Palsy - Part 1/2 (Production)
3-4 min read time
On the set of Palsy.
(L→R) Syazani Zikri (@syazzik)- MC, Kiefer Yu (@kiefer.yu)- Camera Assist, Gwai Lou (@gwai_lou_films)- DP, Duncan (@szxduncanv2) - Sound Mixer/Boom Op
This is Part 1 of my 2-part series of my audio journal of Palsy. Read up Part 2 to find out the challenges I had recording on-set.
Palsy was a straightforward short film (written by Farihin Ufiya and Chew Gui Fang) for sound as it had only one actor.
It’s a story about an architecture student played by Syazani Zikry (@syazzik) who has cerebral palsy and the film attempts to show the point of view of what he’s going through during his work.
Since it was a straightforward film, it was a good testing ground for me to test out my new equipment that I added to my recording rig.
It was the usual one boom and one talent wire setup. I’m running my MKH416 as my boom and testing out the Sony transmitters (UWP-D series) and running the DPA4061 as the talent microphones. A secondary pair of Sony transmitters were also used as a camera feed into a Sony A7SII - which eventually got reverted back into plain old clapperboard for audio sync. As for backup transmitters, FEISK had a couple of Sennheiser G3s which I eventually had to revert to as the microdot adapter** (by YPA microphones) for my Sony transmitters didn’t create a good solid connection.
**YPA microphone microdot adapters for the G3s work though so that’s why I switched over to my G3s.
Production Audio
This short isn’t driven much by the dialog but I would still take the time to request more takes to get production audio so we can reduce the time needed to design the actions of the actor.
Although it was not dialog heavy, it was also a challenge to capture usable dialog as I couldn’t get close enough due to the shot composition. There was a scene where the character needed to strip for the story but before that there was a phone conversation and all of that needed to be one continuous shot. Most of the dialog and interactables was done at one spot and luckily there was a drawer where I could plant a microphone to grab the phone call and the actions of the character; killing two birds with one stone!
I wanted redundancy on the phone recordings too so I had the phone callers hold a transmitter so I can have a clean audio that I can use, incase the production audio was unusable. This came in handy when we moved into post-production. Also, this is one scenario where you shouldn’t mix both the phone recording and the original recording together. A realtime phone call will always have variable latency and trying to match and sync up the two different audios will be unproductive.
And within 2 days we’ve wrapped production for Palsy! Fun bunch of people as always with FEISK - onwards to post-production!
Read up - Palsy Part 2 where I go into the audio post production for Palsy.
If you've find this useful and find anything that you’d like to know more about, please comment below or reach out on my socials (twitter, instagram)