We met on location in the house which would be used for the majority of location filming and sorted out the equipment which I had picked up and signed off on earlier in the day. The purposes of this test shoot was to check the filming conditions, how the locations would effect certain aspects such as teh actors, crew and equipment and to have a more confident idea as to how the scenes will be blocked in preparation for official filming with the actors. This specifically gave me the chance to test the sound equipment and see how the sound is effected by the locations, enabling a better understanding and better planning on what sound equipment should be used in during the final shoot.
Our first location was a field not far from the house. In this scene one of the characters is dressed as a flowers in the middle of a field and is hallucinating that two sunflowers are speaking to him after taking drugs. The first thing we noticed is that, on this day, the ground was uneven and very muddy, so appropriate footwear will be required. It was also very cold so we will advise that thermal clothing should be worn by all cast and crew, especially the actor who will be wearing the flower costume. I decided that, due to the large open space, that use of the boom might not be as practical as I will have to stand far out of frame for some of the wider shots. For the purposes of this test shoot I decided to monitor the sound from the in-built microphone in the camera. This did a good enough job on some of the tighter shots but voices were slightly muffled. I will probably end up using the boom microphone, possibly with the use of a Tascam (a piece of sound equipment that allows me to record sound separately from the camera) so that I am not restrained by being connected to the camera. I did manage to obtain some effective background noise such as the birds and a soft wind which will help when creating the sound beds.
After this, we went back to the house where a scene would take place with three people in a dining room, sat around a laptop at a table. I used the boom microphone for this test scene. The first thing I noticed was very slight echo in the room whenever someone spoke. However, I found that if I half the boom closer to the person who will be speaking, it nullified the echo substantially. I also found that the wooden chairs, table and floor creaked which were all picked up by the microphone. I did ask whether there were alternative table and chairs available but this was not the case. If we are to be stuck with these tables and chairs, I feel I might have to ask the actors not to move around in their chairs too much once they have sat down.
Some background noises could also be heard. The house next door has several dogs which started barking in unison about every ten minutes which might cause a problem for the sound within the scene. We are planning to establish the fact that there are dogs next door through visual and sound in scenes beforehand to hopefully combat this problem.
Overall, however, I do think that this test shoot was a success. I am happy with the sound and have a better idea of the equipment that I will be using on the actual shoot. There are just a few things that we have to try and overcome in future test shoots. In between these, I will also start to try and familiarise myself with the Tascam to give myself more opportunities for sound recording, though I would not wish to use the Tascam to record the main bulk of the sound during the production due to problems it could cause during the editing.
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