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TAKE 1, POV BOX: SOUND RECORDIST / BOOM OPERATOR
FULL INTERVIEW: MISTY CONN
Misty Conn has been working as a boom operator in both television and film since the 1980s. The projects on which she has worked range from feature films like Waiting for Guffman (1997) and Boyhood (2014) to HBO’s award-winning series Breaking Bad (2008-2013). She spoke to me from her home in Los Angeles, taking time off from working on the CW Network series Jane the Virgin.
JH: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview.
MC: Thank you for asking me!
JH: Tell me, as a sound recordist, with whom do you work most closely during the production of a film? The cameraman? The director?
MC: On a daily basis, I do work very closely with the camera operators. Depending on how difficult the lighting set ups are, I might need assistance from the director of photography or the gaffer to eliminate boom shadows and reflections. My sound department really does need to work closely with every department in some way or other. For example, the electricians supply us with power, the grips supply me with apple boxes and ladders so that I can get where I need to be to work around cameras and lighting. The assistant directors and production assistants are vigilant about controlling noise on the set so we can get clean tracks. The wardrobe department helps us to place body mics on the actors in such a way as to eliminate as much clothing noise as possible. Sometimes we do hair mics, and this requires us to work with the hair department. The list goes on … We really couldn’t do our jobs as effectively without all of the wonderful help and kindness from the other departments!
JH: That’s neat. Really gives us a sense of the bigger picture. I’d also like to gets a sense of how what you do as a sound recordist relates to the finished product, the film soundtrack, since a great deal of film sound is added after the shoot, during post-production. I know it’s hard to generalize, but on average what percentage of what you record during a film shoot makes it onto the film’s finished soundtrack?
MC: Most of it. Well not quite, since in a given workday, we do so many takes. We used to shoot on film, but now we shoot on digital, so during a shoot the director won’t cut as much as was done before digital film. Back in the days of film, film was so expensive, we were constantly cutting the take, whereas now we just say, “OK, let’s back it up and let’s do it again.” The cameras keep rolling, because we can! My department’s job is to literally record every word of dialogue. But, of the takes that we keep, all of the day’s work—for lack of a better term—is entirely used in the soundtrack.
JH: I understand.
MC: I work more on episodic television than I do on feature film, so that makes a bit of a difference, but in general, whether feature or television, a sound recordist’s primary job is to capture every word of dialogue. Hopefully, unless there’s some sound issue, there’s no looping involved—that’s always our goal.
JH: So, most of what you record makes its way to the final cut because, as a sound recordist, you’re focusing on the dialogue; other sounds, background sounds and so on, will be added later. I get it. Let’s talk a bit about some of the feature films you’ve worked. One of my personal favorites is Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (1997), a very funny film, as far as I’m concerned. And it’s also got quite a bit of live music in it.
MC: Yeah, Waiting for Guffman was great fun, one of the most fun projects I have ever worked on. I believe the improv-style of filming was just finding its legs. Working with Christopher Guest and all of the incredibly talented improv actors was such a joy.
JH: You can really tell, watching the film, that everyone was enjoying themselves.
MC: Yeah, we were all just laughing half the time. It was such a new thing, too, it was like, “Here we go.” There was no strict script. There was an outline, and you had these incredible improv actors, and you just let it happen.
JH: That was kind of a new approach to a feature film at the time, right? I know that Christopher Guest dislikes the term “mockumentary,” but this would be one of the first mockumentaries besides his earlier This is Spinal Tap (1984), also a music-themed film, as it happens.
MC: Yeah. Other than Spinal Tap, I don’t know of any other film that had been shot this way. In the beginning, Guest wanted this idea of, “we know there are cameras there,” to make the cameras part of the film. But early on, as we moved through it, he decided, “We don’t want to see the cameras; we don’t want the boom operator to get in the shot, we want to shoot it traditionally.”
JH: That’s right. I don’t remember seeing any cameras onscreen—or you, the sound recordist, for that matter.
MC: I do think I made it into one shot, briefly, in a mirror, I think. In one of the dressing rooms.
JH: Oh, right, near the end of the film during the final performance?
MC: Yeah. It was probably a mistake.
JH: I’ll have to look for that. Now, in terms of the music of Waiting for Guffman, in the film’s first act, you’ve got audition scenes, with the actors singing and a piano playing in the background. For most of those scenes, you don’t actually see the pianist. Presumably, you were there with one boom mic, recording the sound, so that the sound we hear in the film, that isn’t post-production or re-recorded sound, right? That’s the sound that was actually produced during the shooting of those scenes?
