First Sound Class

Well, i was so nervous for this first class with Cammy as i have not done anything to do with sound in my entire life and was just thinking to myself - oh god, this is going to be the most scariest thing i have done! But Cammy came in, and was so nice and introduced the kit to us very slowly - and it wasnt scary at all!

We started off with the basics - how to turn on the mixer, and how to plug the battery in to get it working. He passed the mixer round, and we all got to have a real good look at it, and how to plug the battery in so we know for the future. He then went over all the different channels and inputs were, this was quite scary at first because there was lots of different inputs, but again Cammy went through this slowly and made sure we understood by thourghly going through each different one, one by one, and handing the mixer round the room letting us having shots of plugging in different types of cables to the mixer.

We then learnt a little about the different microphones there is - and what one we will be using most. Cammy showed us how to connect the microphone up to the mixer, and what the cables were he had to use to do this. Again, we all got a shot of plugging the cables into the microphone. We the split into 2 different groups and started to learn how to pick up sound from the micophone into your headphones we had just plugged in. Cammy was brilliant and never rushed through anything and let us all get a turn of putting on the headphones and getting a feel for what it is like. He then gave us a demonstration on how to then plug the mixer into the camera. I felt here i got a bit more confused, but knew we were picking it up again the next day so tried not to worry.

The next day we were straight into it and got all the equitment set up straight away - camera and mixer. We split up into two groups again and started having a mess about with the equitment. As a group we had to set it all up - returning the sound from the camera to the mixer - but after i had done this, i understood how to do it, and realised it wasn't the difficult. We then messed about with the different sounds we could get on the mixer. One by one we got a turn by holding the mixer and boom and using the headphones to hear. I didn't really know what i was doing when i was pressing all the buttons on the mixer - but i definetly knew it was changing the noise and volume of the boom. I felt this was really good to do as you could try it for yourself and could have a wee play about.

We then got the camera set up so we had one person (flick) sitting on a chair while the camera was pointing at us. We all got to see how far the boom could go above her head without going in shot - and is closer than i thought you could get. Also we got told how to hold it without hurting yourself which was also very useful too. We all listened through headphones to hear the different ways flick spoke like when you held the boom different ways above her head. This was really interesting to listen to the different ways it changed by just moving it a tiny bit.

Overall, the 2 days with Cammy was excellent, and much less frightening then i thought! i learnt a lot by only having 2 classes with him, and definetly think i would be able to do sound if i had to do it for a shoot which i didn't have a clue how to do before hand.