Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521562
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 33 insect chorus featuring the snowy tree cricket. I supplied them with a robin singing. At one point, the insect chorus comes up, and that was mine. It's sort of a nice relaxing pulsation, which is low-pitched and very musical. I supplied him with some clean barn owl hooting, the Canada geese that flew across the scene, the insect chorus was a binaural ambiance. An Eastern screech owl comes in with a soft melodic trill that sounds very nice. Right before the end, another insect comes in; a slightly higher pitched cricket. What mics do you use for binaural? LE: I use a mic housing called the Stereo Ambient Sampling System ("SASS") that was invented by a guy up in Vermont who produced it through Crown. It emulates a human head that holds the omnidirectional mics about seven inches apart and has a baffle in between. It gets rid of the problems associated with the pinnae. If you think about it, using a binaural head where the mics are inside the ear past the pinnae, when you play it back through headphones, it runs it through your pinnae again. I bought the housings and retrofitted them with a Sennheiser MKH 8020, so it's quasi- binaural. Sam, how did you wind up finding Laura Cunningham as a production mixer? SG: That's a good story. I was looking for a documentary person who knew their way around those kinds of mics. She went to RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and studied architectural acoustics and did material with VR and gaming, which is way ahead of documentary sound. This was a funny project because, usually, the soundperson desperately tries to stay out of the shot. We were saying, "Hey, get over here, we want you in the frame." MM: It's always a bit of an ask to record differently. For the film that I'm on right now, I asked the production sound mixer to add an Ambisonic microphone and four more outboard channels, and there's always a little bit of resistance. All the individuals on 32 Sounds rose to the occasion and saw it as an opportunity, and usually had to rent or buy a bigger recorder. Some of them were working on four-channel recorders, which was plenty for a doc, but this required a six or eight or 10-channel recorder. Sam was happy to pick up that very minimal additional cost, but to great effect. And he'd tell you how valuable it was to have those additional recordings to create immersion. LAURA CUNNINGHAM: Sam found my website because he was looking for somebody who not only could do regular documentary production sound but also someone who could do spatial sound recordings. It was exciting because, with most projects, I don't even try to convince people to use that kind of recording technique. Sam explained to me what the project was all about and I told him it sounded like an amazing project. My undergraduate work was in film at NYU, where I earned a bachelor's in film and television production and specialized, unofficially, in sound. When I graduated with my master's, I came back to production sound. VR was just becoming a hot thing where people had the 360 GoPro rigs. That's when I started doing spatial sound for that kind of capture. Most of what I did was for VR, 360 video, and documentary. I've done a lot of recording with Ambisonics and using the Neumann dummy head for binaural. For my master's degree, my specialty was immersive audio. What kind of gear were you using? LC: The setups varied a little bit, depending on what we were doing each day. It was as simple as mono mics and lavs for the more strictly documentary-style stuff. For anything a little bit more creative, I had at least an M/S set up on a boom, a Schoeps CMC 6, and the MK 4 capsule and a CMC. 8. I like using that for documentary since you can just put it in a Zeppelin. For some of the stuff, I used my Ambisonic mic. I Production sound mixer Laura Cunningham and Don Garcia capturing sound Capturing sounds of the beach in binaural and Ambisonic