Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1179544
27 dination went into this process with Arthur and his team of suit techs, using Excel spreadsheets to work out the daily timings and strategy based on the next day's advanced call sheet. It really was a tour de force in organization. The other really helpful factor was that our suit techs had experience working on 'normal' films and had radio mic'd actors before, so they were arriving on Cats with a skill set already in place. Arthur also coordinated with the VFX team and URSA's Simon Bysshe. Simon was working full time on making unique URSA STRAP solutions for Cats, that included cus- tom-sized straps to attach the VFX hard drive packs to the bodies of the performers. Everything was coming together but we still had a lot of preparation to do. I sat down with John Warhurst, Supervising Sound/Music Editor, Melanie Oliver, Picture Editor, and her 1st Assistant, Alex Anstey, and discussed the fifty cast members. Tom Hooper and Working Title did not want to go down the route of using an OB truck outside the stages, as Tom wanted to be able to move fast from stage to stage. I was also concerned that if I was based off the set in a truck, I would be creatively divorced from proceedings on the set. I feel that the closer I can be in proximity to the director, the more supportive I can be and positively influence the recording of the performance on the set. I can't stress this point enough. We continued by talking about how many tracks the Avid could ingest, and how many tracks I felt I could actually mix on the set successfully. I invited my other 1st Assistant Sound, Robin Johnson, into the conversation. Robin has another diverse skill set that complements Arthur and me, and is a reason he has been with us on our journey since 1998, joining us on our second movie. Robin is our technical genius, qualified as a scientist and an absolutely first-class audio engineer, computer expert (Mac & PC) and, of course, boom operator. I asked Robin to come up with some frequen- cy plans to try and determine how many radio frequencies we could get reliably working together on one stage, bearing in mind the additional frequencies that would be necessary for IEM's and comm's, as well as the radio mics. When we started looking at our planned workflow, we needed a little more than fifty frequencies to work in close proximity on one stage. The most radio mics we could assign to actor vocals was twenty-four. After breaking down the script in conversations with Tom Hooper and the music team, we knew that eighteen soloists would need mic'ing every day as they were key cast members that would sing solos. The rest of the cast would sing the chorus. When I spoke to Tom Hooper about my plan to only mic twenty-four of the cast, he was unconcerned. He explained that the chorus had been cast pri- marily for their extraordinary and diverse dancing ability. Tom did not feel we needed all of them mic'd because of the time Headband microphone with Bubblebee fur to stop wind noise in extreme dance moves