#6 When things go wrong on set…

I have been freelancing as a feature film production sound mixer and television mixer for quite some time now. Every shoot is a collaboration of many many people, belonging to different departments, each doing a specialised job and working towards a common goal...to make a good film or a good television show. A lot of planning goes into getting a day's work go off smoothly, but in spite of the best of efforts towards this goal, things do go awry at times….a new camera turns up without cards, a portion of a set collapses due to overnight rain, the colour on the walls of the set don’t turn out the way the director expected them to...and most filmmakers get going with the shoot in spite of accidents, mistakes, errors, setbacks and upsets. People improvise, innovate, change, adapt….but the shoot must go on.

Every department faces problems. Be it the art dept, casting, production, camera, ….. everybody faces problems at some time or another. Some problems are purely due to miscommunication, some could be avoided with better planning, and some just could not have been foreseen.

On a set, anything can go wrong for anybody.

What I have learnt over the years is that you can never anticipate all the problems that you may encounter on a shoot. However every problem helps you to be better prepared for your next shoot.

I thought of recounting some of the actual problematic situations I have faced in my career, and what I have learnt from them.

The first season of Koffee with Karan was shot in Filmistan studios in 2004. A colleague of mine was the primary recordist of this show. As he was extremely busy with some other project, he asked me if I could fill in for him for a few days. I agreed, and so I found myself at Filmistan studio No. 6, where Koffee with Karan was being shot. The audio equipment for the show was being supplied by one of the non regular vendors, but the equipment and the people were known to me. A few episodes had already been shot in the preceding days by my colleague and my first day of shoot was to be an episode with Mr. Amitabh Bachchan and Mr. Abhishek Bachchan. I came on set and started checking the equipment. Those were the days of analogue consoles, and Digibeta tape recorders. To make a long story short, we were all prepped and ready to roll the episode.

The host, Karan Johar had been mic'd up. The two guests, Mr. Amitabh Bachchan and Mr. Abhishek Bachchan had also been mic’d up. Sound check for levels was done.

The music cue played out and the host, Karan said his opening lines, and introduced his two guests. The guests entered from a doorway at the top of the stairs and climbed down the stairs, walked towards Karan, greeted him; there was a little chit chat and then Karan asked them to take their seats. They all sat down in their respective designated seats and the show started. BUT I HAD A PROBLEM. THE WIRELESS LAPEL MIC ON MR. AMITABH BACHCHAN HAD STOPPED WORKING. I had the mic’s audio coming in fine in the introduction, but now, suddenly, Mr. Amitabh Bachchan’s mike (lapel mic No. 2) was not working. I had full RF indicated on my receiver, but no audio!!!! I asked for a cut. The shoot was halted. I asked my assistant to quickly remove the mic (Tx as well as the mic top) and replace it with a back up lapel mic. The interruption had spoilt the flow of the show!!! But there was no option. We resumed shooting and the rest of the day was smooth. The episode concluded. At the end of the day, I checked the offending mic and found that it was working fine. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it!

Anyways, we had a shoot on the following day too, and as usual, the crew turned up and we checked all our gear and all our mic's thoroughly. Everything seemed to be fine. So I told my assistant, ‘today, we will use the same mic as it is working fine’. Our guests for the day were Bobby and Sunny Deol. Well, the same story repeated again. I had audio coming in fine during the introduction and as soon as the host and the guests sat down, the same mic, (lapel mic no. 2) stopped working. I had full RF on my receiver, but no audio! The receiver did not show MUTE! But, the audio meters on the receiver showed no activity! All of a sudden, just like the previous day, the receiver was just not receiving any audio from the Tx!!!! I called for a cut again. The producers were irritated and felt I had not checked my mikes, but I had checked all of them. We again shifted to the backup mic and the rest of the shoot was smooth. At the end of the day, when we checked the offending mic (Lapel mic No. 2), it was working fine!!!!

