Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 2, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Last week, cult director Guy Ritchie’s current adaptation of Sherlock Holmes opened in German cinemas, an almost irreverently modernised version of the story of the famous Baker Street detective starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. Downey’s clumsy and dishevelled interpretation is worlds apart from the calculated, cool character portrayed in the past by actors such as Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. And yet the film works superbly from the outset.
Location filming for the film began in early 2009 at various locations in Liverpool, London, Chatham and Manchester, with second-unit sound recording led by freelance sound engineer John Casali. His recent credits read like a shopping list of Hollywood blockbusters connected with England. Before recording Sherlock Holmes, for example, he worked on two Harry Potter films and the latest James Bond film. After borrowing an ST250 for the first James Bond film in which he was involved, Casali purchased the more recent ST350 system two years ago to record surround ambience on the set of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and has used the microphone constantly ever since.
“When I first tried the ST250, it was a kind of experiment,” he admits. “Then I bought an ST350 and began using it more often. These days, I no longer do a job without the ST350,” says Casali of the ST350’s importance to his work.
Like all other SoundField microphones, the lightweight, portable ST350 records audio signals in four-channel, output-independent SoundField B-format, from which phase-coherent audio signals in mono, stereo, M&S or 5.1 surround can be derived through the company’s proprietary signal processing.
“The ST350 was excellent for recording the 5.1 base signals that the guys in postproduction used to create a surround mix of each scene,” Casali explains. “It creates very realistic soundscapes. Sometimes I still cannot believe all this comes from just one microphone.”
“On the Harry Potter films, I often used the ST350 for crowd scenes in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and on Sherlock Holmes it was simply fantastic for recording the sound of horse-drawn carriages in the streets.”
“I use Altiverb very often to record the impulse response of the rooms in which we record. The ST350 has also proved excellent for this. If we now record at a location with recognisable acoustics, I record an impulse response because it can be used effectively to recreate the ambience in subsequent postproduction. This is very practical for realistic dialogue replacement in postproduction.”
After completing “Sherlock Holmes”, John Casali had already turned to his next projects with his ST350. He is currently working on the final film in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, which will soon arrive in cinemas as a two-part film.