Another reminder…

This Friday, Zombieland hits theaters.

Here’s the trailer again.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I like Zombies. If you’re in toronto, come join the Zombie Walk on Oct 24th. Here’s the link: Toronto Zombie Walk

http://www.mymilliondollarmovie.com/blog

Today’s guest blogger, Tod Bovingdon, on Green Sound.

Today’s guest blogger is a 20+ year vetran of the sound deparment. i’ve had the pleasure of working him numerous times over the last 3 years.

His post not only gives you an interesting history of this department, but will give you some tips on greening your set, as well as saving money!!!

“Roll Sound.” “Speed! Green!”

With the discussion on greening productions it is important to chime in on the importance of recording from an environmentally sound (so to speak) perspective. Kermit sang, “It’s not easy being green.” I say, “Yes it is and I’m going to show you how.” I’ve been a sound recordist for over 20 years and in that time I have seen this industry grow progressively greener while actually increasing quality, standards and bottom lines.

Making the sound department’s workflow greener has not necessarily been a priority but it is much easier that you might think and the sound department is now among the greenest although we started out as wasteful as any department on the set.

In the bad old days we recorded sound on reels of tape in Nagra machines and the opportunities for green production were very limited. Tapes were made of celluloid backed with metal oxides. Production sound was recorded on these reels and handed off to post where they were transferred to mag stock using more celluloid and oxides. Depending on the scope of the production there could be hundreds and hundreds of reels and as many as 20 audio tracks or more; dialog, atmosphere, sound effects, music, foley, the list goes on. All these tracks consumed resources to be used solely for that project then stored, forever. Since the early-nineties though, the sound department has experienced a sea change that (although this was not the original intent) had the effect of lessening the impact on the environment.

After a brief flirtation with DAT tape recording the industry moved whole-heartedly to recording on hard drives and/or removable flash media. This greatly reduced the consumption of resources in the form of tape. Now, what used to fit onto hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes can be recorded onto and stored on one hard drive. (The first pillar of being environmentally conscious is to REDUCE) This hard drive is submitted to post where it is copied onto a hard drive there for editing (and usually another for backup). The first hard drive is then returned to the recordist the next day to be reused. (The second pillar is RE-USE. We’ll talk about RECYCLE in a bit) The overall cost to the production after the initial investment in hard drives is miniscule compared to working with tape and mag stock (the resolver machine used to transfer the reels to mag stock alone took up half a room and must have cost tens of thousands of dollars) not to mention the cost to store libraries of these tapes forever. Even with the usual industry standard of creating an archive backup copy on DVD the costs of the disks and storage are far less than that incurred in the days of reel and mag stock. A film’s entire sound requirements and output could easily fit onto 50-100 DVDs. It’s usually 1-2 disks total per day of shooting. Look at that stack of DVDs next time you’re in the store. Now imagine that the same output on tape and mag stock could easily take up an entire bookcase in the edit suite and then a warehouse somewhere. You get the picture.

Batteries were the other issue.

Nagra recorders consumed batteries (D cells, remember those?) at an enormous rate. 8 batteries on a short day, usually 16 on a full day and if the day went long (that never happens does it?) you could end up using 24 cells! Way back, this was, as bad as it was, the only power requirement. It was a Nagra and a boom mic. Everything was recorded like that.

Eventually, with the advent of hard drive recorders, the power requirements dropped to the point where manufacturers were able to develop internal, rechargeable batteries or, when possible, the sound recordist ran his gear on a cart with external power. With the advent of multi-track field recorders and reliable wireless mics though, directors and sound recordists were able to wire all their talent up to get cleaner dialog tracks from everybody. This led to a new problem. Wireless mics consume batteries. Lots of them, and battery technology hadn’t progressed with microphone technology. The carbon-zinc or alkaline batteries of the day only lasted a couple of hours. Now the sound recordist was faced with changing batteries on 3-4-5 talent up to 3-4 times a day. You do the math. 15-20 batteries per day or more not counting the slate, comteks, IFB feeds and the various people who always seem to come by the sound cart when the batteries die in their CD players because they know the sound recordist is the biggest battery pimp on set… (but I digress) and you arrive at a lot of batteries in a hurry!

All these batteries just ended up in a landfill leaching their components into the ecosystem forever. For an interesting and slightly scary look at what’s actually inside those little power cells we so casually throw away just Google “battery chemistry”. Batteries used back in the day contained Zinc, Carbon, Manganese dioxide and either Ammonium chloride, Zinc chloride or Potassium hydroxide. Yummy.

