Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1179544
43 by them on the set. However, I sometimes manage to establish a rapport with an actor, and can unobtrusively communicate directly with them. But if the director finds out… IT'S NOT OKAY TO LIE ABOUT YOURSELF Time and time again, I've seen someone who "padded" their credits get caught out on a shoot—you never know who else may have worked on that show. In the '80s, my girlfriend was a script supervisor, and she was working on another feature and swapping stories when their mixer said he mixed Blow Out. She knew I did that film, not in the least because I had flown her to Philly to stay with me. When she told him I mixed it, he explained, "Oh, I boomed that show." "No," she replied, "Rimas Tumasonis boomed it." "Embarrassed, he quickly said, "Yeah, Rimas is a great guy, I use him all the time," and avoided her for the rest of the entire shoot. The mixer involved wasn't a newbie, and had about as many credits as I did, though lacking the two "bigger" shows I had done, and didn't really need to lie about his resumé. This story got spread around, and I'm sure it didn't help his reputation. NEWSFLASH: As if lying about working on shows you didn't isn't bad enough: I was just researching IMDb and happened to check the crew listing on a movie I recorded about 35 years ago. I found the cable person listed as the boom operator, and the real boom op listed as "sound assistant (uncredited)." I'm sure this was not the original IMDb crew listing. I was flabbergasted—the nerve of that a…hole. I got out my DVD of the show and watched the credits—neither of them had credits as anything. Since IMDb still also lists the orginal cable person as "sound assistant (uncredited)," I assume he edited the webpage and replaced the boom op's name with his own, and sloppily forgot to remove his correct credit as assistant. After finding out about this change, I checked the crew listing for another show I had used him on and saw that he had altered his credit to be a "Boom Operator" too. I immediately submitted corrections to IMDb—who promptly declined them because they were "unable to verify my contribution." I am credited as the mixer on both shows, and stated in my submissions that I had proof (call sheets), so I will pursue this matter further. Just because you tell the truth, doesn't mean you always have to tell the whole truth. If you've done only a couple of features, you can talk about how the challenges of working on documentaries (or whatever else you've recorded) help you when mixing features, commercials, and music videos (or whatever else you've worked on). But if confronted directly, admit the true number. There are other tricks like not starting your invoice numbers with "00001." Be careful about accepting jobs you don't know how to do, figuring that you'll learn before production starts. If you're told that there will be a lot of telephone conversations involving hard- wired phones and you know that prop houses rent a gadget that two phones can plug into and when one handset is lifted the other phone will ring and when it is picked up both phones will function normally, don't think you're home free. I got such a show, and already had my own CO (Central Office) simulator. I even rigged a lav on the off-camera phone so I could get a clean track of the off-camera actor. But as soon as the director heard the first rehearsal, he wanted to hear it "like it sounds on the telephone." Now what would you do? If you tried to connect a line-level input to the phone line (assuming you happened to have an RJ-45 modular phone plug splitter in your kit), you would find that the two sides of the conversation were greatly unbalanced in level. Furthermore, the telephone DC loop-voltage component can cause distortion in both transformer and active-input electronics. Since I was experienced with telephone circuitry, I also had a battery-operated hybrid phone patch (and the necessary adapter cables) so I immediately plugged it in and had control of the send and receive levels, and a happy director. THE SECRET TO PERFECT PRODUCTION SOUND The secret is… there is no secret. There is no one thing that will always produce a perfect sound recording. But there are lots of individual things that will produce big improvements in the quality of the sound you record. 1. 90% of recording good production sound is having the right microphone in the right place. However, learning which microphone to use, and how to boom correctly, or hide ("plant")