I often find myself having an incredible conversation in the middle of a banging party, and wishing there were some way to capture the juiciness of the interaction then and there.
The main problem is that it hasn't been possible to make it work technically, soundwise. Until now!
When music is playing in the background and dozens of other people are also chatting away, it’s traditionally been impossible to capture the sound in a ‘clean’ fashion.
When I was a cast member on the final season of Go Girls, we’d shoot party scenes pretending to dance to music which would be added in post-production.
Anyway, short story is that those days of muddy sound are gone. As of pretty recently. I was inspired by David Pagan Butler who lives near me and has a big YouTube channel - and a very popular and unusual Substack thanks to my gentle nagging.
I saw how he recorded his stuff at home, on his iPhone with a special microphone. I picked up a pair of wireless lavalier microphones - which are the things with a blue and green light on Louis and my lapels. They cost £40! A few years ago they would have been 4 figures and required a sound operator to monitor. Now I plug a small transmitter into my iPhone, clip the mics onto the speakers’ lapels, and I’m ready to roll.
These things are miraculous. They capture the sound of our voices, and only our voices - despite the hubbub around us.
I’m so excited by this conversation. Primarily because of my interlocutor, Louis Pisano, whose opinions grace the pages of Harpers’ Bazaar and Nylon France among others - but of course I think you should read him on his recently launched Substack .
Louis is such a ‘get’ that you’ll see I get a bit discombobulated, and even claim to be an Australian at one point… I test high for agreeability at the best of times. This was the end of the night and I was giddy with the whole everything.
Anyway, this is a lot of writing, when the point of this post is the video.
I hope you dig watching it as much as I dug making it.
Now I know how to do it, there will be more of this kind of thing to come.
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