The Cinema Audio Society put on their first Parade of Sound Carts this past weekend, and it was an overwhelming success. The event, moderated by Paul Marshall, reminded me one of those classic car shows, but instead of cars being shown off, the Local 80 Stage in Burbank, CA was filled with tech-packed carts for everyone to gaze at. CAS President David Fluhr mentions, “An event like this is very special. For these guys to come out and share their cart building process for everyone to learn from is fantastic.”
Coleman Metts, Richard Ragon, Gary Gossett, Seth Cooper, Devendra Cleary, Scott Farr, Lisa Pinero, David Waelder, Ed Moskowitz, Kriky Krikorian, Paul Marshall and Andy Rovins, to name a few, were on hand to share their knowledge of why and how they configured their cart. Charlie Slemaker, who was stuck on an airplane, managed to even deliver his cart with the help from his boom operator, Howard Ericksson. Ron Meyers from PSC and Sig Guzman from Backstage Equipment were also on hand to offer product support and knowledge for the day’s event.
The show kicked off with a short history of the CAS followed by a slide show from Andy Rovins. He put together an incredible photo demonstration of various sound mixers showing off carts both old and new. The display really highlighted the progression of carts past to present over the years. After, Paul Marshall introduced the mixers who brought in their carts for display. They were then able to say a few words about their cart and highlight their reasoning’s for their build.
Devendra Cleary explained he took a page from Phillip Palmer’s book and designed the height of his cart from the chair he knew he wanted to sit in. While Ed Moskowitz built his rig taller because he stands all day to mix. Scott Farr and Charlie Slemaker took even different approaches with their builds. Farr’s cart is made from a wooden frame while Slemaker uses a carbon-fiber material for his side access panels which are velcro’d for easy access during his commercial shoots. Everything from Coleman Metts’ bike infused antenna tree to Chinhda’s cart customizations, if you’re either new or old to mixing, you definitley picked up some cart tips from these guys. Just the patch work alone was amazing to see.
The insightful event allowed for individual Q&A’s, where mixers shook hands with one another, took pictures, talked shop and shared their expertise to all the students and attendees who showed up. Ed Moskowitz said it best, “Sound guys coming together to share knowledge with one another wouldn’t have happened years ago. It seems silly now because we all worked off the same Nagra, but I’m glad we’re able to learn and tweak different workflows from one another today.”
S&P would like to thank the CAS for letting us come out to cover the show, Paul Marshall really did a wonderful job putting this event together for everyone — here’s hoping there’s another one next year.
Be sure to check with CAS website for more photos and coverage of this event.
4 Comments
Very good to see! One question that it does bring to my mind, though:
What is the purpose of having monitors on the Sound Cart, and how is signal being fed to it?
Is this just so that the production mixer can see who’s talking when, or to make sure no booms intrude, or some combination?
-Doug
Hi Doug,
Great question.
Back in the late 80’s sound mixers and playback engineers started adding onboard monitors to their rigs so they could see the boom frame and to get a visual on the digital smart slate that were utilized in the making of commercials and music videos. Currently, most mixers carry at least two monitors to get a view of the ‘wide & tight’ camera frames when shooting with two cameras. The video feed generally comes from the DIT or Video Assist person.
Hope this helps.
Gary G
Nice article; you captured it well. I’m sharing this with a lot of the guys who contributed pix but couldn’t make it.
The video tap is a feed from the camera. This allows the cart to see the actual frameline to know whether the sound perspective is properly matching picture, and allows the cart to be farther away from the action where it is not in the way.