MC: That’s correct. We just recorded those in the moment. Of course, so much of what we shot wasn’t used, didn’t make the cut. But, so far as I know, nothing was laid in, or added in, in post-production.
JH: Whoever this pianist was (Jean Fuller), she seemed to be doing most of the piano playing in Waiting for Guffman, or at least during the audition scenes in the first act.
MC: I’m trying to remember. God, that was like twenty years ago!
JH: Later in the third act, though, during the final performance of Waiting for Guffman, there’s an entire orchestra that accompanies the singers, not just a piano. A small orchestra, but still, more than just a piano.
MC: Yeah, that was interesting. The technology has gotten better over the years, but the discussion surrounding that scene was, “Do we actually record the actors sing and have them wear earwigs that would feed the music into their ears, so that we don’t hear the music but we actually hear them singing?” That was the route they wanted to go at first. But then, they decided that it would be simpler to play the pre-recorded music, have them lip-synch to playback.
JH: I see. So, singing to playback was how the third act orchestral performance in Waiting for Guffman was done, as opposed to the first-act audition scenes?
MC: Yes, they decided to just do that for the orchestral scene, because they had already pre-recorded the music. And then, the band could actually play if they wanted to. They don’t have to mute themselves. Nobody has to mute themselves because all that’s going to be used in the end is the actual playback track which has already been recorded.
JH: You can tell that’s the case, because many of the instruments that you see on-screen are actually played in the soundtrack by synthesizers, old nineties synthesizers, so it’s pretty obvious. There’s a trumpet solo, for example, and it’s clearly a synth being played. In other cases, I seem to remember a clarinet solo in that same scene, it’s an actual clarinet. So, there’s a combination of real and synthesized instruments happening there, I think.
MC: Yeah. The people performing on-screen were all well-trained musicians. If I remember correctly, to make it more realistic, we did record individual musicians at times in close-ups, to intercut with orchestral scenes performed to playback. So, you could say, “Oh, they’re actually playing, I can see him playing.” But otherwise, they were playing back to the recording. That whole idea of, “Do we do playback versus recording things live,” it often just comes down to, “What’s going to be more budget friendly, less time-consuming, less complicated?” For most of that Guffman final performance scene, the decision was made that playback would just be the easiest thing.
JH: That makes sense.
MC: And in big budget feature films—not Waiting for Guffman, obviously—but with these big budget films, where you’re mixing dialogue with the music, you’ve got playback, it can get very complicated. But even in the Guffman scene we’re discussing, you could say, “Let’s have Parker Posey (who plays Dairy Queen employee Libby Mae Brown) actually sing her part,” but then she might mess it up three or four times, and you’re having to do take after take. Whereas, if she’s doing it to playback, it’s going to be less time-consuming and quicker. But then, you’re forfeiting the actual recording live for something that may be obviously lip-synching. There are a lot of little things that go into that decision-making process.
JH: And I suppose the potential for a mistake during a take increases when you have more and more people. I was recently listening to the audio outtakes of Wizard of Oz (1939), to Judy Garland singing with an entire orchestra, and each time she messes up her vocal line, the entire group, orchestra and all, has to start the song all over again.
MC: Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like, everybody has to get it right.
JH: Can you tell me a little bit about the process of sound recording during a shoot?
MC: Sure. First off, I, along with the sound mixer and utility sound person will watch the actors rehearse. We watch the movements of the actors as well as where all of the lines are delivered within the scene. From that rehearsal, we then wait to see how the scene will be shot, where the cameras will set up, whether they will be using wide or tight lenses. Once we’re armed with that information, we decide how best to mic the scene.
JH: And how does that work exactly, when you go to mic a scene? Let’s talk microphones a little.
MC: Well, in a perfect world, we would capture every word on boom mics, as the microphones we use tend to sound the most dynamic, warm, and conversational. However, if the camera positions will not allow for us to be close enough to the actors with booms, then we will either put body mics on the actors or do some combination of boom and Lavalier microphones and “plant” mics.
JH: Is a Lavalier mic like a body mic, clipped on to clothing?
MC: Yeah.
JH: How is that different from a hair mic, which you mentioned earlier?
MC: Oh, well, the hair mic, which is a “plant” mic, is a type of Lavalier mic. Sometimes we’ll need to put the mic in the actor’s hair. It usually works better with women, because it’s easier to hide these mics. It’s a Broadway thing, you know. These hair mics don’t create the same kind of noise that body mics do. When you put a mic on another part of the body, we get all sorts of clothing noise, or the mic gets buried, or it gets muffled. Lavaliers come with their own sets of issues, because we can’t have them exposed. In broadcast television, the Lavalier mics are exposed, so that doesn’t present an issue. But in our world, because they have to be hidden, we run into all sorts of issues.
