British editor and sound recordist Jon Olive worked on crowd noises, including those for the scenes set in a large outdoor stadium during the Quidditch World Cup and Triwizard Tournament. According to Olive, this presented quite a challenge in terms of loop group recording.
He says: "The normal practice of recording a loop group in a studio would not do these scenes justice, as the only way to convincingly get the sound of a large number of people in an outside setting is to record a large number of people outside!"
Olive, together with supervising sound editor Dennis Leonard and ADR editor Dan Laurie, decided to find a quiet external location and record a group of people in 5.0 surround. By recording several takes of each cue at different perspectives, Olive planned to layer them together in the cutting room to create the appropriate crowd size.
The recording took place at Bentwaters Park, an ex-US airbase in Suffolk. Around 35 people - professional loop group artists and children from a local school - made up the loop group and the recording team recorded lots of cheering, clapping, running about, screaming, chatting and chanting. This was recorded with five DPA 4011 cardioid mics on boom stands raised about 12 feet in the air in a semi-circle around the space where the loop group would perform.
"I chose the DPAs for their reliability, lack of colouration and low noise, which was important because so many takes being layered together would have resulted in cumulative noise or colouration," continues Olive. "They also stand up well to the kind of abuse they were likely to suffer on any field recording such as this."
Olive also tried out the Windpac windshield system from DPA. "It got a bit blustery during the session, and I found that using a Windpac on each of the 4011s did a very good job of minimising any resulting capsule noise," he says. "Any wind noise that did make it to the recording was a nice steady low frequency rumble that was easily filtered later. The effectiveness of the Windpacs, combined with ease of assembly and compact storage, impressed me greatly."
Another long-time DPA user, Foley editor Alex Joseph, used a quantity of DPA 4060 and 4062 miniature omni-directional mics in the studio and on location to record close up sounds. Joseph has developed a technique of attaching the miniatures to objects in order to pick up their resonance. A clever example was to strap some extra low sensitivity 4062s inside shot glasses mounted on wooden boards, which were wafted through the air to produce the sound for the dragons' wings.
Joseph also used the DPAs to good effect to create the sound of a ship rising up out of the water. "I'd recorded lots of wooden sounds on locations with the 4062s, which really pick up the low end sounds that other mics have problems getting. I inserted the mics into a railway sleeper and bashed it around, and also used them in an old windmill and a watermill to record mechanical wooden sounds. The results I got were colossal, perfect for the wooden sound of the ship coming up out of the water, which can clearly be heard in the soundtrack."
The sound of the water coming off the boat was recorded using a combination of 4060s above water thickened with agar gel and the DPA Hydrophone in the water. This was actually recorded by Joseph and sound designer Martin Cantwell for the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Joseph also experimented with the 4060s for the underwater scene, where he worked closely with Nigel Heath of Hackenbacker post production. "We even managed to record stereo underwater tracks of sea kelp moving, which is physically impossible to do and remains a closely guard
