Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487667
36 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Winter 2023 with Shure ADX receivers for a scene with five cast members waist-deep in water floating across a creek in a station wagon. Shure Axient Digital has been the go-to wireless system for mission critical applications like arena touring, live theater, and broadcast for years. I'm glad we finally have these robust tools available to us in production sound. As is almost always the case, doing the best work requires teamwork and collaboration with other departments. We had our share of challenging locations but one set worried us the most. In fact, I had been sent an iPhone video from a director's scout of this location months earlier because the acoustics were so bad that pretty much everyone on the early scout thought it would be impossible to shoot there. Everyone except Noah, who wanted us to find a way. The space had been a reception area of a now defunct theater space in Cleveland. The room had an octagon footprint with twenty-one and a half foot tall walls and a parabolic ceiling. All surfaces, including very large glass windows were hard and reflective. There were two adjacent rooms. On one side double doors opened to an even larger lobby area with a parabolic ceiling. The other side opened to a circular ante room with a very high ceiling and a stairway. This wasn't your average variety reverb situation. The existing acoustics in this space made speech barely intelligible. The scene to be shot here would be a spirited debate between two professors. The written dialog was expected to be performed in a dynamic fashion and came at a pivotal moment in the story. After sharing room recordings and discussing the situation with Sound Designer Chris Scarabosio, we worked with our producers to bring in an acoustical consultant to run a series of impulse-response tests in the space and make recommendations on possible treatment options. Enter Quincey Smail of ABD Engineering and Design, who was brought to Cleveland to acoustically model the space and make recommendations on modifications to improve reverberation time and background noise. Production Designer Jess Gonchor and Art Director Chris Farmer took Quincey's findings and materials suggestions to make the space completely suitable for recording the scene while keeping intact all the visual design elements that Noah loved. Wall treatment locations Playhouse layout RT Graph Acoustical grid locations Photos courtesy of ABD Engineering and Design