JH: Hair rubbing against the microphone must present a problem.
MC: Oddly enough, that doesn’t present a problem. You would think that it would, but it’s something about the texture of hair. And oftentimes with clothing, it has to do with the material. Some materials just tend to be noisier and more abrasive than others. The thing about hair mics, which are just a given in Broadway stage theatre, they’re very different. In film, the actor may be like, “I don’t want you messing with my hair,” there’s all sorts of politics involved with it. Usually if I’m working with an actor who does do work on stage, they’re like “Absolutely,” because they’re so used to having it. It’s a slippery slope sometimes. I would use them all the time if I could, because they’re pretty bomb-proof, in terms of the issues we have when we put mics under clothing.
JH: Aside from Lavaliers and hair mics, what other microphones you use?
MC: As far as the other mics go, on our boom poles, we use condenser microphones, which tend to have a cardioid mic pattern, which is warmer, more forgiving. At other times we use super-cardioid shotgun microphones. Shotgun microphones are more directional and have much more rejection to the back and sides of mic. We usually use shotgun microphones for exterior scenes, when we need to reject more ambient noise.
JH: What’s a shotgun microphone?
MC: A shotgun mic is a condenser microphone used mostly for exterior shooting. I personally like the Schoeps CMIT 5U shotgun mic.
JH: I’m a little confused with all these microphone names. Can you tell me what kinds of microphones are used when?
MC: Well, I started about thirty years ago, but over that time microphones have remained pretty standard. The Schoeps microphone was used for a long time, although not many people I work with now use that one anymore. Not that it’s a bad microphone, but because better microphones have come into the market in the last fifteen, twenty years. As a boom operator, I have to know the dialogue. Because the mics are so directional, I have to be on cue as soon as the person says their first word. Otherwise, you can hear that it’s off axis. That’s how directional the microphones are. The pick-up pattern rejects as much external noise as possible, so that we can get these very clean, warm sounding tracks. So, we tend to use super- or hyper-cardioid mics. Their pick-up pattern is more honed down, almost at the tip of the mic, and will reject as much exterior noise as possible. We tend to use warm, cardioid condenser mics for interior scenes, because we’re not battling much exterior noise. As soon as you go outside, you have all sorts of traffic, airplanes and just general louder ambience. Which is why we tend to go to shotguns which are much more laser focused and a little less forgiving in the pick-up pattern. Most mixers, I would say, tend to only go to those super-cardioid microphones when we’re outside.
JH: I think I got it: cardioid mics for indoors and super-cardioid for exterior scenes.
MC: That’s it!
JH: Now, you referred to the condenser mic as warm and more ideal for capturing the human voice. Why are condenser microphones, which are the oldest kind of microphones, still considered the best?
MC: I’m not sure exactly why, but the condenser microphones are the best for conversation sound. They have good noise rejection, they’re very on-axis, they direct right at the sound, as long as you’re putting the mic in the right place. And the tone you get is deep and rich.
JH: The range of frequencies is better?
MC: Yes. On the mixer’s end of things, limiters have gotten so good. An actor can be loud and soft, and, in the past, you might have over-modulated too easily—
JH: What does overmodulating mean?
MC: Um, let’s say I scream into a microphone. It would be so loud that you would just hear it splatter. If you’re listening through headphones, you would hear it distort, and the sound would be unusable. A limiter is a compressor that will prevent this from happening in the final mix. The limiter controls the up-and-down of the volume that’s coming through the microphone. As the sound recordist, you no longer have to worry, “God, I’m three inches from the actor’s mouth, and they’ve gotten a bit loud.” Previously you’d have to record that over again, because that part of the track is unusable.
JH: Can I ask about the practical reality of handling a boom mic for an entire day’s shoot? I would find that exhausting after fifteen minutes!
MC: Yeah, it can be tiring. But it’s like any repeated activity, at a certain point it becomes muscle memory. It has gotten harder in recent years, in the sense that, shooting now on digital film, like I mentioned earlier, directors don’t cut as much. They’ll go talk to the actors for two minutes, and you keep shooting. With film, that would cost a fortune, so you would cut at every opportunity you had. In Waiting for Guffman, we would run through entire film magazines, about ten minutes worth, but that was because of the nature of what we were shooting. It was improv: “We’re going to roll the camera until the camera rolls out.”
JH: That was Waiting for Guffman, in the late nineties, and the switchover to digital film hadn’t happened yet. Cameras were still using the old film stock? How long would a magazine of film stock last?
