Modern microphone technology has saved costs and guaranteed professional quality for a video production in Mold, North Wales. Find out how we used miniaturised production technology to save filming and post-production costs. Additionally, the technology improves equipment mobility and can operate in variable outdoor weather conditions.
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About the project
Bailey Hill – a historical enactment
“Bailey Hill” is a historical chronology about Mold’s town-centre park. Actor and playwright Mike How conducted research and interviews before writing a play for live outdoor performance and screenplay. Subsequently he opened his show in July 2023 at Bailey Park to public audiences in English and Welsh with his theatre company, Grass Under Foot.
Filming for this stage of production is subject to image rights and scratch images are displayed in the gallery below to adhere to rights limitations.
Background
Bailey Park’s early origins
Bailey Park is a historically important landmark in Flintshire’s market town of Mold. In dark times unknown hands shaped the park’s landscape that we recognize today. According to historians and archaelogists a Motte-and-bailey castle built in around 1080, serving as a fortified power base in a region where violence was never far away.
Bailey Hill Park today
Bailey Hill’s fortifications are gone today and instead the public enjoys this unique park in Mold’s town centre. Indeed, Mold Town Council worked with Flintshire County Council to receive a grant for improved access and facilities in 2022. Further improvements include an impressive modernization of the former ‘keepers cottage as a “front-of-shop” which provides an information centre and function rooms.
About the performance
Mike How’s production tells a colourful story about events and people whose lives play a part in Bailey Hill’s history. “Bailey Hill” celebrates the park’s restoration with cameos and monologues depicting personalities and events spanning a thousand years. The play is written for four professional bi-lingual actors to deliver live performances in English and Welsh. A Heritage Fund grant provided resources for this project.
Audio and video production methods
Projects like this depend on professional audio and video production equipment to accurately capture “as-live” recording of the one-hour performance in English and Welsh. Partly, this is because hardware has to be mobile and resistant to adverse weather.
We also opted for compact sound and video production equipment to stay ahead of live audiences and weather as the cast moved between sets. Lastly, we join rehearsals for productions of this kind to understand artisitc direction, plan camera angles, micropohone placement, and logistics. Altogether we collected footage from three one-hour performances at 8 “scenes” around the park. You can see a map of the park in the gallery at the end of this article.
32-bit audio means big savings
Outdoor audio recording
Outdoor conditions often hamper audio quality. Microphones hear the world differently than we do and acheiving sound as we hear it ourselves is a tricky art sometimes. Accordingly, thunder, lightning, and rapidly changing daylight quality caused headaches for actors, audience and electronics alike. Although some microphones deal better with factors like wind, “run and gun” filming depends on equipment that is compact and rapidly “armed”. To solve this problem we used advanced 32-bit floating point audio technology. Consequently, we only had to move and protect our Nikon 4K cameras equipment.
Miniature, discreet, distortion free sound
32-bit floating point audio recording is a recent technology and it excels in variable outdoor conditions. Indeed, at time of writing there are only three manufacturers who supply 32-bit field recording hardware worldwide. The technology consistently outperforms conventional systems that are prone to distortion through limited dynamic range. Therefore, 32-bit audio is a “go-to” for this kind of production.
We equipped actors with miniature clip-on recorders and lavalier microphones that achieve millisecond precision over as much as 14 hours of continuous recording. Importantly, the technology also meant that with prior preparation we saved the cost of dedicated sound engineers to monitor sound.
In closing…
Remote control technology for Nikon, and 32-bit microphone field audio systems give us scope to produce dependable professional audio and video in the most challenging of conditions. Consequently, this gives us the best chance to control and reduce post-production costs for clients.
Browse our knowledgebase to find out more about the technologies we use.
For advice about how to make technology save costs for your productions, please contact us.
