Carl Homer

Location Sound for Film & Television Contact Me

Three jobs in one day

A three-job sound recording day yesterday, and a very interesting one. A long day shooting at the local NHS hospital, where we interviewed the inventors of the artificial pancreas, which monitors blood sugar and dispenses insulin for diabetics.

Also filmed in an intensive care unit, which is always strange, as you're aware that there are very distressed relatives of seriously injured people there, and you feel a bit bad about going on with your business while they're having such a horrible time. We've had someone's heart fail and the crash cart come racing in while we were filming two beds up on one occasion.

After that full day, I was off to one of the colleges to record a Cambridge Uni guest lecture by Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC.

I found Mark Thompson's address refreshing free of media and business jargon, and, reassuringly, he seems keen to make fewer higher budget, high quality programmes, rather than try to continue with the same number at lower budgets. Having seen what happens when the professional crew are replaced with graduates with a camcorder, I'm relieved. That's no way to differentiate the Beeb from the commercial competition, so that everyone pays the license fee happily.

Then back home after 12.5 hours of work to edit a Danish radio ad before bedtime! Not sure how great my jingle-writing was by that point, but it needed doing that night, so..!

It was a fifteen hour day by the time I was done. I've done longer, but usually on one job, so it's been much less manic than rebuilding equipment for the next task and travelling between locations and clients… Still, if I can keep that up five days a week, my bank manager will be very happy. But nobody wants that.

Wrapping on The Roundabout

roundabout

After around six weeks of shooting, it’s sad to be wrapping and leaving the company of The Roundabout’s cast and crew. Lots of really nice and extremely amusing people, and it was a pleasure to go to work with them every day.

It’s a comedy pastiche of films like The Omen, and however it turns out, the shooting was frequently a hoot. Hope to see any and all of that crew on other jobs in the future; not a bad egg among them.

However, after long days, 6-day weeks and a tiring chunk of night shoots with big commutes, I’m going to be very happy to see the family in daylight hours for a while before I do any other long jobs. And I imagine the schoolfriend who put me up for a good few nights of the shooting will be glad to see the back of me too.

Credibility with 3 year olds

mrtumble

Just finishing the pickup shoot from a feature I’ve been working on in February and March. Lovely to see everyone again, but it means missing out on a shoot I’d have loved to make...

BBC Worldwide have put another fun little promo video my way: the launch of Something Special magazine, which accompanies a CBeebies show that my daughter loved between one and two years old. It features Justin Fletcher, the benevolent godfather of CBeebies, who does a Lee Evans-esque clown character called Mr Tumble.

Their launch event was yesterday, just when I was shooting pickups for the feature, so I had to send a cameraman along with my camera, and today I’ve been editing a short promo from the resulting footage. Would have loved to go in person, as Mr Tumble would be the only performer I’ve worked with who my daughter would actually have heard of. A missed opportunity for genuine street cred with Cambridge toddlers. Bugger.

At least Alice watched the short promo edit once I’d finished it, and said “now can I watch a long one, daddy?”. Which I think is a good review; you should always leave ‘em wanting more. Unfortunately, as I’m off to finish the feature pickup shoot, I’m having to be kindly bailed out by my partner in Logical Media, who’ll finish editing the longer Mr Tumble epic...

BBC Magazines & Pete Postlethwaite

petepostlethwaite

I’ve done another couple of very pleasant directing jobs for BBC Magazines, interviewing editors of print and online services from Radio Times to Gardener’s World. All extremely interesting, and on the first shoot, before christmas, I was kindly donated some of the children’s magazines for my little daughter, which lasted us quite a while.

The second shoot was yesterday, and was calmer than December’s, despite also having iPad video material to cut on the same day, so my cameraman friend and I sat side by side in the Magazines office with our MacBook Pros, cutting away, and I switched attention from one job to the other a bit until we’d finished.

Very sad to hear that Pete Postlethwaite died early this month. Wasn’t my mate or anything, but I’d done a couple of films with him - Mary (daughter of Bill) Nighy’s “Player”, and Sean Crotty’s “Waving At Trains”. The picture above is one of Neill Phillips’ brilliant production stills from the latter film.

“Waving At Trains” was written by a friend of mine, and then coincidentally produced by another friend. We stayed in a hotel in Cromer, and I was in the room next to Pete. He was unfailingly friendly to me, and my main memory of that stay is when we emerged simultaneously at 4.30am one morning, and he had a pint of Guinness in his hand. That’s one way to cope with brutally early call times...

A generous bloke who did jobs on merit, not budget, as far as I saw, and a considerate team-spirited actor who’d always check everyone else had got what they wanted on a take. And obviously he was a bit good, acting-wise. Sad he’s gone.

BBC iPad shoot

ipad

Did a really nice day’s directing for BBC Magazines today, shooting an intro video for the iPad edition of BBC Good Food Magazine with a cameraman friend of mine.

It’ll be available in the new year. It’s the first iPad magazine I’ve seen in detail, and it looks great. And I’m a sucker for these sort of gadgets anyway...

I do hope that tablets like the iPad enable the magazine and newspaper industries to survive in the future. A journo friend was explaining to me recently that if, as a freelance writer who isn’t Charlie Brooker or some other celeb, you earn 25p a word, then there simply isn’t time for investigative journalism with proper research if you want to pay the mortgage. So you get Wikipedia-researched “comment” columns, recycled Reuters/AP items, or press releases.

If iPad papers put circulations back up, maybe there’ll be a bit more money around for quality writing, instead of some magazines just printing celeb press releases and stills as if they were stories.

It means we have to be willing to pay properly for papers again, though. We all ditched print papers because we could read the news for free on the websites, and when papers charge for their website, we just go elsewhere. I hope iPad/tablet magazines are attractive, convenient and cool enough that we’ll pay proper money for them, and they can pay journos to write the good quality stuff they’d like to, if only they could afford to.