I was also guaranteed to be out of shot and it was an easy position to be able to tell if Kim’s camera was running or not. Handily this left two other positions out of my reach where people would speak in the court and two inputs on my DAT. There were likely in each case to be several witnesses so I could not possibly radio mic them all, but I could mic the witness box. I have a (reassuringly expensive!) miniature cardioid mic called a Schoeps CCM41 which with the aid of an(also reassuringly expensive) adapter plugs into a radio transmitter, the mic is very small and placed on a tiny stand in the witness box picked up anyone standing there perfectly. No cables across the Court, no trip hazzard and nothing tying me to anything so am still able to move around should anything dramatic happen without warning – which it often did. What have we left? One radio link, one Judge. Bingo! Radio mic the judge which has the added advantage of my being able to listen in and let Kim know when the Judge was about to enter the court.
With that all set up all there was left for me to do was pray it would not rain, drowning out everything as it hit the tin roof of the court….. more on that another time.
One response
Hello Mary,
only two years since you wrote this enlightening article lol! But I stumbled across your site and enjoyed reading your experiences.
Heck the beeb are even offering wannabee jobs if you can swing over a 30,000 killer bees nest and get some decent footage amongst other tasks, now I would like to know whether the sound came from the trainee(s) cam mike or whether there was some audio pro dangling behind with nerves of steel and a Rycote boom in hand!
This was some beeb docu about what it takes to be part of a film crew and the prize is….blah blah..a job on a docu etc. (29 july bbc1 8pm)
Thinking about the timecode aspect of life, do you think these products may offer a simpler solution to the thorny issue of syncing up audio? to video?
http://www.horita.com/gpsvideo.htm
I am principally a composer of music, but experiment with ambience, wild tracks and dialogue, and have always been put off by the technical aspects which ultimately can get in the way of achieving great creative audio for film and docu/drama, and as you mentioned, when you are free of the ties to video, one can get the positions for great sound, and not have to listen to some stressed out Director bellowing “things” that mean nothing in relation to audio and are not cohesive to a collaborative effort (my experience, possibly not yours) did I mention that sound recordists are a bit anarchistic lol!
I think the insistence on frame rates etc is just so the editors in Soho can b***** off to the pub
whilst the video encodes on its own, they should just say they want it in 44.1khz, 48khz 88.2khz and be done with it but some kind of satellite realtime system would be handy that sort of slammed a spike or data pulse at the beginning of each take, then one could use whatever recording equipment they favoured at the time?
Actually come to think of it, maybe just a finger click and a restrained “take 42” etc could get over the problem of timing, but having experience yourself with emotional courtroom scenes you would know best whether this would work? It would mean a bit more work and cost at post production but good for them to keep up the skills, I know people that still splice audio tape for their edits..sweet!
BTW do you ever work in stereo or does this cause loads of problems?
Questions questions, but thanks if you have any insight on them…
Nico