What's in your Kit? With Sound Mixer Devendra Cleary, CAS | URSA Exclusive

the other thing that drew me to this is it's kind of built like a tank these cars didn't exist in april i have a feeling these are going to be used a lot okay everybody it's time to be really safe hello and welcome back to another ursa exclusive this time we're here in santa monica california with javendra cleary hey there welcome welcome to my soft prep paradise i can't wait to get into your kit shall we sure of course awesome let's dive right in devendra cleary is an la-based production sound mixer originally from denver colorado he got an early start mixing sound when he was only 18 while still in college which helped him land his first big break in 2001 as a sound utility on buffy the vampire slayer over the next decade he would go on to refine his sound department knowledge as a boom op and utility on a number of shows including firefly ugly betty and glee defender made the jump to mixing and the 2009 indie feature paper heart from there he would find the bulk of his work as a sound mixer on major tv shows like the last man on earth and schooled in this episode devendra walks us through his brand new carts which i have to say are some of the most beautifully organized arrangements of sound gear i've ever seen then we sit down to talk about what he's been doing as he prepares to deploy his new kit on his first post-pandemic shoot for netflix show dear white people [Music] what did you start out with when you started mixing what was your let's go back oh i'm trying how far should we really go back my first recorder was actually it was a fostex fr2 if you ever like i've never used one of those film schools i came up during like niagara and dat days and the earliest part of file-based recording but i was always a utility and a boom operator during those times so i wasn't uh you know immersed in building my own kit yet but once i did start doing a lot of my own documentary type things my first recorder after that for the fr2 was the sound devices 744t which i still own and i don't see any reason to get rid of it uh took it all over the world with me you know took it to europe took it to canada after the 744t and i started moving into more cart-based work or at least aspirations to do cart-based work i bought a used diva 5 from phil palmer and i bought a mix 12 which is really similar to this all zaxcom and i started my mixing career with that i my first show was called the goodwin games it's like a fox half hour comedy that was the gear that was deployed on that um a couple years went by into my mixing career and immediately it seemed like the the need was for a higher track count everyone was wiring everybody and i saw the writing on the wall i knew that not everybody worked that way i'm philosophically not 100 on board with that's the way to do it but we do we we do it all yeah so in scripted television we boom everything we still wire everybody it just it seemed like a lot of shows the cast counts were going uh up and not down and things were getting more complicated and not simpler yes you wanted to have those options so i get it i upgraded at that point um from the diva to a different system that some of us were sort of trailblazing with and it was when you'd use a yamaha 01v and dante was pretty new at least for us and that would go one cat 5 into sound devices 970 but at the time the 970 didn't exist so it was a pix 260. yeah had all the tracks i ever needed i used that system though for five six years um on many tv shows but when it came time to upgrade and my eyes started to wander around and i thought what would be a kit that i can that can satisfy just the ruggedness that we need in location sound and then the flexibility that we need in tracks and aton and kantar just kept checking every single box i mean even if you use it in its most simplistic way you can input 12 and like that's not that many for this day and age i mean you run out after you've wired you know eight cast members and you have two booms and you have your fader for your talkbacks that your boom operators wear you're already out of inputs yep um so there's another layer of aes inputs which are the digital ends and all that really requires is some converter boxes right the other way to go in here is dante so these can feed dante into it as well and what are you doing at the moment it's just analog yeah it's just the way i set it up because firmware wise the dante options weren't really ready for this setup yet interesting so i plugged it all in i patched it all in analog within the brett plate so that this is the heart of the system is ready to go anywhere but i have a little bit of time and i think i may rip the guts out of it a little bit undo the analog interconnects and put a little switch in there and have it be dante and then have these be analog in and then at that point i can get rid of my digital converters that i have tucked away in the back right okay so just be 12 to 12 and then these would go in dante or i may rip these out completely and have them permanently on a remote rig that goes to the set if i have to be super far away from the set i'm i'm very visual and color based i mean that that alone for me i know that might sound silly but the color coordination is just very uh eye-catching and very focusing for me and these screens are just gorgeous yeah the x3 has been around forever like 2014 or 15 it came out and i always knew about it but it kind of flew under my radar it