LOS ANGELES — Sound designer Aaron Guice recently collaborated with director Paul Hunter, on a new Fiat 500 Cabrio campaign featuring Jennifer Lopez. Guice used a Sound Devices 702 Portable Digital Sound Recorder to capture sound, be it from the backseat of the Fiat 500 Cabrio or amidst a screaming crowd of people.
“I was asked to do a lot of on-set, live recordings," says Guice.
The production of Lopez's five-and-a-half-minute Papi music video and the :30 Fiat 500 Cabrio commercial were integrated, requiring a four-day shoot in downtown Los Angeles.
"The action was happening all around, so therefore long wires were out of the question. If you set up from a camera perspective the sound would be of very little use in post," says Guice. "In order to get the sound I was looking for, I had to hide and integrate myself among the chaos with the 702 to give it the right feel."
In addition to the 702 recorder, Guice kept his rig at a minimum, only including the essentials for maximum mobility such as a boom microphone on a pistol grip with a short-coiled XLR cable, a lavalier and a pair of headphones.
The two-channel Sound Devices 702 is a compact file-based digital audio recorder that records and plays back audio to and from removable CompactFlash cards and/or external FireWire drives. It writes and reads uncompressed PCM audio at 16- or 24-bits with sampling rates between 32kHz and 192kHz.
"It would have been impossible to realistically Foley more than 200 rioters, as they stomped and screamed through the streets of LA,” says Guice. “I had to be in the thick of it. There was one instance when I wanted to capture sound from the perspective of the interior of the car as individuals in the crowd jumped and tackled each other all around the vehicle. In order to do so, I wedged myself on the floor of the backseat. I was cramped, but the 702 rested on my side and the panel was available for gain control and playback during takes. The back-lit display, which is easily visible in extreme sunlight or dark situations, made it easy to see everything that was going on."