After refining our concept, we now had to go about gathering our recordings. We made multiple trips to collect sounds, but they weren’t massively constructive or successful. The problem was we weren’t being specific enough when we went out to record, by just saying to ourselves ‘let’s go and get some recordings’ we ended up getting a little bit of everything, but not enough to really work with and wasting valuable time and resources.  

As someone who comes from a music background and is used to working in studio environments, this is a common problem I am very used to. So I decided to do what I would do when preparing to record music, which is create a clear checklist of what exactly needs to be recorded. After writing out this checklist we were able to get a larger amount of usable recordings done in a much smaller time frame.  

Our technical recording process was as follows; we used a zoom field recorder for most of the sounds and interviews because of its portability and ease. Multiple trips were made to record. The first was a trip to the LCC bar to gather ‘atmosphere’ by placing the field recorder on top of the lights to get a recording of the entire space, during this trip we also recorded some close up and more detailed sounds in case we needed to emphasise the bar atmosphere in post production. The close up sounds included the likes of hitting pool balls, drinks being poured and the sound of glasses clinking and hitting tables. A second trip was then made to the CSM bar, we repeated the process of getting general atmosphere. There was then a second trip back to LCC to record some more interviews. Once all the bar recordings had been made, we booked into a studio space to record the narration. The technical setup was fairly simple, we used a Neumann u87 microphone as it was the cloesest we could get to the Neumann u47 (the u47 is commonly used to record spoken voice for radio and podcasts ect..).