The Scout

The past 3 weeks I worked on a short film called The Scout. I was a Boom operator and Production Assistant on this film. For the protection of the production company, I will only give vague details on certain things, but the DP of the film has filmed almost everything that has been on the Syfy network since the 1980s.

The Sound Mixer on this film was also a recent college grad, so we worked together to learn how to use the fancy expensive equipment the production provided. Neither one of us had used any of this equipment.

We had a Deva 16 sound recorder, lectrosonic wireless lavaliers and transmitters, Sennheiser shotguns and a DPA shotgun. The Deva was touch screen and had tons of options that you HAVE to tell the recorder before shooting or else it wont work.
The Transmitters gave us problems with frequencies and such throughout most of the production but one day the Sound Mixer couldn't make it to set so I mixed for the day with my friend Sam boom opping for me. Sam boom opped for me with QFS in The High Life and How to DP. Together, we read the manuals over again and quickly found our problem with the transmitters and fixed it immediately. We powered through the rest of the production of the film and came a long way from days 1 and 2 when we were trying to figure out the mixer and wireless lavs.

Many longgg overnight shoots, working 30+ hours consecutively, 20+ on back to back nights, things just got insane for a few weeks with no sleep, running on Dunkin' literally. But I have a more cushy gig I'm doing right now in between short films.

There's so much more that could be said about this film, but I will keep this somewhat short. We did stunts with the child actors on a few days and had them do some real crazy stuff. Micing up children was an awkward situation for me but I got pretty used to it.

They called me back to work as boom op on their next film starting this weekend. It will have a new Sound Mixer and it's looking real bright, although we'll take it one step at a time.