In my earlier career days, I used to work a lot on car shoots. I’m not sure how I carved out this niche but I was chuffed with it because I bloody love cars.
I know nowhere near as much about them as the people I worked with but, I was certainly in my element.
These days, I don’t do so much of this. I don’t shoot very often at all. So, when an opportunity arises, I have a little check list:
Is it for a current client that I genuinely care about and who cares about me?
Is it going to be fun AF?
Is this end product likely to be killer?
And every time I get a call from Sam Hancock, the answer to these 3 questions is always “Fuck Yes!”.
But, wait a minute…
“Sam, I want to have crystal clear dialogue from inside my helmet whilst driving this screaming 80’s F1 car at full throttle…”
“Oh. That could be tricky”
I guess another question on that list should be “will this challenge me in a way I enjoy?”.
Once again, the answer was “Fuck yes!”
Experience matters
The range of potential problems with a job like this is vast:
How to avoid clipping & distortion as a result of loud engines?
How to hear speech over the noise of the car?
Where to mount mics and recorders where they can’t be seen when extra space is non existent?
How do we make sure whatever we do rig, is mounted safely?
How do we prevent kit from getting wet and broken?
How do we record the engine notes in a pleasing way?
How do we monitor what we’re recording when we cannot be in the car or use a follow car
I could go on. But only through years of experience and knowing what equipment could do the job was solving any of this possible.
The Process / How we did it
I think this is the bit you’ll find valuable, or at least interesting.
Kit
To solve a number of these problems I knew we had to think small and light.
Where we usually plug various microphones into one recorder, this simply wasn’t an option. A standard recorder is way too big.
So I used the Tentacle Track E’s. One for each sound source.
These are small enough to hide, light enough to mount easily, and have all of the features I need to make this work (32-bit recording, Bluetooth monitoring, long battery-life etc).
The only downside is that the microphones they come with a terrible. Well, that’s not totally fair. They’re fine. But they’re terrible for this very specific purpose where high SPLs were the main issue.
So I swapped those out with some DPA 4062’s. Very low sensitivity meaning they won’t clip when exposed to loud sounds. They’re also tiny!
Mounting
Then it just became a game of hiding mics, recorders and cables in places they couldn’t be seen by the cameras and would be deemed safe by the track marshals.
I was able to squeeze a microphone into the foam inside of Sam’s helmet, right next to his mouth. This was the only way we were going to be able to hear him above the roar of the car.
But the recorder was too big to fit inside the helmet too so I mounted it to the side of his helmet using some Joe’s Sticky Stuff. Filthy name I know. But it bloody works!
I them rigged another microphone inside the cockpit of the car to capture the sound of the engine from the driver’s perspective. This was a little easier, there was more room to play with so no real issues here.
Exhaust notes
Lastly was the issues of capturing the exhaust sound (the juicy bit!)/
I cannot express how loud these things are. I could physically feel my ear drums being stretch when it rev’s. It was horrible to be quite honest.
The back of the car has all kinds of paces to mount a small mic and recorder but the main issue was how to keep them both dry, out of any airflow (failure to do this makes your recording sound like shite), and capture the sound in a pleasing way.
Why do I say pleasing? It’s hard to explain but think about every great car film you’ve seen or if you’ve ever watched the F1. What you’re hearing (usually) is either the sound from within the cockpit or the sound of the car whizzing past a fixed microphone somewhere on the track. You rarely hear the exhaust sound directly. But this is where the sound is coming from.
So through some experimentation, I found that the best way to capture exhaust notes without it sounding like the devil gargling on a bees nest, was to put a microphone at the back end of the car, facing away from the exhaust.
This non-direct impact of the high SPL the exhaust was putting out, seemed to do the trick.
That’s all the nerdiness from me for now
I have got a lot more I could write on this but I’ll leave it here for now. However, if there’s any part of this that interests you and you have more questions, just let me know and I’ll see if I can help!
Enjoy the film.
And a final hats off to the guys at Continuum Films for making this so bloody epic.