At the start of October, Chris Packham, the well-known wildlife TV presenter, came to Lincoln to help conduct a BioBlitz in and around the University Campus. A BioBlitz is an period of biological surveying over a short period of time in an attempt to record all the living species within a designated area. This BioBlitz took place for just one day, and the University had arranged for a short film to be produced that would summarise what went on throughout the day. Rob Wynne, Samuel Jenkins and myself assisted with the location sound.

We booked out both Sound Devices 633 mixer recorders, and because there were three cameras, we also rented out one of the TASCAM DR60 Audio Recorders, that I ended up using. While this device is much more affordable than the 633, it performed admirably throughout the day, and I can definitely see the appeal of something like this for someone filming with a DSLR for a YouTube channel. The device is actually designed to seat a DSLR on top of it, which would make adjusting levels and changing settings easier when both devices are stacked on top of each other on a tripod. Sam and Rob both used the 633 recorders, and we all used a Sennheiser MKH-416 shotgun mic complete with a Rycote Windjammer, which is necessary when recording outside to minimise wind noise.

Rob paired up with one cameraman and followed Mr. Packham around for most of the day. It would have been nice to divide this up slightly more, but it would have been difficult to achieve and would have made the whole day more complicated in terms of filming, so Sam and I paired up with the remaining two cameramen and recorded audio where necessary. In the end, most of the audio we recorded wasn’t used, as the the media students decided to conduct an interview with Mr. Packham, in which they asked him to summarise the aims of the BioBlitz, and also what had been accomplished today. This interview was the main source of audio in the video, so our Location Sound from the various activities was very low in the mix.

I did boom this interview, which was interesting, and it sounded really nice. In the video below I actually feature for a short period of time, unfortunately the shot used was one when my arms had gotten tired from holding the boom in an awkward position. Chris had just finished his lecture talk, which we also recorded using a radio mic, and was running low on time, so our interview was set up very quickly and as a result I didn’t have enough time to get into a comfortable stance before the interview began. It was also longer than I was expecting, so that’s why there is a lot of boom shake in that shot. I did manage to adopt a more comfortable position for the final section of the interview: It wasn’t all like that! I’ve enclosed the final video below if you’d like to see it.

The three of us sat in on Chris Packham’s guest lecture, which I found very interesting. We recorded him using a radio mic that Rob gave to Chris; he miked himself up. Afterwards we found that the transmitter and receiver had apparently interfered with another lecture that was going on, but we aren’t fully sure who was at fault here.