Zaxcom recording wireless

[Jeffrey S. Wexler]

For those of you who don't look at r.a.m.p.s., here is another amazing account of Billy Sarokin's use of recording wireless.

quoted from Billy Sarokin:

The other day was unusual, even for the kind of work I do. I ended up
using the Zaxcom recording radios in 3 different ways for 3 different
reasons.

We were at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. It was New York's
original airport that became a military air base in the 1930's and
played a crucial role in World War 2. It was abandoned in the early
60's and is now part of Gateway National Park. We were using a
section of one of the taxi-ways to create a cold war border crossing.
The entire set probably stretched about 500' including active military
vehicles and guard posts on each end and the long razor wire
surrounded 'no man's land'. Of course many takes ran the entire
length of the set. My sound cart was about 100' past the end of the
set (since no one was ever sure where the set or the shot actually
ended!).

I had 3 speaking characters and a wireless boom. I did tests before
we shot and radio range seemed to hold. And for the first setups in
one direction everything worked fine. I only got a few minor rf
dropouts at the very end of the take.

BUT, when we reversed direction everything fell apart. The actors
were now inline with the very distant Empire State Building (and all
of NY's tv transmitters). My range dropped from 600' to 200'. My
options were to either go with it and use the recording cards or re-
rig and build a handheld rig and walk with the actors. Since the rest
of my gear was at base camp and already pre-rigged on an insert car
for the next scene, it would have taken 20-30 minutes. I decided on
using the cards. Fortunately, after 2 very wide shots we went into
closeups where the boom (a Schoeps CMIT) worked very nicely. It was
wireless too, but I had my third hold the transmitter away from the
boom guys body and that gave me enough range to cover the scene. In
the end, we only did 2 takes where I had to use the cards. I copied
them that evening (on the clock) and sent them directly to post using
yousendit.com

Next we were on an insert car towing the actors around. That was all
going smoothly, but then they decided to have the B camera
simultaneously shoot drive-bys with the 2nd hero car. Since my boom
guy (George Leong) was in standby mode while I was on the insert car,
I sent him out to the B camera to cover the drive-bys. He used his
Zax 992 transmitter. I jammed it with time code and let him record to
his SD card. He got a bump to mixer rate and he kept track of the
timecode on the slate so it was an easy job to dub it to dvd that
evening.

Finally they called wrap. But wait, I said three instances and there
were only two. About 5 minutes into the 'wrap' the sun came out (did
I mention it was raining the entire day) and the director wanted to
get one more shot with one of the actors freewheeling. They were
ready to go instantly and I would have needed 10 minutes to re-rig
from the insert car to freewheeling mode, so they called the shot
'MOS' and off they went. I was able to tell the assistant as they
drove off to slate it as if it were a sync shot. When they got back I
pulled the actors transmitter, did a quick playback check of the SD
card and that night burned wav files and sent them to post. btw, I
added 2 hours to my time card for the extra work.

It's getting complicated out there folks.
Billy Sarokin