Sound Advice

Posted on March 5, 2009

Not advice about audio, but lessons learned from costly mistakes.

The last Executive Producer I worked for took me to lunch one day. As we walked back to the studio he told me in the most earnest way that one should never bring a pornographic film to the station or studio for which one works. Even if its locked in a safe in your car out in the parking lot, even if its in a format your company doesn’t even support, it will find its way onto the air and into your duplications. After these many years, I know for a fact that the most strongly learned lessons are those we glean from disastrous mistakes. Mistakes, Billy Joel said that they’re the only thing that you can truly call your own. People don’t change because they’ve seen the light, they learn because they feel the heat. I saw that on a t-shirt once. My old boss, he neglected to tell me how he had learned that particular lesson. The one about the porno.

What have I learned? That is, what mistakes have I made?

Never take your phone off vibrate. Don’t wear a watch that makes any noise at all. My first day on the job, the DP’s phone rang, interrupting the president’s speech we were taping. Twenty minutes later, my watched beeped the hour. Ten years later, I haven’t worn a watch since.

When I would grip, the old-timers would bitch about actors and management. They claimed that you should never assume that they thought of you as equal. Never assume you’re one of the gang with the talent or creative or the money they would say. No matter how much advice they ask of you, no matter how much they flirt with you. “They see you as a carny with teeth!” Is what he exactly said. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s stuck in my memory.

I’ve had some spectacular disasters that were entirely my fault. When I was an AC, I exposed the feed-side of a 16mm magazine, twice on two separate shoots separated by six months. Sure, one of the magazines had a busted latch, and the other had been out of my control during transport from location to location. But that doesn’t excuse me. There were several best practices, industry standards, I hadn’t employed that would have prevented those errors. That’s where I learned to tape the hell out of the magazine.

My first time as DP for a film shoot, I shot a sequence two stops under-exposed. I didn’t watch my forearm against the exposure ring. I was steadying the camera with my right hand. As I reached across the lens to trigger the camera with my left hand, I just rolled it against the iris ring. That’s where I learned to tape down the ring after metering and setting F-stop. 

My first time working in Hollywood, I was AC, audio, video DP, grip, loader, and Associate Producer/Director, and PA for a project (actually, we were there to shoot several projects simulteneuosly for numerous clients.) There was a very long list of things that went wrong. (The story of how I nearly got fired because I pissed of the talent, three famous personalities, I’ll save for another post.) My two favorite things that went wrong involve audio. I was riding the mobile DAT and shotgun boom as the producer shot 16mm. It was a perfect Universal City day, but I was terrified of wind noise polluting my recording. So, I put the neoprene foam windscreen on the shotgun mic. Then I put it in a blimp. Then I put the cat on the blimp.  Thus, the last two inches of the neoprene foam windscreen was compressed between the end of the shotgun mic and the inside of the blimp. It might as well have been a concrete wall, it was so dense. I don’t know how our post audio guy back home pulled it out of that swamp.

When it was time to interview the big star, there was no handler, MUA, costumer, or anyone to negotiate placing a microphone on him. There was no way I was going to ask his permission to cop a feel as I threaded a lavaliere wire up anddown his shirt. I also knew full well the possible political ramifications of even having the appearance of messing up his costume before his next take (as we only has him for five minutes before his next setup was ready.) So, I draped the mic from behind him, over his shoulder and clipped it to his collarless shirt. It looked terrible, thins wrinkled wire snaking across his neck and shoulder. I at least tried to put it on the upstage shoulder to minimize the impact.

It gets worse. Sure, I had erected the previously mentioned muffled shotgun/boom armed over at him on a c-stand as a secondary audio source. The deal was, I was shooting as well on that project. We had rented a very sweet Sony ENG Beta camera (Model 40, or something.) The engineering menu allowed for me to paint the image such that it seriously rivaled the 16mm footage. So, I was shooting with the Beta camera as a backup/camera B. I knew that the other projects I was shooting for would kill me if I returned with this important interview and it had weak audio (and they had to go crawling to the other producer for his material.) Thus, I wanted good audio for my camera. So, I sent the signal from the DAT outputs into my Beta camera inputs. You may be asking, what the other guy, the producer, was doing while I was grip, gaffer *, audio, 1st/2nd ac, loader, slate, PA**, and DP? He was schmoozing with the talent. So, what got overlooked this time? When the interview was over, I looked down at the DAT. It wasn’t rolling. I hadn’t pushed the record button. I grayed out a bit. Lost the feeling in my hands. I absolutely did not tell him. It was a few minutes before I realized that, fortunately, I had the audio I had rolled on from the beta camera that was usable. (Now I’ve got the audio engineers who may read this ready to kill me over the the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz sampling rates between the two formats.) That’s where I learned that free run time code should only be used in very specific applications. Like when you need to sync to the event’s time of day, etc. I know it’s another piece of equipment to keep up with and feed batteries to, but the timecode transceiver kit to slave the slate is worth the rental price: rolling numbers=rolling decks.

*I had setup this ridiculous 20X silk overhead for him to sit under in order to soften the backlight from the sun. When that was too flat, I setup 4x reflectors to bounce in sunlight for a backlight. So, I was constantly running over to the reflectors to chase the sun back on him to create and effect that looked exactly like he was sitting in the sunlight.

**That was the shoot I spent all day (on the Producer’s orders) getting our graphics guys back home to stop what they were doing in order to make mic flag logos. We never used handheld mics on that shoot.

