The Last Divide premiered on Eastlink tonight as part of Cinema 902 and I’m really proud of it. With it’s release, I thought I’d like to talk a bit about the production and the location sound aspect of it.
The film was shot in late September 2017 in and around Barrington, Nova Scotia. The film is about a brother and sister who get separated, and are desperately searching for one another after an apocalyptic event.
The location audio recording of this film presented some challenges. With a variety of locations, rustic or outdoors, the wind was a serious factor. Being outdoors meant the use of a windsock and careful placement of the boom, both to ensure the sound permeated the windsock at an acceptable level, as well as positioning to ensure the wind did not blow into the microphone. Being indoors, the problems compounded due to the rattling of doors and windows. To overcome this issue, I suppressed as many of the rattling objects as I could, then positioned the NTG-2 Microphone 150 degrees off-axis from the noise to ensure maximum rejection.
This shoot marks the first time I used the Zoom F8 field recorder, which I quickly grew to love due to it’s ability to label tracks on the fly, even on a fast-paced shoot like The Last Divide.