Volumes

A large amount of my friends are film students (it seems like most people in Salford are). And one thing that film students always need is soundies. So when my friend Ellison started asking around for people to be on his film, I was fully up for it. Unfortunately I was only on the project for 5 days of shooting, because I had to move out of halls midway through, then I was in a different city so it wasn't worth me going over just for the film. But those 5 days were some of the most fun I've ever had.

The first day wasn't too interesting for me - the shooting was all taking place in a tiny office, and there were already two soundies with more experience than me, so I was on runner duties. Day two was much more exciting, because one of the other soundies had to drop out for reasons unknown to me. That meant it was me and Ry, who is probably about 7 foot tall. Naturally, he was the boom operator. We were filming in the top floor of The Old Pint Pot, a pub near the uni, so the first job was getting all the kit there. There's a great photo I took of me in the lift with a shopping trolley full of C-stands.

The second and third days were in a house near the M602. These were a bit more challenging, because there was much less space to move around, but on the other hand we had less to think about. There were only two actors and no extras, compared to 4 actors and another 4 extras in the pub. Things ramped up for me personally on the third day, because Ry had to drop off the project - he was moving out too. On day 4 we were back in the pub, and I was alone for almost the entire day. Ry dropped in for an hour or two at the start, as he was just packing the day before, but for the actual shoot I was on my own.

All in all, my side of things went pretty well. There were a lot of things that went wrong or needed urgent action on the videography and management side of things, but I wasn't in charge of those and I certainly don't have the expertise to talk about them. The main thing that stuck out to me was how much gear you need for video, and conversely, how little you need for sound. We had two cameras, two big lights, two tripods, 3 or 4 C-stands, a lens kit, two monitors, and innumerable smaller stands and cables and whatnot. For sound, we had a 4-channel field recorder, a boom, 4 wireless lavaliers, and a pair of headphones. I could have carried all the sound gear in my bag without any hassle.

Even though it didn't last long, Volumes was a great introduction to sound recording, and I can't wait to get on more films later this year.