TV Sound Recordist

[jammers]

Hi Blue Room,

I am looking into getting into working in TV, documentaries, sporting events etc... as a Sound Recordist.

 

I have been working in live audio for about 7 years now and have managed to work at quite a high level working for large PA companies (Just got my K1 cert :)), touring arena's, major festivals and live TV music awards. However I have always wanted to get into TV recording, especially documentaries and sporting events.

 

Do any of you guys know how to get into this field? Obviously with the experience I have I'm pretty apt and understanding microphone polar patterns, gain structure and problem solving etc...so I don't really want to have to take courses where I have to go too far back to basics, but I don't mind doing it a bit.

 

If any of you guys have the knowledge of what steps I should take and who to contact please let me know, it would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Jamie

 

jamieearle2002@yahoo.co.uk

[Bobbsy]

As with any of these queries, there's no one right way into the industry. It's often a matter of knowing or meeting the right people...or just being in the right place at the right time.

 

Even with live sound experience, there's probably a quite a few practicalities that you need to become aware of. One thing you might look at is the two day Ravensbourne short course in PRACTICAL LOCATION SOUND.

 

After that, a lot of phone calls and CVs....

[Jivemaster]

Certainly a college short course, probably look for some student film projects and do sound for them. Look wisely for a low budget student film that might actually get somewhere and get your name on the credits. Can you get "sound" credits for something that you have done the sound for the live show too.

[paulears]

Sound recordists also spend an awful lot of money on equipment - little of which has much use outside that area. There's not a lot of crossover, so your new kit would pretty much be separate from anything you already have. It could be useful to join the IBS - Institute of Broadcast Sound, which covers TV and radio, and is quite different from anything we do. They like different brands of kit, too - so while we see Shure and Sennheiser, they have Sony and Audio Ltd (plus lots of others we don't use).

[dbuckley]

Yeah, as I understand it, when a movie hires a sound recordist, he is expected to arrive ready to work with all the required kit, which often involves a digital multichannel recorder and wireless mics of the unobtrusive variety, as well as the boom. Thus these guys tend to have a mountain of specialist kit. This is very different from theatre, where the skills and equipment are normally two separate issues.

[Bobbsy]

On the "owning gear" question, the answer is a bit different depending on whether you're lucky enough to be on staff at some TV company or working freelance. Staff people usually use company gear--but the trend in this part of the industry is very much towards freelancing everything out and expecting people to turn up with their own gear.

 

What you need varies depending on what side of the industry you're going into--the separate digital recorders are mainly in the realms of features and dramas--for news and documentary, you'll probably just plug your location mixer into the back of the camera. At very least you'd need a small location mixer (mine was by Audio Developments but there are several others), s short shotgun on a fishpole, probably an M-S stereo mic, 2-4 wireless lavs with battery receivers, a couple of hand helds (wired or wireless), good wind screen for everything, headphones, and a small collection of cables and adaptors. This list goes up if you're working on drama/feature films.

 

It's not unusual in the news and documentary area for a cameraman and sound man to work together (and offer their services together) as a team.

 

If you get to the stage of sending out applications, don't just stick to the big obvious companies...there are tons of small production companies that hire in crews on the job--sometimes working for big broadcasters.

 

Finally, the downside of all this: there's quite a trend in the industry to cut crew sizes and the sound person is often the first to go--it's not unusual for camera ops to try and function as a "one man band". Even worse, sometimes the journalist is given a mini camcorder and tries to do everything with no crew. Bigger productions still use proper crewing but a lot of entry level jobs are disappearing.

 

Bob

[paulears]

Bob touched on M/S. Worth making sure you're up to speed with this. The worse thing ever happened to me was not having an M/S proper monitor facility for your headphone - on the popular mixers they are a proper designed in feature. You can cope without, but it's quite difficult to predict if what you are recording is going to be 'solid'. You can hear what you are recording, but having different sound types in each ear is a bit weird. Lots of interesting quite unique features - like breakaway cables between you and the camera, adaptors to use the DC tap on the cameras for emergencies and a zillion different types of mics, isolation mounts, hard and soft windshields and curly XLR cables. The Canford Blue Book has lots of the right types of equipment for comparison. I've got a bad shoulder now, and discovered only last week that holding a boom above my head for more than just a short time is now far too painful, so that's one job I can't do until I get myself fixed.