Brandy Schwartzberg Midterm paper

In this class we have learned there are three separate jobs that everyone that works in the sound department has to know. Even though they are separate jobs they blend together a little bit. These jobs are the mixer, the cord operator and the boom technician. Without these people a movie would not have good sound as far as dialogue and ambiance. The first job is the mixer. This person has a lot of responsibilities. They connect the mixer to the recorder along with connecting the other equipment to the mixer. They make sure that we have good sound. They do this by putting the mixer audio level at zero and then putting the recorders DB level at negative twelve. By doing this it gives them some head room incase an actor increases the ton of their voice i.e. yells at another actor, we will still have good audio. The mixer is also in charge of doing the time codes. This means they right down the time code or this time on the recorder which the audio is recording and then writes down if that take was good or bad. Next we have the cord operator. This person’s job although you may think it is pretty easy it is a very important part of this department. Without a cord operator your boom person can fall, trip, ect. because someone is on standing on the cord. This person is also in charge of keeping the cords wrapped correctly. The last job on set as far as sound goes is the boom operator. This person determines which kind of mic he or she should use for any given scene. There are a few mics for him/her to choice from. There is the lavaliere mic which is a personal mic that is attached to the actor’s person. There is a stationary lavaliere mic which is hidden in a scene. Then there is the boom mic which is placed on the boom pole and the operator must maneuver it to get the best and most accurate sound. This person must communicate with multiple departments on set to not mess up their work but also do his/her job correctly. WE have learned all of this the past few weeks yet I personal feel like we have just been repeating ourselves. Other than learning about the time codes and that it basically implies frames per second or FPS I feel we have been going over the same thing more than enough times. Also I feel like some of the students in class are constantly asking the same questions over and over again which is hindering my learning. As far as on set reflection, I can only speak of when I worked on the news crew back in high school. I moved around to multiple positions but was mostly used as a floor director. This is the person that tells everyone when we are rolling and calls out stand by. I learned back then that I need to be a little more patient with things because you cannot always control everything happening around you. I also learned that no matter what position I was placed in I had to work together with the rest of the crew so that our end product was what we wanted it to be.