flew outside of my radar for some reason yeah i just never really saw it as an option and maybe i felt like i was pray it was priced out of my league but this piece is what really drew me to it because this huge screen all this information that's in front of you for every single input output how it's being powered if you have eq if your limiter is on um the other thing that drew me to this is it's kind of built like a tank yeah like these aren't even faders that have are they magnetized just magnets oh my god there's no slit in the chassis of the board yeah for dirt and dust and moisture to get into there's some kind of mag i don't even know how they do it engineering wise but there's magnetic ball and it makes it so i believe this thing is as sealed up as it could possibly be that's amazing it's just a freaking tank and whether the day consists of me just doing a single boom and like this one person lobbed this is the kit or if i have everything going including up to second blue orange red and yellow yeah cause there's a first blue orange red yellow but now there's a second one because i ran out of colors what would get us in to the second blue and orange we have a bunch of cast we have booms do you use any like ambience mics or anything like that sometimes there's plug ons like a good example would be like cast members one through eight on the call sheet are right here um i have actually three lavs that are talkbacks only that have little switches on them i have all three of those patched into this input so the track 13 fader i have three sources going into it so i don't need to have three faders for my guys where i either want to have all my guys have the ability to talk to me or or they're turned off so then there's that i have a fader especially for music and that's just for when i have a uh an earwig situation yeah or even just over a speaker coming in from my laptop i go into another converter and then aes into the atom then i can control the laptop and how it outputs and i can make it not go to the mix track i could silence the track i could lay down the track of the music so then after that say one through eight of the cast is also wired but then we have a couple other cast members that have one or two lines say there's four of them that have that and then you know say there's six more actors that have that then i also have plug ons that are on these same blocks um that could be on either of these four this is all trim for this these two accessories they're all usb okay let's move on to your wireless how about that yeah what do you have um i have electrosonics great um love electro these venue ones i've had for maybe the last six years i bought them like right when around the time that i was just moving up to mixing um god they're so robust and reliable i mean they're they're getting long in the tooth um but i started the desire to upgrade and i thought about going venue two um and then i ran into gordon moore at the cas awards maybe two years ago and i had heard a rumor of these d-squareds coming out and i think i had enough wine in me to just be a little ballsy and just confront him and i was like he's so friendly too that's so friendly yeah i was like are you guys coming out with like a portable you know four channel receiver you know and i described and he was like we are you send me an email oh my god emailed me and i got on the the beta test team oh that's awesome so then they sent me one yeah and i just put it through the riggers and you know test it all out i was so impressed with it because i use wireless designer which i don't have set up right now but chances are the laptop will be out and i'll always have wireless designer um this impressed me because it's kind of like having wireless designer right right those beautiful screens yeah just i know what you mean it just really catches the eye on the info that you need and i've always used electro ifbs for my boom operators i recently well recently like six years ago recently sold off all my comptex um and i thought all right well i'll get all vhf ifbs if you're familiar with those uh to replace the contacts and what was the benefit to that you felt well as far as the receiver boxes i just wanted something just metal and like a tank and yep you know they're gonna get dropped so i wanted to clear out comptex i went the vhf route just with the intention of moving ifb out of the uhf range which so far i haven't done these are great but the range isn't as good as what i feel like my boom operators really want yeah so for a while it was just boom operators and then clients and i realized there are some clients that get real far away from me and sometimes that i might be tucked away around the corner or i might be around video village and it has plenty of range for these but the director needs something as long range as the boom operators do so i got a second channel of uhf and i just hand those off to the director and the script survivor it's kind of like the heroes get those yeah yeah exactly i'll show you these are the newest additions of the kit is um beautiful these so far are just for my boom ops and that's what they're so small yeah look at that so my guys i think will be really happy that they get to use those absolutely and then in the back which we can like do some shots of waiter oh yeah there's a patchbay for all the remaining the first three outputs are being used for this the kantar has eight outputs like eight analog outputs first three are being used for that so