problems with sound SWINDLE

Sound Swindle by Neal Chauhan

As my role was doing the sound in Swindle, overall I think some parts were alright and some parts weren’t. One of the important problems I had was when we were filming in a little town, where we needed power because I was using a mixer, that had a function of phantom power, but it didn’t manage to work. The solution to this problem was we had to ask a local supermarket, Co-Operative, if we could use their power. At first the manager was a bit hesitated to use the power, but then he went to ask his work partner, to get his view of this situation. 10 minutes later he came back saying we could use the power for a couple of hours. The solution for this whole thing was the college should have got another Edirol with the sound mixer and the recorder built into one and has phantom power with it. I had to keep using their sound recorder/mixer because some scenes we had to film in the van. 

The most important we had was the Canon 7D. Although it was a fantastic camera, in the sound wise there were some problems. We couldn’t connect the mixer to the camera, because we weren’t allowed to adjust the sound levels, as it was only set to automatic. Also another problem was that there was only one output on the camera. 

The rain was another big big problem for sound and the camera men. Every time we were shooting it was always raining, and we had to stand under the umbrella. Also the power had to be outside and was getting wet, so we had to make sure it wasn’t wet, so we covered it up with a plastic bag so the water doesn’t go in to the main power. 

Most of the time when we were filming we were using the tie clip mics, and the battery life wasn’t that great even though we kept turning it off, when we didn’t need it. We took 16 batteries with us and they were all used up within 2 days. Because the Edirol was taking huge amounts of battery life even though it was doing what you wanted it to do. When I was using the Edirol I had to change the battery twice, even though again we kept turning it off when we didn’t need to use it. 

Another problem was that I was using the mixer and a zoom recorder which was fine. But then on the Edirol zoom recorder, there was a 4 GB SD card, after I had recorded and transferred the first scene on the mac, I wanted to format the card, so there is space for the next day. I tried several times to format the card it just wouldn’t work because the card was locked. I took the card out of the Edirol zoom recorder and tried to look for the lock switch. I wasn’t able to find it, I even showed it to David and he couldn’t find it. Luckily there was a solution to this problem, which was we bought down the HD camera, just in case one of the SLR cameras had failed. I took out the SD card out of the HD and put it in the Edirol. It was a good thing I done that because I had a chance to record more sound, because it was a 32 GB card.

The problem I am going to have is when it comes to the editing, where I have to sync all the clips together. The first Tuesday I came back I tried syncing the clips in Final Cut Pro. At first it was very hard trying to find the clips. The way I sorted out the clips was looking at the times we shot the clips both the camera and the sound. Some of the clips weren’t similar time than the time on the camera. Next time, to make it easier I would in Surrey, select the clips I want to use as well as the video footage, so when we come back to edit, I straight away know what clip goes where. Another way is write down the video and sound footage name is, so we know that they are synced together. 

My Overall experience in Surrey, was very good, it was a good experience. I had never been to a place we stayed in, so it was a very good experience. The actual filming of Swindle was very good and had some great moments. After a hard day filming in the evening we would just chill and rest.