Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy just wrapped their latest season, which includes the
Filming of two holiday specials. For “A Very Queer Eye Thanksgiving” and “A Very Queer Eye Christmas,” the show’s sound supervisor/mixer, Damian Canelos, reports that he brought in an HHB Portadrive and additional Sennheiser wireless systems.
In “A Very Queer Eye Thanksgiving” the “Fab 5” made surprise house calls to check up on straight guys from the past season, while for “A Very Queer Eye Christmas” they tackle one family’s bad decorations, gifting needs and Christmas clichés. With more people on-camera than in the regular season episodes, Canelos brought in an additional production mixer, Antonio Arroyo.
“It was a hoot to watch Antonio run around with this pack of six wireless receivers and the HHB machine around his neck in the middle of a field of Christmas trees,” laughs Canelos. The HHB Portadrive, an 8-track hard disc-based location recorder, was critical to the run-and-gun shoots, he elaborates, since the show producers wanted participants recorded to separate tracks.
On the Queer Eye specials, he says that, “We’d be on location somewhere with 11 people wired. For a feature film we could take the time and do it properly, but with this show, we show up at a location and within an hour we are rolling, and we don’t stop.”
He continues, “Usually we have the five guys plus the straight guy, his girlfriend, his mother, then possibly a sister or somebody else. So normally it’s six, seven or eight people at most. If it’s nine, I have my ENG guy,
Teferra McKenzie, mix the additional person to the camera. But for one of the specials,” he notes, “We had the five guys, the straight guy, and then his family–his wife and four or five children.”
That also meant extra channels of wireless microphones, recalls Canelos, “The Sennheiser transmitters, the SK250s, are phenomenally awesome. The frequency agility is fantastic and, for the user, is incredibly
easy to operate.” The compact transmitters are essential, because, the “Fab 5” he says, “are always wearing couture wardrobe, expensive and tight.”
Paired with Sennheiser’s EK3041 miniature, true diversity receivers, dropout was not a problem, he says. “Even in a show where I can only set up so many antennas, and sometimes can’t get them too close to the area where we’re shooting, the SK250s always kick out enough power and enough signal.”
“A Very Queer Eye Thanksgiving” premiered Tuesday, November 23rd at 9:00
p.m. ET/PT. “A Very Queer Eye Christmas” premieres December 7th at 10:00
p.m. ET/PT. For more information, please go to www.sennheiserusa.com
www.hhb.co.uk.
