4. On the Shoot

The Shoot.

I had visited the venue a few days prior to booking out the equipment to see exactly what equipment would work best, as this venue is situated in an open plan bus station and due to recent weather I discovered that there was a lot of cross winds sweeping through the station, this would mean that any audio captured in this location had the possibility of being disjointed and even lost in some cases, and as we where only going to be recording once there was no margin for error and this meant that the equipment required would need to accommodate this.

Due to a booking error I only took the Sennheiser ME67, Zoom H4N and the Marantz PMD 660 to the shoot. I found that during the setting up process as I had less equipment it was far easier to set up quickly, this would come in handy later on as I found out the interviews where not set up and more “on the spot” so I needed to be able to capture sound at any moment.

The Zoom H4N was the only solid-state recorder I used that day as the Marantz PMD 660 was just as a back up recorder. As there where no radio mics I was a bit concerned with being able to focus in on the audio from the subjects but as the

ME67 is a highly direction microphone I found that the audio was coming through clear from the subject and there was no need for the radio mics after all and I had found that the reviews for the ME67 on certain forums and websites where very true when it came to the shoot.

Even though there was still a bit of background noise on the captured audio I found that it was essential to the piece, not only to add a soundscape to the audio captured, but also to place it within its surroundings something I feel that if I had used the radio mics that a lot of that background chatter would have been lost and I would have needed to record a separate wild track to run underneath the audio from the interview subjects.