The challenge of Song 4 - Leaving Town (duet)

One of the biggest challenges I faced whilst on Jailbird was Song 4. Not only were there the complication of recording vocals live on set but now it was doubled. During pre-production we had a test on how doubling up the recording devices would work. It was a success and so was it on set of the actual shoot. Both Lucy and Kane (our cast) had the DPA and Puretone set-up. They went onto sing and act as they should of.

It was only when the project came into the sound edit did the new challenges start to occur. Due to the amount of cuts and many different takes used in the final edit, the vocals where not consistent in the slightest. On set we recorded in 3 different way. DPA's, Boom and a stereo mic. I once again made the decision to only edit to the DPA's due to their consistency and decent sound quality. I scrapped the edits audio and started from scratch. One problem that did arise is that Lucy is a much more powerful singer than Kane, and due to the height difference, when Lucy and Kane would sing near one another Lucy's voice would be picked up very clearly and what was supposed to be Kane's microphone.

The video is a comparison of the 4 microphones used. Although this is not the take chosen, it is the cleanest across all recordings.


Once I have synced up the radio mics to the visuals I needed to create the atmosphere. Similar to the white void scene I needed to create the illusion of space. The atmosphere was key but more importantly the reverberation of their voices needed to be grand.

The top reverb window is Kane's (Rick's) and the bottoms is Lucy's (Jenny's). With his voice being a lot more 'bassy' I brought down the wettness ever so slightly, not to over power the reverb. The space is supposed to be a void, therefore the voices shouldn't be echoing. However, for the emotions to come through and simply to have a more serial experience the the fullness of the voice and atmosphere needed to be present.