there's five more so on the back of the patch bay there's just five xlrs coming out this is such a clean rig all around i love it oh thank you i hate when i look behind something and there's just like a mess of cable that gives me anxiety this is so nice this is the messiest part this is like a dante connection that if i put a sound devices 970 up on top i would just run this cable into it and it'll be every single track that's being recorded on the kantar is now basically shareable five additional outputs i was telling you about one of them is already going up to an xlr um i also have a usb connector which goes from the d-squareds and it goes into a little to this hub and connects the venues and that's how i get wireless designer information from all of them i put these on there three ifb antenna inputs and those all go these two cables are from the betso betsy sharky ins and then i those go into the d squareds and they loop in and out and then they loop out into the venue so it's two antennas for all four of those receivers nice the manual uh that will you read for electrosonic's receivers is that you should only loop three of them together but you kind of get this sense if you've tried to do four and it works it works and i've even gotten that from electro they're like yeah that's just we said that as a safety you can loop four of them together and you'll be fine um and then the only other thing on the patch bay is four more analog ins and the reason for that is everything is patched into the kantar from the d squareds um but there's 12 analog inputs so these four analog ins come from the first four of the venue ones yeah so those just go so all this gets unplugged it's still only it takes me maybe like five ten minutes i unplug everything i quickly you know i have a quick release even though it doesn't it's not quick to release all this stuff yeah um and then that whole thing comes off and i can take that into a process trailer that's great and these funky little boxes are kind of meant to be hidden behind the curtain they're called aja boxes ada4s they're basically a four input for analog input and for digital output they just straight up convert analog signal with digital so the next eight channels of the venue ones after those four go into these boxes first and then it spits them out aes interesting you have to convert it to digital it's behind the curtain and i can totally get rid of those yeah if i hook up my d squared's dante and the venue ones analog that's so nice to have so many options so yeah absolutely options are definitely the best yep and then this funky looking thing is a thunderbolt hub i have an old macbook air so it still hooks up thunderbolt yep and this allows me to control anything with dante so dante controller here uh all the venue ones are plugged in usb there and i have this little motu box hidden in there that's actually my pro tools interface oh nice what about power how is this all being powered yeah this is all being powered with a power star life this has a little fan on there because this one was converted modified to power um an inverter when i used the yamaha mixer that needed ac yeah and how long like with with just what you have here fully charged how long would this last you the tests i've been doing have really only been going about four and a half hours okay of like fully charged and it's with these two okay so yeah generally i'm not without house power for that long if there was a time where i was gonna need to definitely just be self-sufficient yeah power wise you can i can stack some more of these batteries together have several of these on hand can we open this up sure it's just a i love these so much heli battery by piece beautiful yeah all right this is great and what about the wheels when you got this cart did you modify the wheels no that's how they come really the backstage tr1 which is a cart like this but it's just shorter and it has um it's probably about this tall and then it has the rear height is like this but you put a shelf like this which they call an inaugural shelf yeah they all come with these wheels stages can sometimes be the most rugged places you can go like really i mean sure being on dirt roads and stuff is not easy but sometimes just all the cameras the cabling everything you just want to you don't want to be like what am i going to do lift lift so this thing kind of just powers over all that like that's awesome yeah monitors are tricky because you know it takes up valuable real estate and you buy a say a black magic that takes up three like i don't have three rack spaces to spare here yes i want to like cover this but i don't remember mounting idea though because you don't have to give up rack space that's awesome i switched to these because whenever i i had these as kind of spare monitors for my smaller kit or for when i was doing uh insert car work like this would be my go-to monitor and i just started noticing how much better they looked how much brighter they were because they're daylight viewable so they're super bright yeah little lights can they're leds but they can either be in bright mode this was for when i would need to light up my little side my script pages yeah of course i think those are going away so i don't really need it for that i probably just want it to be shining down on the panel it's nice to have this more dark mode though dark mode is really handy if i use it if i'm next to the the director which probably won't happen postcode but either but