Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487667
38 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Winter 2023 Our "stage" had been a Walmart store in a prior life. It was part of an abandoned mall where our production was based. It was a funny setup with the production office occupying a space previously used for a bank and every other department using a former retail space. The so-called stage space was plagued by the usual problems associated with using a space designed to be one thing for another thing entirely. The room had a metal roof which is extremely problematic in the very rainy and stormy Cleveland, Ohio, summer. You could not hear a person talking to you from a foot away during the frequent downpours. There was also a club in the mall which had remained open and had extremely loud music scheduled for just about every evening between 6 to 11 p.m. This was a tad distracting to our cast who had a hard time ignoring it while we attempted to shoot through it. There were many more challenges in the space, including a haphazardly assembled air-conditioning system that persisted as a work in progress throughout our shoot and the hideous acoustics in a hard wall and floored square box. Our grip team headed by Mike Popovich made the place somewhat workable for recording dialog by surrounding our sets with heavy floor-to-ceiling velvet drapes. Teamwork and good inter-department working relationships can make almost anything doable. Another of the many instances when the Art and Grip departments helped us improve the sound for a scene was in the lecture hall film projection sequences. The scene would have a large and loud commercial grade projector running in a college lecture hall's booth while one of the professor characters in the film spoke on the featured sequences. During our scouts, I noticed that the booth was not soundproofed, making it difficult to get clean dialog while the projector ran. To isolate the noisy projector inside the booth, we lined its interior wall with mass loaded vinyl (MLV). "We" in this case means Randy and Eva, along with some help from our Art Department and grips. MLV is a VERY difficult product to work with. It's very heavy and unwieldy. I located a local source for the MLV product and Randy hit the hardware store to get the hardware and tools together. Randy and Eva cut custom-shaped pieces from large rolls and then drilled the heavyweight soundproofing into the walls. It was a grueling job that they managed to get done on our last day of prep so that we could shoot the scene the next day. Their work made a huge difference in terms of the quality of our recording and allowed our director to shoot the scene in the way he preferred. It doesn't take long for anyone who works in production sound to come to an understanding about how important a good relationship with the Costume Department is. The quality of our work depends on it. On White Noise, we had the honor of working with legendary Costumer Designer Ann Roth. Julian-Andres Arango, Lucy Cobbs and the rest of the on-set costume team were a joy to be on set with and worked tirelessly with us to get body mics into the best positions possible. We worked long hours with considerable drive times back- and-forth to many of our locations. The show was plagued by COVID flare-ups in the crew, complications with locations, etc., which kept us working in Ohio into November. Wiring (L-R) Don Cheadle (Murray) and Adam Driver (Jack). Photo: Wilson Webb/Netflix © 2022 Mass loaded vinyl install