Katherine of Alexandria
I have recently been working as Sound Mixer on a feature film which started shooting this January at Pinewood. The film stars -among others - Peter O’Toole, Joss Ackland, Steven Berkoff and Sam Beckinsale. There are plenty more familiar faces in the cast too.
The films recounts the story of Katherine of Alexandria; Katherine is probably best known for the ‘Katherine Wheel’ firework which symbolises the instrument of torture designed to break her. More importantly, she was the first woman of position to publicly denounce Rome’s false gods and her eloquent arguments with fifty of Rome’s finest scholars in an open court in Alexandria captured the spirits of ordinary people around the world.
It was Katherine’s belief in the freedom of faith that led to the eventual collapse of religious persecution under the Romans.
For the recording process I used the new Sound Devices 552 mixer, feeding 4 individual tracks to a Sound Devices 744T and a mixed track to a SD702T. The booms were using Sennheiser MKH50 mics to allow us to record as much of the superb vocal dynamic range of actors such as Mr Ackland and Mr O’Toole as possible, with a couple of Audio Ltd 2040 radio mics with DPA 4071 capsule attached - for emergency use only of course! We also sent a feed of the mix to camera A (shooting two Red One cameras - one on a dolly, and the other on a Technocrane for much of the time) via a Ricsonix Camlynx bluetooth connection, which was an elegant, if slightly troublesome (lots of wireless frequencies, metal objects, bags of water - people - and small electric motors eg on the smoke machine caused a few issues) method of connection to camera without adding to the numerous cables already attached to the Red. This allowed immediate playback with audio for the Director and DOP. We synced rushes using the time honoured method of a clapperboard, rather than jam-syncing the timecode of two audio recording devices with the Red cameras. This would have been easily achieved with Lockit boxes and a Digislate, but i prefer the simplicity of the clapperboard, and the assistant editor was happy to sync using a clapper.
You can see (and more importantly hear!) the results in this brief trailer; http://www.katherineofalexandria.com/trailer1.php
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