um it just may you know if you're in a really dark space and yeah and somebody's lit it beautifully you don't want to kill that for sure i have a couple extra power cables ready to go that's for if i want to do a backup recorder and i have a pix 260 still laying around and obviously i would just feed that with uh ethernet dante yeah power it with uh dc and the reason there's two is um if i put a com tech base station right here for earwigs it's power source is ready to go and i don't need to plug in the power supply in the wall war it just this comes directly from the psc so it's just dc um and then this is just a jam cable it's beautiful i could hang it i haven't really decided it's all new as well yeah i have a feeling these are going to be used a lot first thing in the morning on uh post coveted sets when the ads want to give us a little demonstration okay everybody it's time to be really safe social distance six feet away um and then as soon as the first ad has it i go yeah congratulations that is now your bull horn that you get to keep for the run of the show and i have a few different things and you're their best friend because you brought them a bullhorn yeah i mean we'll i'll carry it for them if they want if they're like i can't carry it but once an ad uses it we're gonna put their name on it and it's just theirs and i'm gonna try to carry enough of them so that two different ad teams can have them that's great yeah i'm definitely not a proponent of like buying cheap equipment but this is a different thing these are like 14.99 on amazon so this is an anchor which is translates to not very good sounding speaker so it doesn't sound great but it's something but it's still nice for voice if whenever i do uh dialog playback i use this thing and i just plug in a plug on transmitter on my end that's tuned to the frequency of this little baby receiver and whatever i got going on on my laptop feeds to here and i just have my boom op or my utility run this out and hide it on set somewhere it's brilliant and it was one thing that we did a lot on my last show called schooled we would do um morning announcements or there would be a phone call something the actors have to react something the actors have to react to and you know you can have the stand-in read be off camera but if i had the recording of the scene that maybe we shot two days prior of the principal saying whatever he's saying into the microphone attention students and faculty i have a brief announcement to make effective immediately i will be taking a leave of absence and earl ball will be your new head of school oh no poor john long overdue my friend needs me i'll just pull what i think is the best complete take and then say it's a day later i'll just walk up to the director before we rehearse and i say i have that do you want me just play it and then like nine times out of ten they're like yes that would be awesome can you do that is that like they're always surprised though they're like is that a huge pain in the ass like don't do it if it's gonna be a huge pain in the ass and i'm like no here let's run this out and they're like thank you for doing that looking through you know even this beautifully organized area that bag your follow cart i mean this really speaks to the fact that you've done every job on it you've been a boom operator you've been utility you've done playback you've been a cable person how has that affected how you organize your your entire kit it was really rewarding to be a utility in my day i worked with a lot of really great sound mixers yeah i worked with some where you also learn what ways you wouldn't do something the transition i went through as a utility well the transition that the industry was going through was on buffy we don't wire anybody it would be a thing to wire them like oh we need to wire them for the steadicam shot otherwise everything was captured on the boom five-person walk-in talks i watched kevin hyde boom with the sennheiser 816. yeah yeah oh my god walking backwards and i'm pulling cable behind him and he's stepping over gravestones and i'm tapping them and that's how we recorded the dialogue for shows wrong thing we need the world and the underworld to believe that buffy is alive and well but then cut to a few years later the way they were shooting things on ugly betty that was a show i was a utility on for two years while it filmed in la booming was almost impossible on some of the sets so wires became really important so in parallel to my career this was also happening on other shows without me seeing it it was just happening in parallel throughout our industry everybody was going oh man we're wiring everybody and when i came up it was the boom up that knew how to wire because the utility was just someone the utility was just a pair of hands that's there like run and go do that go grab that that's so not how i think of a user go pull the mixer's car up at rap and those kind of things like benefits um pa yeah so wires really honestly yeah it was it was a union it was a just a uh it wasn't as much of an expertise position as it is now yeah and now with wires that gifted the utility position kind of some clout and some cred in it's like one of the last people to see the actors before they go on screen that's just it i mean you interface directly with so many people as a mixer you know you're tucked back sometimes in a little corner but as a utility you're talking to the talent the producers i actually miss it i miss being a boo i mean