The third day was a repeat of the first two days. I cannot remember who the guests were, but that was it!!! We did not use the lapel Mic No. 2 for the rest of the schedule. Later on, when a thorough investigation was carried out by the vendor, it was discovered that every time the talent sat down, there would be a bit of stress on the clip that attaches the Tx to the trouser belt. So every time the guest sat down on his sofa, the clip was stressed, and there was a short happening inside the transmitter that caused the TX to malfunction. (A mica sheet had to be placed inside the TX between the metal bodypack and the circuit board to rectify the problem!)

LESSON No: 1 - ANY RADIO MIC, HOWEVER MUCH YOU HAVE TESTED IT, CAN MALFUNCTION IN THE MIDDLE OF A SHOOT. SO ALWAYS HAVE EXTRA MICS ON SET, NO MATTER HOW SIMPLE THE SHOOT IS.



On the same shoot, Karan planned to shoot his finale episode with SRK and AB (senior) as the main guests, along with some more guests (Kajol, Jaya Bachchan, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Farhan Akhtar and Farah Khan) who would join in during certain segments. Those were the days when production could not afford to have many DigiBeta recorders, and we were running out of Iso audio tracks to record all lapel mics individually. So I suggested to the production department that let us get a ProTools DAW on set and record all lapel mics as split tracks (sometimes also called ISO tracks), just as a backup, for safety. An audio engineer I had met during the shoot of Paheli agreed to help me out, and he was good with ProTools. He brought an interface unit (which I think was a DIGI 002) and a (Windows?) Desktop and we set it all up in the control room. I sent him a pre fader, direct out feed from my analogue console of all the lapel mics that were to be used in this episode. We were planning to do about 8 tracks on the ProTools. However, just before we were to start rolling the episode, the system crashed and we could not record anything on the ProTools system. Luckily, I had my regular DigiBeta tracks all set up as I would normally do it, so we were not really affected by the crashing of the ProTools, but the chance to do something different was lost.

My friend who had got the ProTools setup was devastated. Not one to give up easily, he told me that he would come again on another day of the shoot - even if it meant he had to do it for free!!! Since the shooting order had nothing to do with the telecast order, we had shot the finale even before we had completed shooting all the episodes of season 1. There were more episodes to be shot and so, he returned with his ProTools system on one of the days. (By then, the primary recordist of the show told me that he was too busy with some other projects, and would not be able to do this project at all. So I became the HOD of the show).

This time, the ProTools worked flawlessly. It was a regular episode with two guests, so we really did not need to do any backup multi tracking, but we wanted to do our experiment with ProTools on set and were very happy that we could accomplish it. Now all that remained was for us to hand over the audio files to post production! It was decided that since it was late in the night, my friend would take the ProTools system back home and the next day, he would copy the files onto a HDD.

God alone knows why, but we were jinxed! Due to a misunderstanding, the next morning, his assistant formatted the internal drive on which we had recorded the audio!!! We lost all our ProTools tracks and I learnt a very bitter, bitter lesson.

LESSON No: 2 - NEVER LEAVE THE SET WITHOUT A COPY OF YOUR MULTITRACK AUDIO. MAKE BACKUP COPIES OF YOUR RECORDINGS AS SOON AS YOU CAN.

In 2004, I was shooting a documentary on SRK in the USA (YouTube Link here). It was a small crew - a director, a cameraperson, me as the sound recordist and my friend Jon, who doubled up as a second cameraperson cum assistant to assist all three of us with any help that was required. He was the B roll camera person. This 4 person crew was shooting run-n-gun style with a DigiBeta camcorder and my audio kit in a portable bag. This was before the Sound Devices mixer recorders were in vogue. I had an SQN mixer with two radio lapels, a boom mic, (and some extra mics) and I was hardwired to the DigiBeta camcorder. If the cameraman ran off somewhere to take a shot, I had to be alert and shoot off in tow, running hard behind him!!!!

