jamieg

I was lucky enough to work with the late David Hemmings, who was an absolute gentleman. I'm also lucky enough to have only worked with two actors that seemed to not respect the crew - one was a former singer/pop star who was making a go of acting in a very low budget "tax-break" movie I worked on back in the UK, the other was an actor from a UK trashy show, who was a pain while I was working on a no-budget short film with him - unhelpful, rude, aggressive and prone to tantrums - the shoot lasted all of three days, throughout which he managed to maintain this manner. For the most part though, I've had great experiences on set, and tend to enjoy my 70 hour weeks!

If they are paying for the gear, it might not mean that they are holding back, just that they at least have some sense of what they should be paying. It's the gigs that don't get how much the gear costs that are the ones to be weary of!

When a producer or director says that they want a film shot in a documentary style, what they may mean is that they'd like the story presented in that style, but they would like it to be made as professionally and carefully as though it were a full budget big feature. Cloverfield is the best example of this - yes, it is presented as though shot on someone's hand-held camera, and indeed shot on digital cameras, but it had a full crew, including boom ops. I can understand low budget indie films not wanting to have 3 or 4 man crews, but one man crews aren't as viable to obtain the quality that they actually want. That's not to say that people don't do it, but I would fight for at least one other person on hand to help - it will save hours in the long run Having one person boom, record, mic talent, take care of extraneous noises etc will just lead to an AD saying "we don't have time" when asked to wait for some adjustment somewhere, and your work suffering as a result, and in the end it's your name against a piece of work - if the work isn't great, do you want to be associated with it? My own experience has been in the past that I have always stood up for 3 man crews, and have turned down work because what the production offered meant that I was unable to do the job in a way that I would have been happy with. When I first started trying to get mixing credits and was working in that world of no/low budget, student and shorts, I would have three criteria that at least two needed to be fulfilled - 1. Is there a personal connection to the piece? 2. Is it on film? and 3. Is the equipment being paid for? I would also never do it alone - my basic rule, if there is someone speaking scripted dialogue, then a boom op is needed. The equipment deal can help, you need the money to obtain the right equipment to do the job, especially if they are laying a foundation that means that you don't have the crew you would like. If you are providing the equipment, then there are costs of usage, wear and tear and insurance that need to be factored. You are not in this industry for the love only! Ultimately - it will be a lot of work, long hours, little reward - financial and professional - too many people are led to believe that working for nothing/next to nothing in bad conditions is the only way to make a start or get ahead in the industry, but if you really want to do it, be patient, take your chances when they come, but do them with a semblance of control over your situation, and so that you at least get something out of the job that you'd be happy with. ETA - it took me a while to actually build up the confidence and courage to turn down work because the conditions weren't what I felt would lead to a good end product, and I was a lot happier once I'd done it!

I love working in Sound, it's been a dream of mine since I saw Star Wars back in 1977 at the Hackney Odeon with my Nan - the moment that ship flew over head, I was obsessed with the sound of film. I have always had a dream of self-publishing my own comic book series (something I still plan on doing, as long as I can find an artist to do the actual drawing for me!) and would probably be working at trying to break into that world. Failing that, I'd try to put my degree to some use, and probably be teaching Ancient History somewhere.

Personalised number plates bug me - the reason being that in the UK the format of number plates changed a while ago, gone was the three letter - space - three numbers and a letter system (with the last number indicating the year of the car model) and in it's place was a system of numbers and letters, with a letter number combo that indicated the period of the year released! For years after this change I was convinced that everyone was getting more and more abstruse personalised number plates that I just didn't understand (you can only buy predetermined vanity plates in the UK - so if you have an idea, you have to check with the DVLA - DMV - and see what they have that is close to your idea), and would spend almost every car journey struggling to work out what normal plates meant! That aside, they make a lot more sense here in LA, as you have more freedom with what the plates can say. Myself and the guy that was booming for me and co-owned the equipment when we first started had dreams of starting a company (called Tone Def Audio), we had the logo, the cards printed etc, just not the clients! Anyway, we imagined a fleet of cars with the plates TDA 1, TDA 2 etc, delivering sound equipment and technicians to the world!

The only time that I've treated a room acoustically was on a film called Mean Machine (a british remake of The Longest Yard) - a scene where Vinnie Jones' character is walked down a long prison corridor before being stopped in a small atrium and talked to by some guards - the atrium where the dialogue took place was kind of echo-y and reflective, so over lunch the boom op and I taped the foam from inside the peli-cases up above the kino banks that would light the scene, and deadened it off. It worked quite well.

I've only listened to one quickly, with a mixer that I was working with who had made the jump from COS-11's to DPA's via another mic I forget. He'd done some pretty extensive listening, and he thought that the DPA's were a closer match to the schoeps mics that he used for interiors, and the COS's closer to the Sennheiser mics he used on exteriors. They are great sounding mics though, a little more bulky than the COS's.

I've done 3 low budget films that used CFC's as the main part of the deliverable workflow, at my suggestion - it came about because of another feature I'd done that we delivered on DVD-R's because the dailies were being rough cut on a computer in the production office which didn't have the means to read DVD-RAM and wasn't willing to buy an external drive! It added 20 minutes of burning from 744t to mac to DVD at the end of each day, when I would have preferred to have been helping the team wrap. At the end of the job I got a call from sound post saying that the only sound they had was the digitized rough mix, no disks - luckily I was backing up so was able to have someone come over with a portable drive and dump the entire jobs sound onto that. So on the next job I suggested going the CFC route, and it seemed to work - 10 CFC's on rotation as daily rushes, coming back to us to be backed up, and then reused. Editors were happy with dropping the sound in to their avids with the digi-dailies, we didn't have any problems with the CFC's, and at the end of the job there was again the master source on a HDD for when sound post got their hands on the job. As I said, these were all low budget jobs, and the fact that I had the CFC's already meant that they saved some money - I had the EXT HDD back up, the 744 held the sound on it's HDD. I think I would have liked the option of using the DVD-RAM burner (I managed to get one day on a commercial with it before the first job, so it was kind of paid for). Not sure how it would have worked on a bigger job, with rushes going to a lab and so forth.

Vin - shout! Simon - My wife and I went last week, it was a great movie, and the cast were all wonderfully likable. I really loved the decision to have the cacophony of space battle sound contrasting with the stark silence of space on one or two occasions, and the space-sky jump. The sound never got so crowded as to be muddy, but had enough going on to seem completely alive - well done all involved!

As I said, sorry for being pedantic! The English also like to refer to themselves as English rather than British - the term Brit or notion of being British only really comes into play when a) referring to an English person in movies, the Olympics, c) when Andy Murray or any N. Irish, Scottish or Welsh sports person is doing well, d) martial victories. Jamie (born in England to an Irish Father and a half Scottish Mother), Brit (or something)

Sorry to be pedantic - it would make him a Brit - Brit = British, encompassing the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island, or England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Island, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. So he is both.

Doesn't Mr Bale even say to the first something along the lines of we will not take a minute, let's just do it again now?

I got it via email, and there doesn't seem to be any dates mentioned

Congratulations, Boss! Where will you be teaching and how long are the lessons? For me some of the most important lessons that mixers have taught me have been to think about the application of what they are recording at the editing end - to think how the final product will be put together. That, and how to use practical approaches to recording/mixing (e.g., silencing extraneous noises, like a chair scraping, and so on)

Happy Birthday Jeff, thanks for letting us all hang out here! Jx