The party film project

Fascinated by the interpersonal moments at a party, sometimes the desire to capture these moments on film follows. This impulse gave birth to "The party film project" (AT). Groups of friends were invited to become part of an experimental documentary film. The entire evening was accompanied by film in order to capture as many of these interpersonal scenes as possible on different levels. Filming and partying took place in four rooms with a total of 16 fixed cameras and 18 TRACK E audio recorders. Each room had its own atmosphere: in one room, for example, there was dancing to loud music, while in another, which was very cozy, there were more intimate conversations. This diversity presented us with auditory challenges.

challenges

It was not only the very different volume levels in the individual rooms and the many other circumstances that would have been problematic for radio systems that predestined the TRACK E pocket recorders for this project. With the large number of guests that had to be wired, it was clear that synchronizing the individual audio tracks in post-production would have taken a lot of time without the metadata timecode of the TRACK E audio recorders.

Not to mention the fact that the party lasted much longer than planned and the 10 hours of battery life ensured that important moments were not lost.

Summary

Now that filming for the project is complete, we can say that overall we are very impressed with the TRACK E Audio Recorder. At no point did we as a team feel that the technology was hindering us, but rather making life easier. With the number of people we had with us, the preparation alone with batteries, radio settings, finding thresholds and interfering frequencies, etc. would have been a real nightmare with conventional pocket transmitters. With the TRACK E, it was all much more pleasant. Each unit was recharged on prep day for safety, connected to the sound team's phone via the Tentacle setup app, and set to the same settings.

Feedback

At this point, we noticed one of the few points where we still see opportunities to improve the setup app. With such a large number of TRACK Es, it would be easier to make the settings on one TRACK E and then apply them to all the other TRACK Es to make sure that, for example, not a single recorder is set to the wrong recording format. A person was assigned to each TRACK E and this was then marked on the device itself and in the setup app so that the audio tracks could be directly assigned later in post-production. The app is really wonderfully designed and great to have such a good overview of all TRACK E devices at the same time. The small form factor of the devices was really helpful when wiring people up and we were able to hide them all well with the guests. The synchronization in Davinci worked without any problems. The extended dynamic range of the 32-bit float material ensured that everyone could be heard clearly and the data played back cleanly, whether a person was standing next to the speaker box shouting or someone was whispering something in the ear of the person sitting next to them. In summary, we are more than satisfied and really glad to have worked with your Tentacle Sync system :)

Note to feedback: We're glad if our users share their ideas and tell us about the challenges they've experienced. We try to integrate the suggestions into our products if possible and when it makes sense to us as well. In this case we are already working on a solution. Thanks a lot.

Images - @alexander_hidic_photography