At this shooting session, we filmed footage
for a montage, as well as scenes at a coffee shop at the start of the story. As
sound director, I did not have much to do during the actual filming of the
footage for the montage as music would be playing over the background and would
cover any sound captured on set. In addition, the boom-pole attachment broke
off, and so sound captured through a hand-held boom-microphone would have been mediocre
at best. Instead, I bounced ideas off of Matthew, the director of
cinematography, as I had been DP for the past two units. During the second
section of the shoot at the coffee shop, I once again did not have that much to
do. This was due to the fact that, as mentioned above, sound captured would
have been mediocre at best, the actor for the waiter was not ready to deliver
lines in Cantonese, and the restaurant was quite noisy. Instead of spending
extra time maneuvering the microphone around the area and trying to get as
close to the actor as possible to capture the best sound, we decided that we
could record the lines at a later date in a controlled environment and edit
them in during the post-production stage. To make this possible, actors had to
say “watermelon” over and over again – a word that forces your lips to form
common shapes that surprisingly fit most sentences.
The primary problems during this
session were that I could not use the boom pole, lines were not ready, and we
were in a noisy environment. This session taught me to be prepared for the
worst, and to be flexible – especially as technology and editing techniques are
so advanced today. I could have been a more productive sound director had I studied
the script and knew which lines were coming next. In this way, I would have
perhaps been able to move the microphone between the two people without
disrupting the flow of the actors or the camera operator. If the lines had been
recorded on set, time would not have been spent on recording the lines in a
studio and editing them in.
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