MC: The longest take you could do was ten, maybe eleven minutes. That was it, a thousand-foot magazine. Whereas with digital you could just go on forever. (Laughs.) As a boom operator, you learn to find your moments to rest. It’s been rare, but I have had a sound mixer walk out and say to the director, “Look, you’ve got to cut, my boom operator needs a break.” But usually you find your moments. If the director walks in and talks to the actor, then, OK, this is my moment to rest. But digital has really changed things in a lot of ways. We used to shoot with one camera.
JH: And now it’s multiple cameras.
MC: Yeah, multiple cameras have become the norm, two to three cameras, both episodic television and feature film.
JH: That’s a throwback to the early days of sound in the twenties, when multiple cameras were used on set in order to get different shots and still avoid camera movement and the resulting undesirable sound.
MC: And that’s still the way it’s done in sit-coms. They’re in such controlled environments, on sound stages, and they’re usually working with fisher booms.
JH: What’s a fisher boom?
MC: A fisher boom operator sits on a platform, with the boom locked onto the platform, for greater accuracy. I would imagine that years ago, they were all fisher booms. It’s a different operating skill. Sit-coms will use these. They’ll rehearse the scene with the boom operators and cameras for a day or two, and then shoot the scene with multiple cameras. It’s a lot less on the fly. It’s a very controlled environment. Nowadays, it kind of depends on the nature of the show, or how the director likes to shoot. You’ll work with some guys where you throw up three cameras and “Go, go,” it’s not very well thought out; and then you work with guys where they might set up a camera or two, and each shot is very thought out. Why we end up on Lavalier mics now more than in the past, is that a lot of shooting will be a very tight shot while we’re shooting a very wide shot. There’s no way with a boom microphone that you can match the sound of a boom microphone that you can match the sound of a tight shot with that of a wide shot. A body mic is the only thing that will do that.
JH: When would the changeover to digital film have taken place?
MC: There was definitely a transition period where the old film stock and the new digital film overlapped. Even when digital was coming into play, I was still on shows where the question was, “Are we shooting digital or film?” In the beginning, a lot of people didn’t trust digital. On director of photography I knew said, “Well, there’s nothing I can do to fight this digital thing I want to say that the last major feature film I was involved with where we shot using film was Boyhood (2014).
JH: Boyhood was not shot digitally?
MC: Yeah, it was shot on film. That’s because Boyhood took director Richard Linklater some ten years to complete. He had started using film stock, and so he stuck with it for the duration.
JH: I read that Boyhood took Linklater twelve years to complete.
MC: Not sure about twelve years. I believe it was shot over ten years, maybe, although I don’t want to give you wrong information. I think Linklater started out doing one segment a year, and then stepped things up until the end, when he was doing three segments in the last year. But, yeah, it was quite the undertaking.
JH: Kind of a special project for you as sound recordist, similarly unique to Waiting for Guffman, although the two are very different.
MC: Yeah. As the director, you have to trust from the start that your actors are in it for the long haul. You can always have a revolving crew, if you need to. And to a certain extent, he did. I wasn’t available for all of it. The first several years he was doing it, I was always other places, working on something else. But I was glad I had the opportunity to work on the latter part of it, something like the final four segments of the film.
JH: One of the last scenes in the film is a very poignant one, in which the main character, Mason Jr. is heading off to college, driving in his truck, and the song “Hero” (2012) comes on, a song by Family of the Year. And Mason Jr. reaches for the volume and presumably turns up the song, and at that point the music gets louder. Do you know if the song “Hero” was playing when you were shooting that scene or was it added in post-production?
MC: Yeah, I did work on that scene, and I’m pretty sure that the song was added in post-production. Those kinds of things usually are. If it’s a controlled song like that, with the volume going up at one point, we would have had to have a whole thing set up with that particular song, assuming that song had been cleared at the time we were shooting it. Can you use that song? There’s always that part of it, the music licensing, that usually happens post-shoot. I’m sure that was done in post-production.
JH: And the clearing rights for “Hero,” or any of the film’s other songs, would have been done by the music supervisors (Meghan Currier and Randall Poster for Boyhood)?
MC: Yeah, the music supervisor works with the director to pick the music, and make suggestions that way. I know that oftentimes, there are a lot of hoops to jump through, what’s it going to cost to get a song. Some people may song, “I don’t want you to use my song.” At other times, the director or music supervisor might say, “I can’t get the original version, I can’t afford the original version, so I’m going to have somebody emulate it.” Which, of course, is never as good as the real thing.
JH: But at least it’s doable from a financial point of view.
MC: That’s right. So that often happens, where a cover of a song rather than the original version is used. The music supervisor works with both the director and the producers. I don’t know all the ins and outs of what they have to do to get clearance.
