The Fallen Knight

A knight flees from battle, mortally wounded and close to death. After performing his last rites, an angel from God comes down and tells him his work is not done. Awakened and reinvigorated, the knight marches off to rejoin his brothers in battle.

Directed and Produced by Harrison Woodland

This was truly an incredible project to work on. An amazing group of filmmakers came together to make this passion project possible, and without the efforts of everyone involved, it wouldn't have been possible. This was, by far, the most productive one-day shoot I've been a part of.

This short film had only one actor, Dylan Thomas, wearing a suit of armor and swinging a sword around. This created some challenges for capturing usable and consistent sound. The armor was incredibly loud, which made for beautiful ear candy anytime he moved around, but rendered his quietly uttered lines almost impossible to hear over anything but the smallest of movements. It became an exercise in aim for my Boom Operator, Grant Armantrout, because in order to minimize the clanking of the armor, he had to be aimed clearly and directly at the mouth of the knight. In the end, he was up to the challenge and did a great job. The lavalier microphone changed over the course of the day, so I will go into more detail on that below.

By the end of the day we had accomplished almost everything we had set out to shoot and began racing the sun to the edge of the mountains. We had about an hour of sunlight left and five shots to finish. It was awesome to watch all of the crew lock in and hammer out the last of the shots for the day. Everyone, myself included, gelled together, so it took as little time as possible to set up and rehearse the shots. In the end, we wrapped the last shot less than 5 minutes before we lost the sun, and we all celebrated our successful shoot in the last rays of the day.

Lav Setup with Helmet

With the helmet on, we needed some space between the capsule of the lav and the chin of the helmet to avoid the scraping of the two together, so we chose to mount the lav to the inside of the breastplate, just to the right of the shoulder strap. This worked out quite well, protecting the lav while also allowing enough sound to come through. The wire was routed along the inside edge of the breastplate and then fed out of the gap between the front and back panels of the armor, leaving us enough slack to stash the transmitter inside of the belt pouch that was part of his costume.

Lav Setup without Helmet

Once the helmet came off, the opportunity to move the lav to a position that would allow for better capture of the dialogue. The lav was remounted to a flap in the doublet just to the right of Dylan's face. Secured with a safety pin and concealed with black gaff tape, the lav captured beautiful sound and was much less obstructed than in the position lower down in the breastplate. This was possible because the lack of a helmet removed the loudest part of the armor in the neck region. The wire was routed around the base of the neck to the back, where it was fed along the suspenders that held up legs. From there is was pulled through a gap between the front and rear sections of the breastplate and tucked into his belt pouch where the transmitter was hidden.

Post-Production

I had the wonderful opportunity to not only be the Production Sound Mixer for this film, but to also be a part of the Post-Production team as well. Working on this film in post was a wonderful time, and it allowed me to push myself further than I would normally go for sound design.

Those who know me know that I love to experiment with new tools and try different ways of doing things. This film was no exception. While I normally do all of my work in Pro Tools, I had been wanting to try out Innuendo 14 for a while. I had heard great things about it and figured that this short film would be the perfect time to dip my feet into a new tool.

I have to say, using Nuendo was a great way to wake up my brain. The learning curve can be steep, but it was incredible to be back in the mindset of a complete novice. Figuring out how to accomplish what I needed to while also learning the different tools and workflows that Nuendo supports was just a wonderful time.

The mix and sound design itself was pretty straightforward for the majority of the piece. Harrison and I had several discussions over the course of the production to ensure that the sound design would support the emotion and the tone that he was looking for. This led to the sound design being far more bombastic and larger-than-life than a lot of my previous work. It was a challenge to push the sound design and the mix further than I had pushed anything before. The end product was a dynamic and evocative soundtrack that supports the emotion of the film.

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