The On Location Recording Process

28th February – 28th March

The on location recording process took a total of 12 days recording in Scunthorpe spread over 4 weeks. The equipment we used for this process was a Marantz, Sennheiser shotgun microphone, a boom with a pistol grip, an XLR cable, and headphones.

We encountered several issues that we had to over come when recording on location that we had to over come. On the first day, after about an hour of recording, we noticed that if we listened carefully we could hear the heating in the headphones, so we had to make sure the heating was turned off every day when recording in the house from then on, but apart from that, the first few days passed with no problems. One of the issues we first encountered was recording out side. There were a few outdoor scenes, but they were all particularly short in length, but it was near impossible to record outside as the microphone picked up any hint of wind, rendering the audio practically useless. This was also the same for any scenes that we had to record with the bath running. We decided not to even record any scenes with the bath running as we felt this would just be a waste of time and decided to do all the sound for this in post production. For a couple of the days of on location recording we received a Marantz that seemed to pick up a lot of background noise, even at minimal levels, with advice given over the phone from a member of media loans; we were still unable to get rid of this quite hissing noise being picked up by this old style Marantz. This is evident in the final mix down of the film.

We only filmed on location in Scunthorpe 3 days a week, as opposed to the planned 5 days a week, as after the lead actress was already hired, no one had asked her about her availability and it turned out she could only do a handful of days a week, one week she couldn’t make any days, so that week was almost a write off as we could only record a handful of scenes that just included the lead actor. A couple of the days the actress could attend, Shane and I couldn’t attend, but filming had to go ahead without us being able to record the sound on location with time being limited due to the lead actor having another job in the up coming weeks and with filming already being later than scheduled, so the producer took over the sound recording process for these 2 days and the editor logged the tracking sheets.