Project — Paul Flynn’s Food Truck Favourites

'Paul O'Flynn's Food Truck Favourites', a six-part cookery series premiered on RTÉ One in July 2022

In 2022 I got a call from the folks at Aperture Media to sound edit and mix a six-part cookery series, Paul Flynn’s Food Truck Favourites. The co-production with RTÉ follows chef Paul Flynn as he samples 18 of Ireland’s best food trucks, and recreates his favourite dishes in his own restaurant. The show was filmed during pandemic lockdowns, a time when the hospitality trade faced temporary closures, but food trucks began to boom.

The production team were coming to the end of picture editing and starting to realise the challenge that lay ahead in the sound mix. Two-thirds of the shots were external roadside sequences, with loud generators powering noisy gas burners with frying pans full of frying food. The rest of the content was shot in a large tiled and highly reflective kitchen space.

So the mission was clear, almost every sequence was going to need some level of de-noising or de-reverbing and in some cases both. Some shots needed the sound design rebuilt, but thankfully that was minimal as the audio restoration was already going to take up a chunk of time on every episode.

Food trucks make interesting subject but they are a challenging location for sound recording

In many ways reality television can be one of the most demanding genres to mix. The turnaround times are short, sometimes as quick as a single day per episode, but the content can involve everything and anything and almost always shot in less than favourable conditions. As a mixer you really are at the mercy of what recordings the location sound team provide you with.

In these kinds of sequences you need a boom operator who isn’t afraid to get right in there at the edge of the frame so that the mixer doesn’t have to rely too heavily on the lavalier microphone sources. Too much lav mic in the mix and things begin to sound very dead and lifeless, the boom mic is crucial to preserving the realism of the location.

In the case of Food Truck Favourites the boom op was really up against it. These food trucks are typically powered by noisy generators located only a few feet from the crew and separated only by a thin sheet of aluminium. If the boom mic is raised above the speaker then by default it will be pointing down towards the noisy gas burners and crackling food frying on a griddle, whereas using a low angle sometimes just isn’t possible due to set constraints.

Paul Flynn visits The Hungry Donkey food truck at the Killarney Races

There’s no doubt that we live in a golden age of audio noise reduction tools with company’s such as iZotope pushing the boundaries with every new update to their RX toolkit. It’s important o always keep in mind that it takes a very nuanced approach to succesfully employ these tools, otherwise you will make matters worse and introduce artefacts and warbling that further degrade the signal. Less is generally more, a little bit of the right tool used in the right place can do a lot more to restore a recording than slapping on a plugin and cranking it up to the max. Always let your ears guide you, as well as your experience.

With scripted programming a sound mixer will often have retakes to fall back on if the main take isn’t working for any reason. Of course with scripted series you would usually have control over the noise sources so it isn’t such an issue, but we’ll leave that aside for now. With unscripted shows such as this one it’s usually a case of ‘one and done’, and if there does happen to be additional takes the phrasing rarely aligns because interview responses are typically off the cuff. If you are lucky and dig deep enough you might find some word fragments that will help somewhat. ADR, another preserve of the scripted rescue kit, is definitely not an option, as are re-shoots. So when all is said and done the location sound team really do bear a huge burden of responsibility in reality shows such as this.

So what’s the take-away from all of this? Directors, use your ears, think like a sound recordist, and always listen to your location sound team if they have something to tell you.