View From The Office:

[André Boisvert]

From July 2002: A young polar bear is washed up on the shore of Coats Island, Northern Hudson's Bay, Canada.

 

 

From last September: Love is in the air.

 

 

From a 10 day shoot in February/March in the cities of Dohuk and Erbil in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq: A Syrian and Iraqi refugee camp. It was a thoroughly uneventful shoot. As Martha would say " And that's a good thing".

 

 

And I got to add one more currency to my collection.

 

[old school]

That's some collection of photos Andre. Thanks.

CrewC

[jwill]

OpeningDay Phils v Red Sox

[old school]

Now that's a good gig. Play Ball.

CrewC

[Philip Perkins]

The Mana Quartet, a saxophone quartet playing music from Glass to Bach and everything in between.

 

p

[Philip Perkins]

Here's our hardworking Art Dept deploying "the box" @ 14th and Broadway, Oakland CA, one of a few locations used.  This was for a hidden camera shoot--3 widely spaced cams plus a Gopro inside the box, plus mics plus a recorder plus transmitters plus 5 iPhone 6s with ext batteries that I made SFX for (they fit in the holes in the box top covered by a thin glass sheet with an image on it) plus a bunch of old towels to try to keep the mics from not sounding like they were in a hollow box, which they in fact were.  Not shown, but also sound dept. responsibility: a large powered speaker buried in the scene, powered by a small generator, with a long cable to a PA's phone programmed with about 30 SFX I'd edited, playable on demand (very loud) to get people to look in the direction an eventual CGI "event" will occur, balky rented wireless cam coms to director (less than impressive range…), 250mw moni audio TX to a moho with the creatives in it, various less than perfect attempts to get outboard speakers working with the iphones without a lot of weird phone-digital interference.  I was also in charge of telling the camera dept when the GoPro inside the box would die (loud beeps, right next to the mics), which it did, often, since it was well over 200 degrees hot inside the black rear portion of the box when in direct sun.  But the 744 mounted in there chugged along the whole time--very long rolls, without issue, although it was hot enough to cook on when we'd open up to fix the GoPro.  Every dept. had a number of Wheel-Reinventions and Science Projects that were somewhat less than successful on this job….glad it's done.  Yes, I know there are People Who Do This--I gave the production the relevant phone numbers but we went ahead anyway.  Character building.

 

phil p

[Philip Perkins]

Winging it, @ the Freight and Salvage with folkie Don Arbor's band and Steve Meckfessel as the opening act.  Winging going on due to some overly optimistic time estimates by the house management about how long the loadin/setup/soundcheck would take, thus no sound check for me  (all we got was a mic scratch test as the audience was walking in).  So, the first few songs were...hairy.  Yay for multitrack, yay for headroom in the AH console and yay for Young Jesse, my help that night.  Being right about the setup time needed was small comfort after all, but was what comfort we had.

 

philp

[Ze Frias]

Mixing a discussing panel with guests questions at a medical conference at Philly yesterday. I'm not going to deny it, automix did most of the heavy lifting.

[Ze Frias]

My office today, while visually stunning, is quite noisy:

[soundmanjohn]

Oh come on, it's not every day you find yourself in the same room as a gold-painted skeleton and a Nagra 3...

[atheisticmystic]

Oh come on, it's not every day you find yourself in the same room as a gold-painted skeleton and a Nagra 3...[/quote

You need a selfie when something of this coolness pops up.

best

[Philip Perkins]

Here are some shots from a job I did Saturday night.  This was a joint effort by Meyer Sound (who supplied 44 powered speakers, the trussing system to rig them, cableing and speaker control systems) some folks from Stanford and Mills College (who made the MAX and Reaper patches that guided sound around and through the speaker array), and some composers who had "shot" impulse responses of the interior of the now-empty Berkeley Art Museum (big '60s Brutalist concrete building) and had made combo electronic and instrumental works to play through this speaker set up.   In the picture you can see the smaller inner ring of rigged speakers (behind my console etc)--there was also an outer ring of bigger speakers at about waist--height, and then an array of top speakers (see 2nd shot) firing downwards from the grid.  (The tiny object hanging from the grid is a Core Audio "Tetra" Ambisonic mic that I recorded along with all the other mics and feeds.)  The audience was in the middle of these rings of speakers, seated on the floor, with the performers at stations around the outside of the ring.  It sounded pretty darn cool in there--WAY hifi, with components of the audio flying around and over you.  Powerfully loud, but GOOD loud!  

philp

[Jeff Wexler]

Hey Philip, you get to do the wildest jobs of anybody I know! Thanks for sharing, always interesting.

[Philip Perkins]

Thanks.  Perrin Meyer himself was there to supervise--I think it was a passion project of his.  I just wish they'd left the whole rig up for a week and booked a whole slew of performers etc to play special pieces through this thing--it was World's Fair-level Big Audio Fun.

philp

[ryanpeds]

3 days of filming in Moab on the colorado river. Lots of film history in this area. 

 

 

 

[Rick Reineke]

Nice photos fo' sure.

[fieldmixer]

FIFA Woman's World Cup 2015 MONCTON New Brunswick Canada.

[jwill]

Jersey Shark Fishing....nice blue shark 9 ft !!! Tag and release

[Philip Perkins]

Rolling on the Terryfest--recording and verite-ing at the Terry Riley Festival in SF.   (Not shown--48 chan ProTools rig rolling upstairs--thanks Lincoln!)  Big music fun while working with Kronos Quartet, Wu Man, Zakir Hussein and about 30 other musical greats.   Thanks to Amy M for the gig and SFJazz for putting up with my pleas, whines and demands!

[Mack]

I tour with Meyersound Stuff....have a truck full of it now.  Sounds great!   

[Boomboom]

Reno Rodeo's been my office for the last days. Documentary following Manu Letaste, first European bull jumper to hit the USA ground... (https://www.facebook.com/bulljumping)

 

 

[Philip Perkins]

Regina Carter Quartet @ Freight and Salvage for Viki Lewis's fiddle doc, getting close to wrapping after years and years…  Great show, great players, good night for me!

 

[Abe Dolinger]

Jealous of all your music gigs Philip!  I love them when I get them.

[Philip Perkins]

Most of them aren't just music alone anymore--not much of that biz left.  Mine are usually doco video shoots….The in-house recording setups music venues (even some very famous ones) have gotten into as an additional profit center (at the expense of people like me) still don't do sync very well, ie bad clocking or no TC timestamping etc.  Weird, but good for me.

philp

[Philip Perkins]

"Asteroid Day" webcast @ the California Academy of Sciences (Golden Gate Park).  Onstage in the BG: astronaut Rusty Schweikart.  Day full of surprises, like no (promised) PA guy so the producer handed me the iPad part of a digital Mackie mixer locked in an equipment closet, an iPad which then overheated and shut down mid broadcast.  (The audience quietly watched me blowing on the dead iPad and waving it around trying to get it to reboot.)  Once back up the battery warning started up, so there was a long search for the in-house AV guy to bring a PSU before we lost control of the PA again…mid-broadcast.  All this while wiring and unwiring and then rewiring 20 people in a row, and trying to solve their laptop-HDMI audio playback issues re their big screen and mixing the broadcast.  Lesson for me: iPad controlled mixers: not ready for primetime.

philp

Edited July 1, 2015 by Philip Perkins