Home nightclub agreed to let us use their ‘Tequila Lounge’ to film in this morning. The scene consisted of the two main characters infront of the bar, a barman, and extras sat around the room in pairs. We had many problems with this location, and have already been talking about possibly reshooting in a different location. The problems are listed as follows:

• The first issue we noticed was the amount of noise coming from the refrigerators behind the bar; they were very loud, but fortunately we were able to turn them off with the discretion of the manager.
• Secondly, the nightclub also served food and drinks during the daytime, meaning that it was open for business whilst we were filming. Music was being played in the rooms near us at a level which was very obvious on the recording; it would have been impossible to record a room tone that would have worked well in editing. Cleaners were also walking around the corridors, which was evident on the recording.
• The whole length of the bar contained a mirror, and after trying out several positions, it was impossible to stand with the microphone placed above the actors without it being seen in shot. To overcome this problem, we had to position ourselves behind the bar with the microphone pointing upwards. This was awkward as we could not freely move the boom pole without it either hitting objects behind the bar or moving in to shot. We had to greatly sacrifice sound quality in order to get a take.

Not only did we have problems with the location, but also with the equipment at first. After filming a few takes, we realised that our Marantz recorder was set to receive signal at mic level, and not line level as it should have been. Due to the restrictions with the equipment, our headphone feed was pre-recorder and so we didn’t notice this until we played back one of the files through the Marantz, and it was then that we noticed that the Marantz had amplified and already amplified signal, causing a lot of distortion.

This scene was very problematic, and it highlighted the key issues when using a location that isn’t perfect for the job.