i don't i would not go back because i i feel very rewarded in my sound mixing career but i miss being like right there with the camera operators and the focus pullers and you know on some productions that might be the case on maybe like a run and gun style shoot yeah you're all there as like a small family but yeah a lot of my career is now spent and it's going to continue to go this way because of covid my cart is tucked around that corner right yeah got my antenna sticking up and people don't have to see me all day if they don't want to and i do miss people uh with even so even before covet the last five years of my career mixing i'm thinking man i miss just being right there so sometimes i'll just get i got to get my steps in yeah yeah i'll walk to set you got to learn from your mentor the sound mixer but you got to learn from the actors and from you know the other production that that is so valuable to me it was a good vantage point to watch the industry and the sound department as a whole from the utility position so yeah the utility cart is a magliner mini that i had these posts built taller um nice i wanted to go even taller for this it speaks to anyone who has an artistic mind there's something about colors and stimulation yes this is practical too like it's more visible in a darker set yeah um i've always had well always but for a long time i've i've had custom cut foam from that website it's a company new jersey their bread and butter is gun cases but they'll laser cut any design and they have a design app tool on their on their website i think i know which website you're talking about i love this company what are they called again mycasebuilder.com mycasebuilder.com but only as of like a year ago they start offering the the colored uh tops so i decided to do yellow for the loves what else just because i don't know why blue spoke to me maybe because shep's often comes in blues look how beautiful this is i just want to open this yeah and then sennheiser is red you got to have sennheiser's as much as i'm a shep's guy and it depends on the project it depends on the actor's voice i mean i don't switch between a sheps and a 50 in the middle of a scene or anything like that but sometimes i'll go with the vibe of a shep's for a certain space and sometimes certain the last show i did the 50 really was the mic for the for the whole show this microphone i bought it's the 416 uh-huh it's not everyone's favorite mic i love that i think it's a great mic it sounds very versatile you i mean if you're stuck in the jungle and you need to take one mic they say take this one those debates are endless yep but i bought this in film school with money that i should have been spending on books and it was stupid you obviously made the right choice yeah so 22 years later still in my kitchen what is this ifb drawer yeah eight i have more than there's in here there are eight vhf and eight uhf but those are all public line okay i have two more of these vhf but i took them out because i thought they're in a case somewhere they're in a pelican if we need to go over that the utility can go get more of them but i almost wanted to keep this for ease of inventory for the utility of course so it's like you know there's eight and you know there's eight so there's no question on if you've got a ball back or not i bet your viewers know fernando muga he builds um those muga covers for racks he builds covers for the kantar he builds covers for cl-12 he's actually make these soft drawers he made these exactly to my specifications so there's two of them just like that and then this one is all for uh plant-like gek oh lovely so when you are doing plant mics what are you working with here my latest i've gotten i've been able to get rid of a lot of plant mic get because these have worked out so well i used to carry those magic arms that were huge these you don't need to do anything you need to do i'm sorry no it's okay it's reaching for me let's see where i want to like mount this but carlini seems to like clamp really well to any surface that is super cool these are just super easy to like you can get them up in a doorway or wherever and i just keep i use all the sound guys solutions quick releases so i just have enough to just leave them on all the plant mic ones as well what are some of your favorite plant mics like what would you use out of your kit um probably the sennheiser 8050s yeah on school we had a whole like not really roller coaster but like a it was like a school dance but they were riding in this little like train track through the gym and we couldn't boom anywhere they were inside a tunnel yeah so boom operator planted a mic right in front of them but it was on this so he was able to like work with the camera operator and get it right on the edge of frame so it was great these i'll leave out because these haven't really found a home yet these are my voice of god mics for ads nice but they have classic ones little switch little classic sm58 and it's uh you can just order them special from shore to have the switch on them this one's all about wireless which is why i do want it to come out if we were to get be somewhere else like on a gator for two weeks or on a yacht for two weeks leave it all built together but the top one has the logs and the accessories oh can i just dig in here is that all right dpas dpas my favorites i recognize this yeah so soft i love these definitely have ursa strips i have some vampire clips in here those are awesome too what are