Rob Moore has many talents – artistic, musical and practical. Over the last three years I’ve enjoyed making short and simple videos that showcase some of his amazing rolling-ball sculptures: that is, sightly whimsical, but endlessly fascinating, kinetic sculptures drawn in stainless-steel wire and given motion by balls raised mechanically and then descending under gravity. Rob’s most ambitious creation to date has been his ‘Kinetic Lungs’, but, in early 2021, he is just about to start on a far more complex sculpture still: the Brain.
There is a small number of like-minded individuals making these kinetic sculptures, spread across the world and linked mostly by the internet. Many of the videos posted showing these sculptures have soundtracks dominated by music, but, to me, the noise of a rolling-ball sculpture is a significant part of its character: the background rumble of the mechanism that lifts the balls up; the swish of the balls as they descend the tracks; the clunks and thuds as gates and switches move; and the frantic spinning of balls in cones. So my approach to the films has been to focus on the sound, tracking, as it were, an individual ball through the sculpture, in a slightly hyper-real way. In each case I recorded the mechanical lift system separately, then turned this off and recorded the progress of an individual ball close-up, section by section with a spaced pair of mics giving a rather exaggerated stereo sound, as if leaning in close to the sculpture. This was then pieced together, overlain with the mechanical rumbling track (with this turned down, to match more closely how you perceive the noise in the flesh) and (and this is the complex bit) multiplied and synchronized with the multiple balls in the video. The video itself in each case has the whole sculpture shown as a static reference shot, with a split-screen showing changing close-ups, but all synchronized: a complexity of audio and visual synchronization that gives a very simple-looking end result, which lets Rob’s rolling-ball sculptures do the talking.
With the upcoming Brain the filming requirements will be much more complex, with pieces to camera by Rob and behind the scenes filming of its making. I’ll post more about the filming and sound-recording aspects of what will be a long build: and Rob will doubtless post updates on his progress on his Facebook page.
I’m a fan of omni SDC pairs for outside recording. For music I will often use these in Rycote Baby Ball Gags mounted on a stereo bar, itself on a substantial stand (usually the Manfrotto 1004BAC). But where I want something more portable and more windproof, I mount the two omni mics end-to-end inside a single windshield – the Rode blimp Mk1. Joining the two mics end-to-end is easy with a rewired and drilled female-to-female xlr coupler (well, actually, the female-to-female XLR connector is actually not off-the-peg, but made up of three items: two Neutrik NM3FXI and one Neutrik KM. Neutrik’s own female-to-female XLR connector doesn’t unscrew). This places the mics (a pair of Rode NT55 mics with the excellent NT45-O omni capsules) at a 360mm spacing, which renders a good stereo image and is exactly the ideal length for the Rode blimp (i.e. the same length as the straight part of the blimp). Being pure pressure omni mics there is, of course, no phase issue arising from the fact that they are pointing different directions.
After years of Nikon DSLRs for stills (from D70 to D810) I have recently adopted Micro Four Thirds (M43) for both stills and filmmaking: with close-focus like most in their 50s, a mirrorless camera with electronic viewfinder seemed a wise move, and I was getting sick of lugging a rucksack of full-frame gear up scaffolding ladders to the top of cathedrals and castles for the day job. I already had a couple of M43 bodies (Lumix GX80) and some Panasonic lenses, so added a few more lenses and a Panasonic Lumix G9: in 2020/2021 this is a real bargain, with 10-bit internal recording giving near-GH5-like video, on top of much better stills (not least the 80MP high-resolution mode).
