‘Gimme a Break’ for CBBC

This has to be one of my favourite shoots for some time - Gimme a Break is a CBBC show in which kids are given a variety of clues that point toward two exciting holidays to choose from. Then when on the holiday, they are in charge of all activities and punishments for their parents; they get to choose what they do on holiday, when to do it, and how their parents will suffer if the break the rules! A welcome change of roles i am sure.

Most of the kids complain of awful holidays past - how their parents took them to ‘blah blah museum and it was sooo boring, oh my god i thought i was going to like, die and then we ate in the posh restaurant and the food was horrible  - no burgers or anything’ so this is a way to take revenge for those transgressions, and finally get the sort of holiday they want.

So Neil Pollock (Camera) and I set off to the Lake District to meet up with Char and Laura from the BBC for a weeks holiday with the terrible twins; Calum and Jack, and their brave/doomed mother, Mary. Neil and i have worked on a several shoots together, and we were both looking forward to an interesting, yet challenging week ahead.

For me it was an interesting job, as it had some practical challenges; much of the sound would be captured on radio mics; not always a sound recordists first choice, but in this sort of shoot where i would usually have 4 contributors on screen at once (the twins, mum and an expert/leader of activities) they were necessary, and would make the practicalities of filming much simpler; There would be a lot of movement from all contribs, and absolutely no way of knowing who was going to speak and when. Being in the Lake District was good - its a pretty quiet area of the country - not many main roads, and most of the shooting was outside, so the boom would definitely be used, but i had to be able to cover everything should i need to.

So the radios came along with me - I use Audio Ltd 2040 radio mics as i have found them to be reliable, well built, easy to use and most importantly they sound good. I use the mini transmitters as they are easier to hide on contributors than the slightly larger normal TX. I usually use DPA 4071 or Sanken COS-11 mics with these radios, both being high quality omni mics that are good for dialogue. But in this situation i was worried that neither of these mics would be robust enough for the activities planned; it was a water-based activity holiday including rafting, sailing, gorge walking and ‘zorbing’ so in pretty much every activity i expected the contributors to be fully immersed in water.

This creates several problems when using radio mics - the first is keeping the radio transmitters themselves dry - they are worn on the body, and so people in the water is bad - they don’t tend to like being fully immersed in water, as it tends to make them break. This is my technical explanation of it anyway. Fresh water is better than sea water (if you ever drop your radio mics into the sea, the best thing you can do is immediately drop them into fresh water to try and avoid the salt corroding and damaging the unit more than the clean water) but i had to ensure that the packs themselves would stay dry even when in water. I spoke to a couple of colleagues, and decided that rather than creating homemade contraptions involving condoms and gaffa tape (details on request) i would try some packs made by a company called Aquapac who have a range of covers designed specifically for a range of electronics such as mobile phones, cameras, ipods and usefully, radio mics.  The device incorporates a wallet made of thermoplastic polyurethane which is totally waterproof, and then the clever bit - known as an Aquaclip® ; this allows the cable of the mic to feed out of the wallet without allowing water to leak back in. Very useful. The picture below shows you a little of how this works (pics are from the Aquapac site)

I was a little hesitant at first, as the thought of throwing a good £2000 worth of kit into water makes me a bit nervous…especially when i had only just bought the kit to replace my previous Ch69 set of radio mics. So i took some less valuable items that were similar in size and weight (an old mobile phone with headset attached) and put those in the pack instead. I fed the cable through the Aquaclip® loops and twisted the clips to completely seal it. I then filled the bath with water and threw it in. It worked really well - the case floats so if the worst came to the worst you would hopefully not lose anything from sinking to the bottom of a lake, the pack remained completely sealed , and the contents perfectly dry, even after being left in there for an hour. I later found that the key to the pack working properly was feeding the cable through the Aquaclip® loops correctly - if it doesn’t all sit exactly as it should within this seal, when you tighten the clips the pack may still leak. But with correct usage they seemed to be watertight, although not to any great depth. This was fine as there were no plans to go diving as far as i was aware. The whole thing is attached to a belt to allow it to be fitted to a person:

The next problem i had was how to get a mic to work in the water - not literally underwater; that doesn’t do much for the sound quality - but when they did get wet i didn’t want the mic to be damaged by the water and i wanted them to start working again when they were taken out of the water. The DPA’s i own don’t have these qualities, and so they were discounted immediately. The COS-11’s after some discussion with colleagues, and some nervous testing at home were found to be pretty robust on contact with water; they stopped working when wet, but as long as drop of water didn’t stay sitting on the capsule when the mic came out of the water they started working again within a few seconds. This was good, but i wanted better; so i tried a mic recommended by several colleagues; the Countryman B6. It’s a tiny lav mic (see pic below) but people assured me you couldn’t get much better for water based filming. I hired a couple and tried the bath trick again, and was very impressed; even after the mic was submerged it continued to work - lot’s of clonky bubbly underwater sounds in the bath - when removed from the water it worked immediately with no problems at all. I hired 4 of them, and took my COS-11s as backup.

When we shot the water-based activities i was holding my breath to say the least - the family were raft building, and when they set sail i stared worriedly at the rickety state of their vessel. I know raft building is all about falling the water, but with about £14,000 worth of radio mics about to plunge into the icy depths i was perhaps rooting for a triumph of engineering and shipbuilding… Sure enough the raft disintegrated and Calum was first in the water. Listening to his mic on it’s own, i heard the cry as he fell off the raft, the splash as he entered the water, and then…nothing. My heart sank like my radio mics were probably doing too - all the way to the bottom of Coniston water to join all the other expensive debris, like bits of the Bluebird…

Then suddenly - bubble bubble bubble and i could hear Calum screaming how cold it was in the lake - it was back! What had happened was that the mic went fully underwater, still in it’s pack. The large body of water surrounding it had simply blocked the rf transmission from the transmitter to the receiver, rather than water damaging the mics. One by one all of the family went into the water, including Dave the instructor. They all had mics on, and i got some great sound from the ensuing chaos- lots of screaming about how cold the water was, although the mics would cut in and out of hearing depending on how far under the water they were. They all stayed in the water for about 20 mins, before staggering ashore like shipwreck victims in wetsuits. Every one of my mini TX packs were dry, and all the mics were fine too. I was very pleased.

If you would like to watch the episode of Gimme a Break we shot, it can be seen on the BBC iPlayer here.

— Posted by Matt in Uncategorized | No Comments