So what to do? Those of us who were concerned about this issue, even back then when it wasn’t cool, attempted to use rechargeable batteries. The problem was that the NiCd batteries of the day just didn’t have enough juice to power the high-drain microphones efficiently. You’d get an hour or two, tops. And they’d fail without warning. And they developed a memory so you’d have to be careful how long you ran them. And then you’d have to do a deep discharge and recharge maintenance cycle every once in a while. Who’s got the time to think about all that when you’re trying to record clean sound? The hassles weren’t worth it and most of us switched back to alkalines which (although they were killing the planet) were more reliable and wouldn’t make you eat your day rate when a battery failed during a crucial once-in-a-lifetime-can’t-be-interrupted-for-any-reason scene or make you have to hassle talent every hour or two to swap batteries (can you hear Christian Bale now?).

In the past 5 years or so though, battery technology has progressed to the point where many sound departments (myself included) have made the switch to Lithium ion rechargeable batteries for wireless microphones.

The only knock against rechargeable is that they still have a marginally poorer performance than alkalines but the cost savings and environmental benefits so far outweigh this issue that it is negligible. Just buy another battery so you’ll have a spare and change them slightly more frequently. This is a non-issue IMHO.

OK, that’s all well and good, tree-hugger, but show business is a business first. How does this affect my bottom line? You can’t create a change in attitudes by just saying “We should be greener… we are the world…” you have to put it in terms that decision makers will understand and buy into.

Point taken, let’s analyze going green in simple economic terms:

It’s not even worth the time to seriously try to work out the cost savings of a digital hard-drive-based workflow over an old school tape-based workflow because I don’t know anybody who still does it that way anymore and there are way too many variables for a mere sound monkey like me to wrap his fuzzy head around but considering that an average production would likely use 200 reels at $10 per ($2000 if you could find them) which would easily fit onto a 1 Tb drive for editing and 100 DVDs for archiving ($189 and $22 respectively) not to mention the cost of mag stock, cost of resolver equipment and the storage hassles and I think that issue was settled, financially, a long time ago.

Productions ask the sound department to submit a consumables budget at the beginning of production. I always tell them how much they will spend on batteries (based on purchasing alkalines), then present them the alternative to buy rechargeable with the caveat that at the end of the production I get the batteries. They ALWAYS take the deal (who wouldn’t?). They save money, we don’t have to deal with recycling dead batteries and I get a new set of batteries at the end of the day. Then I give the older ones to the kids for their toys. Everybody wins! I might even let them think it was their idea!

Here’s the math:

Rechargeable Lithium ion batteries vs. One-Use Alkaline:

A rechargeable 9V gets 1000 charge cycles for $25 ($100/4-pack)

You can buy 9V alkalines for $1.50 each in bulk.

$1.50 x 1000 = $1500 vs. $25 for rechargeable

Assume you have 16 rechargeables ($400)

Lifetime savings $1500 x 16 = $24,000 – $400 = $23,600

A rechargeable AA gets 500 charge cycles for $7 ($28/4-pack)

You can buy AA alkalines for $0.75 each in bulk

$0.75 x 500 = $375 vs. $7 for rechargeable

Assume you have 16 rechargeables ($112)

Lifetime savings $375 x 16 = $6000 – $112 = $5888

Total savings on batteries: $23,600 + $5888 = $29,488

At the end of the day you only have 16 9V and 16 AA batteries to dispose of by recycling vs. 16,000 9V and 8000 AA alkalines. (you DO recycle the dead batteries, don’t you…?) When I switched over to rechargeables I had 120 POUNDS of dead batteries in my garage to recycle. Fortunately there are companies out there who specialize in recycling batteries and will shred them, recycle the scrap metals, neutralize the chemicals and dispose of any waste safely.

Save almost $30K and don’t have to kill the planet? That’s a no-brainer.

Remember: nobody thinks about sound until it’s not there and nobody really thinks about going green until you can show them a tangible benefit.

Happy (green) shooting!

Todio

www.todio.ca

For more tips on green production, check out other clips on our site at: MyMillionDollarMovie.com/blog

The Return of Trailer Fridays !!! Youth In Revolt, The Wolfman, Bronson, The End Of Poverty

Well, after 18 days straight on set hanging out of helicopters and blowing up planes with the Survivorman himself, Les Stroud, I’ve returned to the city and am back on line. It was a wild ride and I’ll have photos and stories to share in the days to come. For now, lets get back to what’s coming up in the theatre.
MyMillionDollarMovie.com/blog

I never went this far, but sometimes I wish I had.

With such a talented cast, this could prove to be very exciting.

Sometimes true stories are stranger than fiction.

And here is your wake up for the day.