Three years ago, when I first began my transition into HD, my favorite style was to soften the image slightly in order to reduce the crisp digital quality that some saw as jarring. I accidentally left this feature on one time as a shot a green screen interview. Thankfully, the editor had some great software andwas somehow able to get the shot to key, even with such soft edges. But, my mistake was nothing compared to the other camera operator on that shoot. She kept performing pans, tilts, zooms, all sorts of aggressive artistic movement that was useless against a static 2d non-virtual background. This was after she had beat me down before the shoot (arguing with me about aesthetic choices, technical standards, even a big pissing contest over our careers.) I felt no small amount of schadenfreude watching her shoot herself.

What else? My first two documentaries I shot in grad school had no B-roll. I was so tense over the drama and action, I shot in an incredibly conservative style. I did not want to interfere for fear of them stopping their performances. There were also minimal amounts of reverse shots, close ups, and establishing wide shots.

I shot a concert last summer. Considering my work in theatre, music videos, etc., I felt pretty confident about my ability. Christ, what a disaster! I had very little choreography that corresponded to the music. It was almost as conservative as my grad-school docs from eleven years earlier. I had previously reequested the song list ahead of time so that I could learn the songs and be able to move to the music. The producer let this slip his mind, but that didn’t excuse my rigid performance. My mistake was that I was shooting for the edit (in a journalism style), not the event which called for the cameras to act as dance partner to the musicians. What’s worse is that I had done the exact same thing two years earlier shooting a documentary for the music department at the university I was working at. It seemed to make sense, after a decade of shooting anthropologically, to record the entire event, I had finally learned to shoot for the edit. I had anticipated only using the video with an audio bed from the interview of the performer, not realizing the value of the audio from the concert performance in editing transitions, segues, introductions, and conclusions. Shooting for the edit is  necessity, but with music, it’s different. You have to move to the beat. The editing will require you to get at least an entire chorus or lyric in the take.

I once drove to Austin for a film shoot. We had all intended on using my jib and dolly. I forgot jib’s yolk at at home.

I once blocked cameras into spaghetti during live broadcast. We had over a dozen setups in the large studio. As floor manager, my job was to choreograph the cameras positions to the order of the corespondents. About three quarters of the way through, the cameras had crossed so many times that their triax cables were twisted and knotted so bad that the next camera up didn’t have enough hose to reach the next performer. Sure, we zoomed in and got the shot. But, that did nothing to solve the speaker’s problem: the teleprompter on the camera was now too far away to read. Fortunately, I thought fast: unplug the program monitor in the studio (it was on a cart with plenty of BNC RJ6 composite cable and power extension cord length) and use the teleprompter monitor’s BNC output jack to feed it content. We rolled that monitor close enough to him to read just out of frame for him, using it as a line-of-sight prompter.

I was shooting in a forest once in Texas (overcast winter in a river valley) where there was, of course, only one color in the scene: grey. I didn’t want to chase color balance all day as the sun shot different color temperatures at us each hour. So, I used the camera’s engineering menu to boost the red channel up about five percent. It didn’t give me everything I wanted to warm up the scene. But, it did add a bit to the mid-tones and flesh. I had had plenty of previous experience working with color processes in production and post. Between gaffing choices, choosing unique color balances and camera settings, and finally correcting certain channels in post I had created some very artistic pallets. That was my intention here. But, even though I had explained it to them numerous times, management freaked about it when they saw it in post. They absolutelydid not understand the process. Furthermore, they could not believe that  it was the easiest fix to normalize. That was why I chose it: if they didn’t want a second or third process to finish the look (even though it would have turned out great), it was easily dumped and corrected (I’d done it lots of times.) That was one of  the most important lessons I had on the importance of client education.

I’ve worked with several squirrely consumer grade cameras. I won’t mention the brand that’s been my constant nemesis for 13 years. But, if you know me, you know who they are. My attempts to paint the image with these cameras meets with inconsistent results as the ergonomic design of the cameras fails to meet professional demands. If it’s not the onscreen interface not giving conclusive data about the programming I’m attempting to run, its a lack of features needed to technically or artistically operate the camera. Then, they place the most important button for the look you’ve designed right under the main handle so that when you pick up the camera, your fingers brush this button. Thus, every time you go near that part of the camera, you’re unconsciously and unintentionally either turning on or off these engineering paint presents. I’ve learned the hard way which brands to trust.

Back at that river valley in Texas winter, I had about ten minutes one morning to shoot all the B-roll of the location (for intra-scene seque montages) before the cast and crew invaded it. The increasing light from rising sun was warm (being a cool color temperature), but the dawn lingering  in the valley was cool (because of the hot color temperature frequencies from the sky.) I panicked from the time constraint. I didn’t know what to choose, so I tried to straddle the color balance choices. The result was that the highlights looked yellow, the mid-tones looked purple. I though it was an interesting look. It was out of limits of any software to correct and match with other footage. I knew this andwas hoping they would bring all footage to some middle ground (giving all of those scenes more artistic looks) but management was too conservative for such a risky artistic choice. Sure, I learned not alow myself to be rushed. More importantly, I learned not to be skeptical of  management’s ability to understand the spectrum of artistic possibilities.

Yeah, even after all these years, I’ve accidentally left the auto-focus on, auto iris on, crossed the line of action, didn’t assert myself when a problem arose, etc.

But, my favorite recent mistake is within post. I have a tendency to become impatient with best practices of post production work-flow. My most frequent recent error habit is when I begin to add effects (special, correction, movement, audio, layers, transitions, etc.) and other sweetening processes before my cut is complete. Then when I have to go back in order to make changes, my work-flow is slowed because my project is dragging the computer procceses down because I’ve crammed the prject full of effects and transitions to early. It’s the worst when I do this on individual clips instead of an adjustment layer. Then when a change is required, I have to open up every damn clip for these minor tweaks instead of only just one. 

Every day is another lesson.

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