Today we tested a new recording method for In Ear Entertainment. I went over the rough idea of it in the New Recording Method post the other day.
The day went well. Using actors in my local area, I knocked up a short Supermarket Matters script (about 3 minutes long) which would test some of the scenarios which we found difficult in post before. These were:
- People leaving the ‘action area’ but still talking
- People interrupting each other
- People talking over each other
All of these, in our old method, were a pain to get right. This new recording method should sort them out during the recording.
And it worked!
The actors felt like they were properly acting, rather than just reading lines, as they had a space to move around in. They could control how loud they were in the recording by moving toward or away from the mic rather than having to guess with the volume of their voice.
All in all, a good day.
The recording is now with our post production dude to play around with to see what the final quality is like compared to what we have produced before. I have high hopes for this.
One cool point of the new recording method is that we can add the Whoosh! Doors sound effects on live and record with the doors ‘as is’. This is done by having JD Kelly, the Whoosh! Doors actor, in another room with his own mic. This mic is attached to some magic sound box which adds the effect live and then piped into a set of speakers in the room with the other actors. Some sort of wizardry then links all the sound back to JD’s headphones so he knows what is going on. All with no lag. Amazing.
This ends up with the actors talking to a set of speakers. See below:
The Whoosh! doors.
I shall let you know what happens with the sound files during post production.
