Today was the Café Nero shoot, which quite frankly was absolutely awful! There were so many different problems that we knew it would be impossible to get a good take:

• The fact that this is a coffee shop had huge implications on the sound recording aspect of filming. The amount of noise made from the machines was not only loud, but was also consistent, meaning that we just couldn’t get a good dialogue take. The actors were also having trouble with their lines, and so when the opportunity did come to get a good take, it was spoiled by having to cut, and restart the scene.
• A speaker was poisitoned directly above the only place available for us to film in. We were unable to turn this off individually, nor were we able to turn off the whole system as this was a business and couldn’t afford to accommodate for us, which we fully respected. The problems with a speaker being directly above the microphone are obvious, and due to shotgun microphones having a polar pattern that still accepts some signal from the rear, there was nothing we could do about this

Essentially, capturing good quality audio today was impossible, and so we decided that re-recording the whole scene in ADR would be the only viable option. The original audio we recorded was still imperative however, as the actors needed a reference in which to complete the ADR.