I had been asked by Megan Street and Grace Kelly to help them with another one of their projects for their Documentary module. At first I was still undecided because of financial issues, it costs a lot to travel to Loughborough but they agreed to help me with my funding, as I was helping them with their shoot. This documentary was basically about the life of a street pastor and what it is like to do this voluntary job. So we went out with our kit on a Saturday night in the town following the pastors with the cameras and microphones.
During the weekend shoot I had to record a few interviews and just following Megan's camera to get sound of interviews of people out and about in the town, using the boom pole and mic and a zoom H4N kit, which was a pain to carry around town. As we were outside I needed to put the windshield on the microphone but it wasn't windy so I would have the recording level on high. This time we bought duracell batteries, as they are a well known branding name and they lasted quite a long time, which was good so we did not have to change them all the time. The major problem I encountered whilst we were shooting was that the XLR cable was faulty and every time I move the wire slightly it cuts the sound completely. I recorded the interviews of the street pastors before we went out into the town, to try and get around the faulty XLR cable I had to use the stereo microphones, which were attached on top of the zoom H4N kit. Luckily the weather was not too windy, which meant I could still record some sound and also Grace was using her DSLR with a rode microphone attached to it, so hopefully she can pick up the sound that I couldn't on mine.
"Shooting out of town always brings complications to the production. Travelling with equipment has to be planned out and arrangements have to be made well in advance for the crew." (Cartwright S, 1996)
The one thing that I would check next time is whether the kit is all there and working as some wires and technology wears out over time.
Cartwright S (1996). Preproduction Planning for Video, Film, and Multimedia. Boston: Focal Press.
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