London
– September, 2014…
Sound Recordist Richard
Meredith was able to choose the right gear for the job when faced with
recording in a forest at night for a new reality game show with some demanding
circumstances. The brief was recording sound for a new TV series for ITV and
FOX; Release The Hounds. The 'Hounds' set was a huge open forest
several miles west of London with games happening all over it. It was decided that the shoot would be done
in studio style, with the director in a central gallery and all camera feeds
incoming and recorded on a stack of recording decks, as opposed to shooting in
camera. The location was spread so far and wide that it ended up being two
galleries.
Richard's team initially considered the option
of recording out in the field and sending a monitor mix to the director.
However there were so many other elements that required the sound mixer to be
near the producers and director in the gallery that it was decided to run an
audio gallery too courtesy of an Ethos Audio truck, itself hugely capable and
with the added advantage of coffee on tap day and night.
It was obvious with such great distances
involved that fibre run would be required in one form or another for the radio
mic system – Two options were considered; either RF over fibre, bringing
several remote antennae feeds long distances into a central radio mic receiver
rack, or running a receiver rack locally at the game and bringing the audio
back to the truck over fibre - as the Ethos truck already ran a fibre
infrastructure for audio. Coupled with the fact that there were other feeds to
run back and forth - talkback and comms etc. the team settled on audio over
fibre. There were other factors too -
the fact that the very clever Vista 5 console in the Ethos truck could run a
redundant backup fibre simultaneously with the main one, meaning that if the
main fibre got damaged mid game, then the console would invisibly switch to the
spare – a luxury they would not have had running RF fibre!
The decision over which radio mics to use was
eventually decided by the brief; 4 games per night, for the team to get hold of
the money, but then an added challenge which had to be done by each team member
separately to actually escape with the money intact. The locations for all
these activities were at best several hundred meters apart from each other, and
in some cases over a kilometre!
There were 4 different games in different
locations every consecutive shooting night, and some locations required two
drops of receiver rack as the distances involved went beyond the sensible
capabilities of a single multiple antenna system. It required a solid “rack”
style receiver, which was easily portable and at times able to run off a 12volt
supply in some locations - so there really was only one choice – the
Lectrosonics venue rack - or 5 Venue racks to be precise.
Richard explained: “It really was a 'No
brainer' - The games designers were coming up with new ideas which involved
several other artistes to be mic’d in addition to the main game
contributors. I could see that
flexibility would be the key as greater or lesser importance was placed on
these additional characters dependant on how the competing team was doing. Each
venue rack was loaded with nominally 5 receiver modules but we had the ability
to increase or decrease as and when necessary if required. We generally ended
up with 6/5/5/5/4.”
With a split crew running the operation - one
set on nights filming the games and a second on days re-rigging for the next
set of games, the sound team imposed a strict patching scenario. The fibre
interface units at each game were all given a thorough treatment of white
labelling tape and each input and output on every end box was always allocated
the same job, therefore any pair of fibres plugged into the truck always had
the same inputs and outputs derived from the same place irrespective of
location of game. As there was no time
to test individual feeds during the daytime rig, this consistency was essential
to quickly fault find any missing feeds or returns to the game, during the
short re-set period between every game on the night.
Richard added: “We very quickly established a routine and the night crew game rigger, would potter about with a venue rack tucked under one arm in case extra receive channels were required at short notice on any particular ga