Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1351135
Spring 2021 – LOCAL695.ORG 17 The Director wanted to shoot both sets at once and record both sides of the action. The interaction between the actors would be via both the Bitch-Box and the "Sound Phone." The Bitch-Box was a two-way communicator with a speaker for broadcast and a microphone on a push-to-talk switch, which would cut out the speaker and activate the internal microphone. None of the units we had actually worked and most were just shells with a ratty 1940's speakers rotting away in them. The best solution I came up with was to make this communicator open so that one set could hear the action in the other as we were shooting simultaneously. My option was to install a tiny self-powered monitor in all the boxes and place an Omni-directional conference table-style mic close by to serve as a signal to replace the PTT mic. All the mics and speakers were hardwired from the gimbal via a multichannel stage box (giving us only one major cable to wrangle and protect against the gimbal movement) back to Firstly, I spent a couple of days onboard the USS Kidd scouting and understanding just how the internal communications, radio telephone, sonar, and ship-to-ship actually worked in 1940. Thanks to a very knowledgeable crew there, I was forming a picture of how to make our 1940's replica ship sets behave as if they were at sea during wartime. The first challenge was to figure out a way to make the "Bitch-Box" work. This is the internal communication device that allows all critical parts of the vessel to talk to each other. In our world, that was primarily between the pilothouse set (Tom Hanks' domain) and the CIC set (command center for radar and course plotting during engagement). In real life, these areas are several decks apart, in the movie world, the pilothouse was on a twelve-foot-high gimbal with the ten- foot-high set built on top, which could articiulate more than thirty degrees in any direction (to simulate big seas), truly a marvelous thing to see in motion. The CIC set was built on the stage floor some fifty feet away from the gimbal. Tom Hanks stars as U.S. Navy Cmdr. Ernest Krause. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+. Top right: USS Kidd during shooting. Bottom right: Sound world during shoot- ing (L-R) Sound Cart, Support Cart, Playback Amps and Mixers for VOG and Sound FX, Comms Utility controller.