these calls these are hide-a-mites i don't keep a lot of these clips on i don't use a lot of clips we mostly use um the pouches yeah the pouches and five packs and ankle packs and things like that but you got to have them around yeah when you're preparing for a new show you know you're replenishing expendables do you buy new straps and mounts yeah usually you do okay i mean we launder them throughout a show like a whole bunch of straps here but these are these are all on the way out i'm gonna order all brand new ones for the next show okay um but during a show we'll write their names on it yep we'll launder them and i hate to waste them i probably launder these but i just feel like the vibe is going to be people are going to feel more comfortable with new things absolutely you open a new pack right in front of them they know it's time and after that it won't be new but it'll be dedicated to that character so these are all great and these have served me good and we've wandered them but yeah we're going to freshen up the supply that first expendables order of my next show and then lav bullet like that's a sound mixer who makes things jean martin um before the lava came out a bunch of us built these back in the early days where we obviously took the sharp thing off of the fishing line brilliant a lot of the actors and this is not to say anything negative about like jeans products because they're great too yeah a lot of actors end up liking that one better they're like oh it just works better it's very it's just so cute it's heavy and like it's thin so it just really works its way down a full-on trouser you know this is just the disposable battery drawer plus spare spare rechargeables mophie batteries oh great for people to charge i used to you are so generous for keeping these i know so many sound mixers who would be like get the hell away i mean i don't know what's going to happen post covet either because yeah i used to keep a charging station up here for everyone's phones yeah you know you're going to get so much hate for this in the comments well you know i'm going to not do it i'm actually not going to do the charging station anymore because i think it creates too many touch points in a covid world i think that's true already without covid it was you know crew or actors are here and they're totally in the utilities way but i would put it here because i wanted to provide something for the crew this always has power um but now we have like a secret one i like it so the utility can charge his phone in here the boom operator can charge her phone but it's not a public thing i think that's smart i think people understand that i won't have it i'm just gonna say that it's protocol because it probably will be protocol to not have it when you buy these ipowers you probably have some of these maybe i don't have those yet no they come with a four bank charger so in order to have a good amount of batteries it takes up too much room in the drawer i used to have two drawers for battery chargers and i was able to scale it down to one nice because also because uh gene martin sound guy solutions makes this as well i used to have four of just the chargers that i don't know if canon or who at fuji or whoever would make it and they plug into a power strip totally so i had a little power strip in here and it took up way too much space yeah this consolidated that like a dream and it's brilliant like he made it so you can it's idiot proof you can put the battery in backwards and it's still he that's great you put pins in it so that it works either way oh my god um obviously the lock gets charged with usb so that's why the main reason that this station is in here yeah and i just wanted to be able to charge a lot of nine volts so that's why i got two tenergies these tenergy has got horrible reviews on amazon really but so far they've been working out great but uh the true test will be on the next show yeah and i saved some spare four bank ones made by ipower in case i need to cool it's a good idea but i just i mean it's just a space saver and it really is and even like gold this is the detail you added to keep the cables in place it really is just so nicely organized i don't want anything to get snagged there's a little cable guide back there too that's done in a similar wire tie way so that this drawer can come in and out and the cable is always going to flow together in a you know in a cluster what's this here oh yeah this is a portable battery pack it's a 300 watt battery pack everything in the drawer even these plug in to like a cluster of power strips back there can we turn this around i'd love to see the back the beauty of that is like now it's unplugged it's not on shore power anymore but we're still lit up we're on the battery oh yeah you know what it's covered but oh my god back behind this rack panel i'm sorry i can't hear anything you're saying because of this adorable adorable trash can for batteries battery recycling sorry um it is a pretty messy cable cluster we just won't open that yeah that takes care of that it's covered but uh these two feed power strips that are mounted to the back of the drawers and that's where all the battery chargers are all plugged into all at once and then also the little lights run down to there so then everything runs back up to this little ac cable and then to this hubble right angle cable beautiful into the battery so this is always on it's always charging i would say the first thing the utility will do in the morning