Recording sound for a new TV reality game show for ITV and FOX saw recordist Richard Meredith faced with a set that comprised an open forest several miles west of London, with events taking place all over it. Nevertheless, the Release The Hounds shoot was to be done in ‘studio style’, with the director in a central gallery and camera feeds recorded on a stack of decks, as opposed to shooting in camera.

In fact, the location was so spread that it ended up being two galleries…

Meredith’s team initially considered recording in the field and sending a monitor mix to the director. However, there were so many elements that required the sound mixer to be near the producers and director in the gallery that it was decided to run an audio gallery too courtesy of an Ethos Audio truck – itself hugely capable and with the added advantage of coffee on tap day and night.

The distances involved dictated the use of fibre-optics for the radio mic system. Two options were considered: RF over fibre, bringing several remote antennae feeds long distances into a central radio mic receiver rack, and running a receiver rack locally at the game and bringing the audio back to the truck over fibre – as the Ethos truck already ran a fibre infrastructure for audio. Coupled with the fact that there were other feeds to run back and forth (talkback, comms etc), the team settled on audio over fibre. This also allowed the Studer Vista 5 console in the Ethos truck to run a redundant fibre, enabling it to invisibly switch to the spare in the event of a failure.

The choice os radio mics to use was decided by the brief – four games per night for the teams and a further challenge for each team member individually. The locations for these activities were at best several hundred meters apart from each other, and in some cases more than a kilometer.

There were four different games in different locations every consecutive shooting night, and some locations required two drops of receiver rack as the distances involved were beyond the capabilities of a single multiple antenna system. It required a solid rack-style receiver, which was easily portable and at times able to run off a 12V supply in some locations – the Lectrosonics venue rack – or five Venue racks – provided the answer.

‘The games designers were coming up with new ideas which involved several other artists to be miked in addition to the main game contributors,’ Meredith explains. ‘I could see that flexibility would be the key as greater or lesser importance was placed on these additional characters dependant on how the competing team was doing. Each venue rack was loaded with nominally five receiver modules but we had the ability to increase or decrease as and when necessary if required. We generally ended up with 6/5/5/5/4.’

With a split crew running the operation – one set on nights filming the games and a second on days re-rigging for the next set of games – the sound team imposed a strict patching scenario. The fibre interface units at each game were all given a thorough treatment of white labelling tape and each input and output on every end box was always allocated the same job, therefore any pair of fibres plugged into the truck always had the same inputs and outputs derived from the same place irrespective of location of game. As there was no time to test individual feeds during the daytime rig, this consistency was essential to quickly fault find any missing feeds or returns to the game, during the short re-set period between every game on the night.

‘We very quickly established a routine and the night crew game rigger, would potter about with a venue rack tucked under one arm in case extra receive channels were required at short notice on any particular game – a very lightweight solution to moving six channels of radio mic receiver around,’ Meredith says.

The other factor determining the choice of Lectrosonics on this project was the transmitter– production wanted as little interference as possible and long  battery life. Aqua-packs  were impractical due to the costumes. As a result, the team doubled up the transmitters to include Lectrosonics WM waterproof models. With no prior warning as to which of the contributors ‘might’ get wet, they would simply able to rig those likely to with WMs from the start and not give the game away to the contributors with very obvious waterproofing tactics going on.

The system worked well, achieving huge range in the forest using ALP650 active sharkfins, identical performance from the SMDBs and the WMs in all conditions and were able to react instantly with minimal disruption if plans for radio mics changed late in the day, (which it did on several occasions) as additional receiver capacity was very easily deployed vis bicycle.

The terrain on site was in patches so dense and inaccessible that the site was split in two, to make cable runs actually possible. Two gallery set-ups were needed to look after half the location each because it was totally impractical to have every game permanently facilitated with the maximum possible number of receivers. It would have more than tripled the receiver requirement. So in the end there were two sound mobiles and interfacing two comms systems.

‘One final Lectrosonics plus point was the ability to remotely alter the TX gain, which was invaluable for all the barking dogs,’ Meredith  says. ‘Watch Release the Hounds on ITV in the UK, or Fox in the US, to fully understand.’

More: www.lectrosonics.com