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34 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2024 were hugging the actors' flesh. The only thing we could have done to improve this (if we had time) was to run and safety pin a mini six- foot-long dipole antenna to each the of actors' shoulders. I have these antennas, but it also wasn't going to be fool proof as the actors were still inside the faraday cage. So instead, I decided to use my crew's time and energy to mount the rooftop antennas for the individual plant mics and a larger, custom-tuned one-fourth wave mobile CB radio mag mount antenna for the "Bag-Drop" rig. drop rig was as follows: one Sound Devices 833 mixer/recorder, two Lectrosonics DSR4's mounted inside a PSC RF 4 Pack feeding out all eight channels via AES connection, one Lectrosonics LT transmitter in B1 band to an Audio Wireless Power Booster set to 250mw feeding a DPD Productions one-fourth wave custom-tuned CB radio antenna, and finally, one Ambient Tiny ACN Lockit box keeping it all in sync. The entire bag was powered by a PSC PeliLiFe battery feeding every device *except* the Audio Wireless signal booster. For this, I had an isolated power source with a half-sized eSmart battery both housed together in a bespoke 3D-printed holster by Coga Sound. CHASING THE WEATHER The downside in shooting this film in the summer in Oklahoma was the real possibility of seeing (and then getting shut down by) incoming severe weather. Our Camera Operator once said to me one of the more frustrating things about doing this movie was right when the sky started to get beautiful with ominous weather, it was time to shut down for what was typically a lighting delay. The studio mandates a protocol where any severe weather that includes a lightning strike within eight miles of the work area requires the work to stop, and crew must take shelter immediately for a half- hour. Every new lighting strike resets the clock. This would often lead to us waiting around for hours after not completing the scene at hand. And oftentimes after a few hours, we would have to wrap as the storm would linger on past when our day would have completed. This made things complicated and sometimes it would take us longer to complete certain sequences than originally planned. When I would take shelter either in a store front or our own cube truck, I would often have a stereo mic already planted outside and I would record hours of thunder sounds while we waited. The waiting was made easier by the good conversation with our colleagues. People were always eager to get back to work, but also grateful for the safety protocol and the opportunity to take a beat and get to know their fellow crew members without the hustle of the day-to-day work. Between the challenges of the weather and the anticipated WGA and SAG-AFTRA labor strikes, we were racing to the finish line. CHASING COMPLETION As I write the majority of this article during the months of the SAG- AFTRA strike, it bears some explanation that we had to shut down filming with just under a month left until completion of principal photography. My intention was to write half of this section on this side of the finish line, and the second half once we made it over the line! We have such wonderful cast and crew who have worked so hard to bring this movie to fruition. During this strike time, I have been watching dailies every day and getting really nostalgic. I also had some additional equipment modifications done and bespoke accessories made with the express intention on using them on the shoot when we can finally reboot the production. I'm so excited to use the newly developed tools and am happy to be continuously learning from every shoot that I embark on. But most importantly, I can't wait to get back out to Oklahoma and see everyone's faces again and bring this very special production to a successful completion. Wish us luck! OK, Future Devendra here. Now I can open up my laptop to finish this article as I just got back to LA after a whirlwind of a three-week shoot back out in Oklahoma! This time, we filmed in Spencer, Oklahoma, to finish up our rodeo and motel work, Chickasha, Oklahoma, to finish up some major storm aftermath in a neighborhood we took over CHASING MY BAG-DROP RIG OK, the bag-drop rig. For many readers who have done plenty of car work in their careers, this will come as no surprise. But if you haven't, please heed this advice: Creating a well-organized workflow for doing a bag-drop rig in picture cars is the most important thing you can do among all of the layers of your car- work procedure. Even with all the impressive range we achieved with the DPR-A transmitters utilizing their own rooftop antennas and allowing me to mix each plant mic from the follow van with ease, there is no way one should do this type of free-driving work without this failsafe in place. Not to mention there was no other guaranteed way of capturing the actor-worn lavs with this kind of reliability. I would never want to just "drop a bag" either. That should rarely be part of the equation. We use the bag- drop as a failsafe for post-production in the event of RF dropouts, and we also use the bag-drop as an additional layer to mix with in this twofold scenario: part one is to have the bag-drop rig equipped with an output or "hop" transmitter that I make sure has an absolutely spotless carrier frequency. In the case of the various towns and rural areas in Oklahoma, this was in the upper B1 band around 590.000 MHz. In the event that the pod-driven vehicle got too far away from the follow van, I would subtly mix out the plant mics and mix up the feed from the bag-drop which had a more powerfully signal-boosted transmitter associated with it. Then using the aforementioned custom-tuned CB radio rooftop- mounted antenna from the bag-drop boosted transmitter, I would often get about a half-mile range! This came in handy several times and I was grateful for it. Part two of this scenario was how I would also use the bag-drop to provide me with mixable lav mic feeds from the actors. Imagine a scene where an actor is lifting himself out of the moving vehicle to do some heroic work reaching out his window up to the roof of the picture car. There is no usable plant mic near him and there is certainly no boom operator near him and the only shot at getting his dialog is by using his lav. I *could* just say to the director: "Don't worry, it's getting captured on the bag-drop!" But instead of even having that conversation, I would just mix up the bag-drop feed which I intentionally manually mixed as a heavy output of the lavs and this particular actor's lav when I had custody of the bag-drop rig earlier before heading out to shoot the scene. I would also utilize this technique when I really needed to use an actor's lav for a quiet line. Basically, in the absence of any auto-mix utilization, I chose to manually "mix set" the bag-drop to favor all the talent lavs so I could use those signals to my advantage in the dailies mix. Here is a full breakdown of what was recorded as part of the bag- drop rig: ISO tracks 1-4 were redundant recordings of each plant mic that I successfully received from the follow van (but hey, redundancy is good). Then, ISO tracks 5-8 were each actor's lavs recorded just feet away from them and likely with no RF dropouts. Timecode matched my main recorder and I had plenty of 256GB SD cards at my disposal as that recorder would often roll for hours on end, only really stopped during lunch breaks. The equipment used for the bag-