Alleroed, Denmark (November 11, 2014)—Sound designer Maurizio Argentieri used DPA’s d:dicate 4041-SP, 4011 and 4006 microphones on The Girl from Nagasaki, one of the highlights of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Argentieri also used a DPA d:screet 4091 omnidirectional mic and a d:dicate 5006-11 matched microphone kit with an S5 surround mount. “All of the DPA microphones I used sounded amazingly good,” he says. “I need a microphone capable of handling high SPL but one that still delivers a fantastic sound: this is why I chose DPA.”
The Girl from Nagasaki, the feature-length directorial debut by photographer Michel Comte, is a retelling of Madame Butterfly reframed through the lens of a Nagasaki survivor married to an American astronaut. Argentieri was first briefed by Michel at his home in Los Angeles where it was decided that there would be no ADR.
“There was not a word in the movie that was to be replaced, so all the actors’ performances in the movie are real and original,” says Argentieri. “There were a lot of challenging situations. We had a band with a singer performing a couple of songs live while the actors were speaking; a long dialogue scene filmed on the top of Stromboli, an active volcano in Sicily with a very strong wind and real eruptions going off in the background; dialogue under real rain and the sound of the cockpit of a jet fighter while it was flying.”
The DPA microphones were also used extensively in recording the dialogue of the film. Argentieri used two boom operators mounting DPA d:dicate 4017 shotguns that fed into a Manley dual-microphone tube preamplifier. “If you want to get an idea of the quality of these microphones, you only have to listen to the long dialogue scene at the beginning of the movie between Sir Christopher Lee and the older Geisha,” he says.
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