One day, we were shooting in an arena where SRK was performing on stage (Temptations World Tour 2004). The main cameraman was doing some stuff where he didn’t need me. So me and Jon, the second cameraperson, went off to shoot some B-roll stuff on his small DV camera. I was hooked up to his camera, which was a DV camera and we were shooting some crowd reactions. The arena was full of people and I was recording audio with my boom mike and my wireless radio mics were not being used. We were doing our stuff when I suddenly realised that I had lost one of my radio mic receivers!!!! I would always have them clipped to my porta bag, and always connected to my SQN mixer, but in the dark, noisy and crowded melee, someone must have brushed against my bag, knocking off the receiver in the bargain. I was aghast!!!! The arena was full of people. It was like a rock show concert! Where was I even going to start looking for it - especially since I didn’t know when exactly I had lost the damm receiver!!!! But Jon, my cameraman kept his cool, and told me that we should retrace our steps - walk back the way we had come. And after some time, he spotted it, lying fallen on the floor in the aisle, next to a row of seats! Had the receiver got kicked by anyone walking by, it would have slipped under the seats and I would have had no chance at all of finding it! But I was really lucky and owe it to my cameraman Jon, to stay calm and find the receiver.

LESSON No: 3 - NEVER KEEP THINGS CLIPPED ON A PORTA BAG IN A WAY WHERE IT CAN EASILY GET DISLODGED AND FALL DOWN. YOU MAY REALISE THAT YOU HAVE LOST SOMETHING VALUABLE AND IT COULD BE VERY LATE.

Some years later (in 2012), I faced another problem. We were shooting a television show called All is well with Dr. Ahluwalia. The host, Dr. Sonu Ahluwalia used to wear an IFB during the shoot. It was a Sennheiser Induction loop based IFB earpiece, which is actually quite tiny and can hardly be seen when placed in the ear. My assistant was called on set to mike up the host and to fix the earpiece. In a hurry, he ran out of the control room with all the gear in his hands …… the lapel mic Tx and the mike capsule, the Rx for the IFB with the induction loop cable, and the IFB earpiece. Somewhere on the way, in his hurry to get backstage, he dropped the earpiece. By the time he realised that he had dropped the earpiece, some time had elapsed. Although he immediately came back to look for it, the tiny earpiece was lost and was gone forever, never to be found. We had to do that day's shoot with a wired earpiece, much to the annoyance of the host and the director.

LESSON No: 4 - WHEN YOU HAVE THESE TINY AND SMALL THINGS TO TAKE CARE OF, ALWAYS CARRY THEM IN A ZIP LOCK TYPE OF BAG! THEY CAN GET MISPLACED AND LOST VERY EASILY. AND THEY DON'T COME CHEAP.

On a film shoot in Kerala a couple of years ago, we had to shift location during the course of the day. The first part of the shoot went off well. I was using Lectrosonics portable receivers, and they were separately mounted in a wooden box on a C stand, away from the cart, via a snake cable. This is often done when the range of the mic's is an issue - we take the receivers closer to the talent. The shoot started off and all was well.

Around 2 pm, the chief AD announces, “Lunch break and shift location!”

Now, the unit had to shift to another location, which was a 40 minutes drive. So post lunch, the shifting happened. We reached the second location and were getting ready to set up our cart when we realised that the attendant had left all the radio mic receivers at the first location!!! In a communication mixup with the boomman, each thought that the other person had packed the receivers, when actually, no one had. It was now 4 pm. The sunlight was good enough for only one more hour. We needed to start shooting with our artists, who were almost ready to face the camera; and my receivers were a 40 minutes car ride away!!!! We somehow managed to get the receivers to us just in time before the main dialogue shots happened. But it was nerve racking, and we had to do some shots only with boom mikes!!!

LESSON No: 5 - ALWAYS SPEND AN EXTRA FIVE MINUTES TO DOUBLE CHECK AND ENSURE THAT ALL EQUIPMENT HAS BEEN PACKED UP PROPERLY BEFORE LEAVING A SET OR LOCATION. AND CLEAR COMMUNICATION IS KEY TO HAVING AN EFFICIENTLY WORKING CREW.


On another outdoor film shoot, we were shooting in a remote location in Punjab. It was a 5 am crew call from the hotel as the location was a one hour drive. Being the HOD on set, I was in a different hotel and the rest of my crew, (my boomman and attendant) were put up in another hotel. I left at 5 am in my car, all alone, and was on my way to the location when my boomman called me and said that their car has had a breakdown and has not turned up at their hotel!!! Panic! To make matters worse, the first scene of the day needed to be shot in the early morning light!

