Shure On Location

FP33 portable mixer witnesses the future of filmmaking at Sundance Institute
 
SUNDANCE, UT, October 6, 2006—Based  on the true story of a group of illegal Mexican immigrants trapped in an airtight semitrailer, Cary Joji Fukunaga's terrifying short film Victoria Para Chino has won more than 16 awards, including an Honorable Mention at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. This summer just past, the 28 year-old filmmaker of Japanese and Swedish heritage returned to the high altitude tranquility of Utah's Wasatch Mountains, where he continued his cinematic explorations of the immigrant experience at the Sundance Institute's Filmmaker's Laboratory.

 

One of nine filmmakers participating in the four-week long lab sessions, Fukunaga and his peers were given an opportunity to rehearse and shoot scenes from their latest screenplays using equipment and crews supplied by the Sundance Institute. The product of their efforts was then  screened before an expert group of creative advisers who discussed the scenes and helped the filmmakers discover the full potential of their work.

 

"We help the visiting filmmakers' presence here at Sundance by giving them access to state-of-the-art technology," explains Ian Calderon, the institute's director of digital initiatives. "The work is shot on our soundstages or location. When it comes to capturing audio, it's ENG in style. Everything is electronic, remote, and mobile. Shotgun mics and booms are the order of the day in many cases."

 

This year, along with four of Shure's highly directional SM89 shotgun condenser mics getting called for use among four Filmmaker's Lab production crews, a matching set of four portable FP33 three-channel stereo mixers were additionally sent into the mountains to help capture audio input.

 

"Everyone I know refers to these Shure mixers as the industry standard for field production," Calderon adds. "They are compact, virtually indestructible, and very serviceable. The general feedback I get from the crews is that they are bulletproof and do exactly what Shure promises. They have been performing consistently well, and that's what we require at Sundance."

 

Teamed with Fukunaga during this summer's shooting, Jeremy Mather of the Sundance audio department found himself using all three channels of his FP33 and mixing on the fly to complete an elaborate chase scene deep in a mountainside forest of trees.

 

"It was a Steadicam situation," Mather recalls. "We put mics on two of the actors, and then set up another mic on a boom in the middle of the woods. Part of what's interesting about these assignments is that production time is in very short supply, so we aren't recording to a separate DAT recorder. The mixer's output goes right into the camera. There aren't any chances to fix the audio in postproduction either. Therefore, our challenge is to record the audio on the set as if we were mixing in post. The FP33 is ideal for tasks like this, as its straightforward design and intuitive controls enable us to quickly get what we need. That's a very important factor when you only have one chance to get it right."

 

Cary Fukunaga grew up in California's East Bay and attended UC Santa Cruz, where a meeting with legendary film editor Walter Murch convinced him to travel the world before moving on to NYU for graduate studies. Currently he is at work on a feature loosely based on Victoria Para Chino, which was inspired by the fate of 81 Mexican immigrants in Texas.

 


Release 38