Guest Blog - Behind the Scenes of Fireproof, part 2 -  263 days ago

 

Part 2 of a guest blog written by Rob Whitehurst of
sounddude.com.

Another innovative thing that just sort of happened, and then became the norm for the rest of the movie, was in between set ups or scene changes, Bill, the capture engineer, or director Alex Kendrix, would be editing the movie. They started cutting the movie together while we were making it, on set, between set ups. They would take all the camera angles, and other footage that had already been shot, and edit it together, with wild lines, sound effects AND pre-recorded sample music and have it ready to view in minutes time. We were constantly being told by studios, editing facilities, execs, post houses, etc., that no one has done a movie this way yet, especially a Christian film. They had nearly all of
the movie’s scenes edited in rough cuts by the time we wrapped in December. Truly amazing!

So my job became strictly the production sound mixer and not recordist. I did use my Sound Devices 744T hard drive recorder to pick up some sound while riding on the nose of a freight train (definitely an E-Ticket ride), while zipping through town in a fire engine (a boy’s dream finally come true), and for various hospital beeps and whirs. But the Apple G5 computer became my recorder.

Issues on this movie were confined to mostly weather (we got rained out several times) and noise. First of all, our grip package came with a generator on a flatbed truck. This was not a theatrical generator with baffling, it was your standard everyday industrial monster that you could hear for blocks. So we parked it as far away as I could get the gaffer to put it (they only had so much banded), put movers blankets everywhere and did the best I could but there are still genie sounds in many scenes. When it gets to the theater, we’ll see if we can hear it. My sound designer, Nick Pallidino says he can take a lot of that out. We’ll see what kind of wizard he really is.

Most of my issues came from it being a low budget, independent
film, which does not “own” the locations we shoot in. On large
budget films, you rent locations and you pay for expensive ermits
to lock off surrounding roads with police, shut down factories, turn off a/c units for whole buildings, etc. On this movie, we shot in free, donated spaces. So we had virtually no say in controlling or
eliminating background noise. We shot a week in a real hospital wing. We couldn’t turn the very loud a/c off and most of the dialog lines were whispered (this is a whispering movie!). So we lived right on edge of frame with the boom, blew some takes because of the mic dipping into frame, and even with that, some scenes still sound like the starship enterprise (background roar). Oh well! I finally had to come to the place where I just got what I could and went on. Not easy for a perfectionist! And I had to use wireless mics as principal sound in too many shots. I hate their sound and the hassle of using them.

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