Audio Media - September 2008 - (Page 37) WAT E R LO O Location Foley With Alex Joseph Alex Joseph, Foley Editor of note, is well known for his enthusiastic embrace of adventurous Foley recording, and Mamma Mia had some very specific requirements – mostly water-based. Here, Alex shares a few adventures from the high (and low) seas No B ombing There are a lot of splashes and water in this film, and Nick [Nick Adams, Sound Supervisor], Alistair [Alistair Sirkett, Sound Designer], and I decided that the library ones didn’t really cut it (I do record Foley ones, but it’s difficult to get impacts in a tank as the water hits the sides too quickly)…You need the real thing or close – unless you cheat it with another sound. We hired out a local pool for the afternoon, and with various mics recorded lots of water noises. The DPA miniatures came in extremely useful, as we could place them (to get a stereo pair) right on the sides of the pool. The recording proved to be useful in combination with other mics, in giving the splashes a bit of punch. Another location recording we undertook was a yacht recording. To do this we went to Ocean Village in Southampton, as I have a friend there (Peter Dansie) who owns a 30ft yacht (similar to the one in the film). The reason we wanted to record the yacht was that there are very few good library tracks of yachts, and certainly not specific to this film. Also, any boat recordings from location wouldn’t have been much help, as the brief there was to get the dialogue right, not the fx and ambience. In order to get a close matching sound we had to sail out into the Solent, to get away from traffic and so on. The way we miked the yacht was a bit of an experiment. I enlisted the help of friends and colleagues, Martin Cantwell, Neel Dhorajawla, and Walter Samuel from Sound Network. We wanted to try a multi-miking sync recording, from various perspectives. I wasn’t really going for the 5.1 thing but I wanted to get control of different aspects of the yacht’s sounds. We did several passes of recordings. On the first pass, I had Martin on the boat interior doing a quad recording of that. Then I was upstairs on deck helped by Walter and Neel. We strapped a DPA 4062 on the stern of the yacht near the exhaust, but high enough not to get wet, and we also twinboomed the bow of the boat, one with a DPA 4017, and one with a Sennheiser MK60 (call this the unnamed mic), I also stuck a side mic on a boom (to record MS for a general stereo and mono). We recorded the boat with engine on first, then got Captain Peter Dansie to do various sailing manoeuvres, so we could get different types of sound: choppy > AUDIO MEDIA SEPTEMBER 2008 S onic B o om http://www.merging.com http://www.merging.com
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