is you know the just even before they unload it off the truck yeah just to get a head start on the batteries just flip it on batteries are starting to charge it lets you know it's on it's like i'm on and the beauty it doesn't beep when it loses power that's great whoa this is so nice yeah this is just orc umbrellas where they're i mean they're like any other umbrella they're pretty heavy-duty but this is nice yeah like this is aluminum machined and it has a eight thin uh 3 8 thread on the bottom wow yeah the cleaning cart so you told me that you had you just had an extra cart lying around you had painted red and had these stripes put on it i love this i i had plenty of time on my hands i mean it still looked like we were staring at months in front of us and thing and like a lot of other people just trying to problem solve like what do i think i'm gonna need we're gonna obviously be cleaning more um it was always part of the plan to have uh to upgrade to that follow cart so this was definitely on the chopping block as far as selling it but i thought you know it might be really handy and i have a relate because i build my own carts um for my company i have a relationship with a powder coat company i went and picked out the fire engine red i wanted on the swatches yeah the key to it as much as it is like a little silly gimmick that it's bright red is that it's visible oh absolutely if it may be a little shaky the first couple days of a shoot um but definitely while we're on stage when we all like find our little staging areas it'll just be understood by production like if you have equipment to bring back you have your contacts your guests are leaving fire you have uh yeah like a pa might grab a pack from an actor which theoretically is a no-no but we all know that it's it's going to happen anyway that instead of it going over there that ends up being like a clean zone fall apart should be it's like our cars like lately i still like hand sanitized before i get in the car even if i didn't see anybody i just want it to be a sanctuary like it's clean so the follow cart should be a clean zone because actors might be getting wired there depending on how the production does it so this is a dirty zone it's like put stuff here it has the stuff um has a automatic hand sanitizer i love that thing i think i'm going to get like some kind of cup holder brilliant and then it's touchless we've always cleaned our transmitters but i have a feeling we're going to be cleaning them more than we used to if we're being oh if we're all being honest with ourselves we've always cleaned them and alcohol wiped down us i mean they get kind of gross yeah but it's probably going to be more attention to detail now than it used to be um so i just thought as much as it's something i can't sell it's worth having this making it similar to how i like dumb stupid things i wanted to decorate it like an ambulance and put a fire extinguisher on it but it also has a practical use it does there's flammable things here there's probably not going to be a fire but if there is you're prepared we're ready we're ready for anything i love that that is so fun this was really fun to see i think this speaks so much to our industry that it's full of people who are creative who are adaptable who are just problem solving absolutely yeah and this may be the wrong approach we'll find out but it's uncharted territory and it's um yeah it's a wild west and if it can be a safe wild west then we're all going to be better for it i think so so i think we'll just have to err on the side of safety yeah and stack the deck as much as we can totally and this is part of stacking the deck i agree opinion it's something i thought i could do going further into that realm how about we go now and we talk a little bit about the soft prep you're doing for your neck sure yeah awesome cool yeah i've always had this soft prep whether it's four weeks or three weeks or sometimes even six weeks but definitely with this pandemic this has been the longest soft prep i've ever had and i i also kind of figured it was going to work out this way the timing of this kit is so interesting because um i ended school in march right when you know we wrapped right on you know march 15 march 13th and i was supposed to start another show a month later and it was going to be a pretty hurried build to completely tear out my old cart put what i needed in this set up the kantar ready for my next show but four weeks it's actually that's a reasonable amount of time ended up having six months to do this so once the pandemic hit and our show dear white people got pushed yeah i was like well i'm either gonna have a couple months longer or it could be a really long haul so i started intentionally slow rolling every little element of the build that i was doing it almost gave it like a new meaning of the word soft prep that i always do and what i mean by soft prep is like the hard prep is like the two or three days that you get where you're maybe location scouting where you're loading in where you're actually pulling your gear onto the stage maybe even doing a camera test but that's its own thing as well um scanning for frequencies on the stage or the backlog that you're going to be spending the rest of your time on but the soft prep is more anticipatory um it's more theoretical this whole system i designed first on a chart really just to wrap my head around it because using the aton stuff was completely new to me welcome to my little workshop are those