Atlanta, GA (February 9, 2022)—For sound mixer Todd Weaver’s latest project, The Menu, starring Ralph Fiennes, he deployed a combination of Lectrosonics Digital Hybrid Wireless and all-digital RF products.
The biggest challenge we faced on The Menu was that there could be as many 16 to 18 actors all speaking at once,” explains Weaver. His credits include Good Girls, Doom Patrol, Stranger Things and I, Tonya.
“It’s an ensemble cast, with basically four groups of guests and then the chef who’s messing with everyone, so you see all their reactions in succession,” he continues. “The cameras are just raking across everything, especially during the wide shots.” This generated frequency coordination needs of a high magnitude, for which Weaver took advantage of Lectrosonics’ integration with Dante.
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“We used Wireless Designer to integrate everything and frankly could not have done the movie without it,” he says. “The way it worked was, the DSQDs have Dante built in. My old-school Venues were controlled over our LAN via an Extron RS232-to-Network IP link. We ran audio from the Venues into a Ferrofish analog-to-Dante converter. This way, every single channel on the set was on Dante in the same bucket, and from Wireless Designer I could find frequencies for all the channels. I used all my transmitters.”
In fact, all of Weaver’s transmitters were not enough, so he brought in a second sound mixer, also Lectrosonics-equipped. “Jason Sullivan had two racks full of SRc receivers,” notes Weaver. “He mixed another four to six tracks on top of my 12 to 16, as we had that high cast count even out in the field. But thanks to Wireless Designer and Dante connectivity, everything was in the same bucket.
“Jason and I both had Cantar X3 recorders, receiving our individual Dante channels, and I had his mix coming into my recorder on a fader. Again, without Wireless Designer overseeing all this, it wouldn’t have been possible. When we would send our deliverables to post-production, they’d ask me ‘How in the heck did you mix all this?’ They couldn’t believe we did it.”
