La Wedding Planner
A fictional comedy miniseries that explores the concept of the modern family through the story of Eliana, a wedding planner who is faced with a life-changing decision at the same time as she gets hired for her dream job.
Preproduction
Before the shooting I made sure that we had all the necessary equipment and that it was working appropiately to reduce any failure during production. I also had the opportunity to replace the lead sound mixer in of of the scouting days; I evaluated things such as the noise level, reflective surfaces, possible placement for the sound station and power availability.
Production
Role: Boom Operator, SFX & Backgrounds Editor
Something that I’ve learned after doing production sound for a couple of series and films is that you need to learn to be resourceful and to fix problems on the spot. This production was no exception.
For a few reasons, we weren’t able to get a recorder with the sufficient inputs for a number of scenes that had a higher character count than our primary recorder’s inputs (Zoom F4). As a solution we used my Zoom H6 to expand the recording system. This "Frankenstein" rig allowed us to manage multiple lavaliers and two booms simultaneously.
The first day that we had to shoot some exterior scenes, we were faced with a lack of power for the director sound monitoring station. I repurposed a wireless lavalier transmitter/receiver system to send the master mix by connecting the transmitter to one of the recorder’s outputs, and handed the director the receiver, with headphones attached so she could monitor what we were recording in real time.
Another thing that challenged our creativity was a scene that made it impossible for us to hop in and operate the boom. We talked to the grip department and they helped us build a rig so it could be attached to the ceiling, since the structure was suited for it.
We also had some difficulties with the lavaliers that requiered us to proactively do frequency scans and sometimes get closer with the recorder with the attached receivers because we were experiencing signal interferences. In another occasion we also had to perform a disassembly and inspection of a malfunctioning receiver to ensure internal connections were secure becauuse we were having some unwanted noise.
