David Sexton's Client Shoot

On Thursday night, I went to Muse Bar to film David Sexton perform some of his marvelous magic to drunken bar customers. My role was both camera operator and sound recordist, me and Oli Nodwell alternated roles throughout the night.

For the first time we used a Sennheiser clip radio mic which was then hooked up to a Marantz flash audio recorder. The result was pretty good considering the amount of background music and general drunken chatting. The one thing that we did find with the audio was that we clipped the mic on david too high near to his voice box. When we film next time we will get better results if it is placed further down on his shirt pocket.

Camera wise, this was a bit of an experiment too. The bar was quite dark, so we opened up the iris to 1.6. This was still not bright enough, so we increased the shutter speed a little. It was still too dark, so we wacked up the gain on the camera. The result was a very, very grainy video. It might be nice to use this if that is the aesthetic you are going for (weird/grungy) but I think we were all thinking that it would look much better with nicely shot crystal clear HDV. For part of the filming we switched the gain off, thinking that we could do something about it in post. Low and behold, we were right!!! Apple Color is absolutely amazing. It is SO powerful that we could make the footage look like there was a bright light on in the bar. The only real problem is that it is difficult for the camera operator to see what he is shooting!

David has also posted some footage that we shot last week in the TV studio experimenting with cards to create little idents and transitions for his project. Have a look on his blog.

Oh yeah, thank you Steve Jobs.