JH: Either way, choosing and clearing songs for a film usually comes after your involvement.
MC: Yes and no. I’m certainly never directly involved with that. I do know that I’ve seen both situations. Let’s say, we’re using a song like “Hero” while filming that scene and, in the moment, somebody asks, “Has the song been cleared?” This happens a lot. And the answer is usually yes or no. Either, “Yeah, it’s cleared, it’s fine, we can use it.” Or, “We don’t have clearance for this song yet, but we’re going to go with the assumption that, by the time we’re done with the film, that’ll be worked out.” That often happens with product placement, too. It’s like, “Do we have clearance for this?” And the answer is pending, sometimes. I’ve seen it both ways. If we do playback with a song as a sound department, sometimes the producer will come to the mixer and say, “Here’s the music, it’s been cleared, we’re OK to play it.” At other times, they’ll say, “Here’s the song we’re hoping to use, we’re going to use it for the scene today, let’s see what happens.”
JH: Staying with the sound for that third-act scene from Boyhood, in addition to the song “Hero,” there’s also background noise like the truck on the highway. Were those background sounds done in post-production also?
MC: I’m pretty sure, yes. Remembering that scene, I think the camera was even unstable. It was very shaky. It’s the scene where he’s in the truck and he’s parted ways with his girlfriend, I think that’s the one we’re talking about. Unless in the moment, they had said, “We have the song, and it’s cleared,” and they could have done it then. In which case, sometimes if we’re pulling the vehicle on what’s called an insert car, then we may have something set up in the car, where the mixer is controlling playback. And they would say, “OK, we’ll cue you when he reaches for the stereo, at which point you bring up the song.” Then, we’d be handling the source music.
JH: I see.
- Oftentimes we’ll use an insert car in films or TV series, but I don’t recall that setup in the Boyhood scene. I think it may have just been more, “OK, reach for the radio, here’s the song that theoretically you’re hearing.”
JH: Another expression I’d like to ask you about that’s associated with sound recording during production is wild track. What does that refer to?
MC: Yeah. Beyond dialogue, the other main thing that the sound crew is asked to record are extraneous sounds that they might want to put in the soundtrack later on. Let’s say we have a scene where there’s supposed to be a dog barking where we see a dog onscreen. So, then we’ll record a separate track of the dog barking.
JH: I remember dog barks being part of the soundtrack on one HBO show you’ve worked on, Breaking Bad (2008-2013).
MC: Yeah, Breaking Bad is a show I am asked about a lot. I worked on the first two seasons, so that was 2007-2008. That was a fantastic experience as well. The actors were all so fantastic. The writing was great, and I loved working with the folks who put that show together. I worked on the first two seasons. I became a huge fan of the show myself as a viewer, and it remains one of my favorite series.
JH: There seemed to be a sound design thing in Breaking Bad, where you would hear distant dog barks during the scenes in Walter White’s suburban home, and only during those scenes. You never see a dog, whether in the house or outside. But the sound of the dog bark becomes kind of aural watermark for Walt’s suburban environment. I’m assuming those dog barks were recorded separately, maybe during shooting.
MC: Well, if it’s something like that, where you hear it more than you see it, that was probably not a wild track—I don’t remember doing it—but something they pulled from a sound library. Somewhere between the wild track and sound libraries is a loop group.
JH: What is a loop group?
MC: The loop group is the group of voice actors that work in post-production. They will build the voice parts of the soundtrack. Let’s say you’ve got a restaurant scene. Normally, any time you record dialogue during a shoot, you want the environment as quiet as possible. We want to hear nothing but dialogue, no background sounds, so as to record as clean a track as possible. In a restaurant scene, you’ll have all these extras miming speech. Only later, when you go into post, will you have voice actors—the loop group—laying in these extraneous voices that are theoretically people speaking in the restaurant. I suppose that’s part of Foley, too, the plates clinking and so on. Usually all that stuff will be added in later. There have been times when we’ll say, “Let’s get a walla track.” We’ll say, “OK, all the extras in the room, just act as it you’re doing what you’d be doing if you were sitting in this restaurant eating.” We’ll do a track of that, and they may or may not use it, and just go into a sound library to get those sounds.
JH: I’ve heard of the walla track from the Foley sound editors.
MC: Yeah. It’s funny, we don’t do that much anymore, make an extra walla track. I think there’s been so many advances that they can steal five seconds from a take of something and loop it and I have what I need.
JH: Thank you, Misty, for taking the time to teach me about walla tracks and Lavalier microphones! I’ve learned a great deal.
MC: You’re welcome, John. I’ve been glad to help.