all things you've worked on on the wall yeah i love it that's so beautiful maybe the way my brain works i need to do flow charts to like really plan things out and sometimes it ends up changing the equipment that i buy i do the flow chart and i go nope that's not going to work i need to completely go in a different direction and this goes out the window but this is the latest i designed the current system the same way um and it worked out good and just as to be expected i had to make a bunch of changes after i built a flowchart and then the final iteration is a little bit different and so this is an evolution for that but i've been anticipating a lot of little things uh for what's coming up post covid with uh i'm building a couple of director com systems where they don't need to hold the mic that if they're just sitting there at video village that i'll have a gooseneck mic that they can just push to talk keeping the touch zones lower you saw the bull horns that are making their way out i'm gonna do a lot more with wireless speakers but not necessarily for music or for dialogue playback but just for communication yeah um because we're going to be farther spread out it seems yeah so just little things that i can anticipate another soft prep project i had was testing out the dante uh protocol for these receivers yeah and i pulled them out and i tested out how far i can run that sounds fun tried out a couple different kind of network switches to see which ones worked figuring out um there's an analog box i need to buy so that i can feed the ifb transmitters when all of that gack is front of house and i'm tucked away somewhere and it's just a matter of testing all that stuff and putting it through its paces the soft prep i've been going through is a little bit different i mean everything's been a little bit of a project now that most of it is in my rear view mirror it's actually harder to talk about because i'm like what have i been doing yeah but like these cars didn't exist in april oh my god really i mean in their form now like this was a death star skeleton without anything patched and it was not working um this i was still taking delivery of um that didn't exist so i've done a lot during the soft prep but it's almost hard to quantify because of course it's a collection of little tiny projects you said that you've been coming into your office every day and while you're doing other stuff you just power the whole system on and just let it run yeah so i mean that it's a brand new system and it's all new pieces and it's all new brain or heart of the system or whatever this may be and i definitely need to build a lot of trust with it um what you'll hear from other kantar users is i have to just learn it i mean now i've learned it but i didn't it took a while to learn it so it's pretty it's not that it's so tricky it's that it's different i mean that really is a plus side of all of this i can say that for myself with other projects i'm working on i've gotten back into composing music which is something that i had really put aside in favor of just you know growing my location sound career which i love so much but there was a part of me that was missing music so definitely this this quarantine time i think it really is it's hard for sure the uncertainty is the hardest part but what you're doing with it is really the most important thing when the pandemic first hit i in a hurry had to go get all my gear from sony because we were just going to leave it there and they were going to say when it's all clear you guys can come wrap out your stuff the line producer said if i were you i would come get it we don't know if we're going to lose access to the sony lot for a long time so i went and got the majority of my stuff i stuffed into the room and i walked away for like two or three weeks and just stayed home terrified i mean i make it sound worse than it was and more dramatic but i understand none of us really knew what was gonna happen yeah of course and like there's so much more covet around us now than there was back in march when we were all like freaking out um but i didn't touch any of this because it just didn't seem like that's what was going on it felt like it's a little bit of survival mode like it was all about beating the rush to the grocery store but then i started gradually coming back to the office knowing what i had to do in front of me i had to strip down the old cart pull what i needed out of it i sold the old cart that looks just like this but with this has some minor improvements but i had a lot of work in front of me i had this whole rig pretty much from scratch i think i barely roughed in the shelves and had my plan on how to move forward i still had all that project to go the the cage that brett built wasn't painted yet oh well yeah i have maybe six more weeks left of this soft prep so i'm going to continue the slow pace in the next couple projects that i have left of gear building and aside from that i'm ready to get back to work like i missed me too well thank you so much for showing us what you've been up to in this quarantine period and and where you're headed with your cart thank you thanks for coming by you guys we had a lot of fun yeah thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions comments leave them below thanks [Music] you

Channel: URSA Straps

Views: 26,789

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Id: MJRT5c18X_E

Length: 44min 4sec (2644 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020