Saturday, September 29, 2012

DAY THRE...FOUR?  OH, WHATEVER:  Home, James

Here's something you should know about me: I have smooth skin.  Dare I say "perfect" skin.  The kind of skin that a dress making serial killer would obsess over.  And yet - AND YET! - one of Tulsa's giant Carboniferous Period insects has injected me with some kind of venom that has caused my arm to swell up and take on a sandpaper-like texture.  Worker's comp, you say?  No, no, my friends.  This is an indie film and we're tougher than that.  Why would I share this with you?  Because it acts as a very forced segue (by definition, NOT actually a segue) to discuss an even greater personal irritant: Benedict Cumberbatch.  The Sherlock star is in town for the August: Osage County shoot and I must find him.  Cumberbatch has secrets.  He has secrets about the next series of Sherlock that he's not sharing with me (how the hell are they getting out of last series' cliffhanger?!!!!).  And I want them.  Much like the aforementioned serial killer would want my skin.  But I'm biding my time.  In fact, here's a picture of me biding my time, as I try to anticipate Cumberbatch's next move...


(Note to production managers: while the suit doesn't increase my day rate, it does add $50/day to my kit fee.)

Anyway, on to today's wrap-up of Home, James...

Today all came down to one thing: the technical ingenuity of Super Su.  Camera placement is one thing.  Camera placement on the outside of a 1984 Jeep Cherokee as it zips around Tulsa with the driver acting and directing is something else.  I applaud you, Super Su.  Here's are some of the rigging set-ups:




Keep in mind that this is a low budget indie on a night when we only had a skeleton crew.  Take that, Clooney, you pantywaist!  BTdubs, George "Forget the little people" Clooney, way to not credit your sound mixer on IMDB.  Asshole.

On the sound side of things, I had it fairly easy.  The shots always hid one side of the actors' faces, so I first tried to clip the lav mics onto their seat belt straps, which initially seemed like a perfectly acceptable idea.  Unfortunately, due to the amount of movement in the performance, there was way too much acoustic rustle.  So we pulled over, I stared at the actors for a few minutes (awkward!)  and ultimately decided to pull an old stage play move and just taped the lavs right onto their faces.  I used regular 3M medical tape, which is strangely adhesive given that it doesn't really hurt that bad when pulled off, and Bob was our uncle.  However, I have realized one fault with the Sound Device 788T.  While I still maintain that it's the most amazing piece of portable audio gear ever created, I'm not crazy about the "soft key" functions.  While crammed into the back seat of a moving car, it's way too easy to accidentally hit, say, the "stop" key and "forward" key at the same time and inadvertently advance a take number or disable a track routing.  Hopefully a new firmware update comes out that allows you to completely disable the soft key commands for hectic situations.  If anyone reading this knows a way to do that, I would greatly appreciate the info.  Or, I guess I could finally get around to reading the manual.

BTdubs, the portal to a different dimension seems to have closed .  No Godzilla bugs tonight.  Yus!!!  Just a beautiful Tulsa (New Hollywood) evening.

I would also like to thank noted Oklahoma superstar freak Wayne Coyne for lending us his hamster ball tonight.  We didn't need it for anything in particular, but it was still cool...


Tomorrow is a day off, so I may actually be able to take some time and finally figure out the numbering of these days, which I'm sure you're already sick of reading about.  And maybe fix the three (yes, I counted them [no I didn't]) grammatical mistakes I've made since starting this blog.  That doesn't count the one typo.  Night night!!!

Lastly, for the few people that actually read this for the audio info, I'm super curious about SD's new 664 field mixer/recorder.  It has more recordable tracks than the 788T and uses the same world clock TC generator.  However, it's way cheaper, which means there has to be something wrong with it that I'm not getting from the write-ups.  You can read SD's description here: SD 664 Field Mixer

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