By the time, another car was arranged for and it reached the location with the gear, the artists (Arjun Kapoor and Parineeti Chopra) were ready with their make-up, in costume, on set, with the camera in position and everyone was ready to roll. The entire crew was waiting on Sound!

In total filmi style, my equipment car finally arrived with my equipment and crew...screeching to a halt! The sound cart was lowered and other crew members helped to bring it to me, on location. I quickly got the recorder ready - there was no time to check anything and the mikes were straight away sent to the artists, who wore it on set; and we rolled in five minutes! And completed the scene in the early morning light that the DOP and director wanted to shoot in! Phew!!!! That was a close call !!!!

LESSON No: 6 - ALWAYS AIM TO REACH YOUR LOCATION AT LEAST A HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE CALL TIME. THIS GIVES YOU SOME LEEWAY TO TACKLE ANY UNFORESEEN EVENT, LIKE A TYRE PUNCTURE OR A VEHICLE BREAKDOWN.


During the shoot of Kaabil, we had a few days of full night action sequence shoot (at Mumbai Filmcity, Helipad). The main scene to be shot there was a major fight scene which happens in the night and which was to culminate with a huge explosion in which a godown was to be blown up. Which meant that the set would be completely destroyed in an actual controlled explosion. This was to be shot with six to seven cameras.

Once the blasting shot was done with the multiple cameras, we had to be immediately ready to shoot the next scene, which was a dialogue scene, with the godown smouldering with dying flames and smoke and the early morning light just breaking over the city landscape. It was all meticulously planned and the shots were precisely timed, so that we would do the actual blast, just a few minutes before the dialogue scene was to be shot, and just as dawn would be breaking over the city.

The blasting shot went off well. Now we had to get ready for the dialogue scene, where two cops come in the Police car and stop in front of the burning godown and say their lines. So we had the artists mic’d up in advance and the Lectro Tx were put to sleep using the mobile remote app. Immediately after the blast, as soon as we were ready to shoot the dialogue scene, we went to wake up the Tx. And both the Tx powered up, showing RF signals on the receivers. BUT NO AUDIO! The director wanted to roll and my mic’s were not working!!!!

We had to remove the batteries from the Tx and reinsert them, and hey presto, the Lectros were up and running fine! But removing batteries from transmitters that are strapped to the ankle of the artists, wearing tight cop uniforms - you really don't want to be doing that when everyone is ready for a take!

LESSON No:7 - MAKE SURE YOUR TX WORKS FLAWLESSLY WITH YOUR PHONES REMOTE APP. TEST THE THING THOROUGHLY; AND DON’T ASSUME THAT IT WILL ALWAYS WORK WELL. SWITCH ON THE TX WELL IN ADVANCE TO SEE IF THEY ARE ALL WORKING FINE.

I have had boom rods breaking in transit, boom rods breaking when a mic is being held above the talent, microphone cables breaking, Tx antennas breaking, microphone tops breaking, Tx screens going bad, Tx malfunctioning, boom mic’s malfunctioning, plant mic’s failing, my monitoring headphones breaking on a boat in the middle of the sea, CF cards in recorders malfunctioning in the middle of a shoot, recorders crashing in the middle of a take! I have had a headphone adapter (6.35mm to 3.5 mm) failing me at an outdoor shoot in Shimla! I have had CAT6 cables running Dante signals going bad. I have had a digital stagebox going bad on me. I have had entire multitrack recorders run smoothly during an event, only for the recording to show up as unplayable due to computer hardware / software issues.

In spite of all your planning and checking, sometimes things do go wrong on set. However, when they do, it all boils down to how well you have planned your backups and redundancy.

Anything can happen on set. To anybody. In any department.

Be professional. Plan for your shoots thoroughly.

Always keep extra gear with you, as back up.

Be prepared to tackle the unforeseen!

And when the unexpected happens, stay calm. If you have prepared well, you will always have a plan B to fall back on.

Until next time,

CC


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