DPA 4006 omnidirectional mics, purchased via UK distributor Sound Network, have been used on Agora, a new film by Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar, starring Rachel Weisz and Max Minghella set in Roman Egypt. The mics were used for crowd ADR sessions shot on location at Fort Ricasoli in Malta.
The sound crew behind the recordings was Sound24, the BAFTA winning and Oscar nominated team from Slumdog Millionaire. The team included supervising sound editor and sound designer Glenn Freemantle; sound designer Tom Sayers; dialogue/ADR supervisor Lee Herrick and field recordists Nicolas Becker and Hugo Adams. They chose the 4006s for their clarity, transparency and sound quality, as well as the mic’s low signal to noise ratio and high SPL which meant they could record people whispering one minute and roaring the next.
Three days of crowd recordings were planned, similar to a film shoot but without cameras. Sixty people were hired to represent the crowd. A film set had been built at Fort Ricasoli in Malta, using original stone ruins with missing parts filled in to produce authentic-looking buildings spreading over a large distance. This was an ideal location to shoot the crowd ADR, with its stone walls, partly destroyed churches, corridors and basements providing wonderful natural acoustics.
Over a three day period the team recorded in around 25 different setups, capturing the crowd and taking advantage of the locations. The LCR – three DPA 4006s –was always placed closest to the action, with an additional mono – again a 4006 –on a boom in amongst the crowd. The stereo setup of two 4006s was usually much further away from the action and was used to create another dimension to the sound, either for off mic fx, for the surrounds, or added depth. The LCR setup was also used to record the impulse response of all the locations, interior and exterior, and this wasthen used to create reverbs based on the locations in the film.
Amenabar and Freemantle agreed on a brief for the shoot which was to capture as natural a sound as possible. “The movement of voices, both on and off mic, moving through or with the shot keep it alive and not static,” says Freemantle. “This would differentiate the crowd sound from traditional studio based recordings, which can have a 'staged' feel and risk sounding one dimensional. It was amazing having the crowd out of a studio and really performing with such enthusiasm. The clarity of the DPA mics really helped fulfill the brief and gave the weight and shape required.”
Herrick continues: ”Using the existing buildings, we could set up a ‘shot’ with around 30 people out on verandahs and have them fight each other, run left to right and right to left and run away screaming, essentially producing a ‘3D sound’, then repeat the take in the normal ‘film’ style, as another take, if necessary. Recording this material, with two arrays at different distances from the building, produced stunning results.
”As the final mix of Agora attests, in comparison with the normal method of recording crowd in a small closed studio and then attempting to place it in a ‘natural’ environment with synthetic means, this method of ‘real’ crowd recording was a huge success and I feel sure we will use the method again in future.”
”The clarity of sound from the mics was amazing,” says Tom Sayers. “Even though the location was on the edge of a busy industrial port area, the level and quality of the recordings enabled me to focus on the voices and not the backgrounds. Often single tracks were pulled out of the recordings and the mono voices could be panned in theatre as required.”
Agora was released in Spain in October 2009 where it became 2009’s highest grossing film in just four days, earning the sound crew a nomination in the prestigious Spanish Goya film awards. It is being rolled out internationally over the coming months.