Three lucky winners acquired a full cinema mics kit from DPA and Rycote
World - To support first-time and indie filmmakers through the height of the pandemic, DPA Microphones partnered with Rycote on a Pay-it-Forward giveaway in late 2020 from which three lucky winners acquired a full cinema mics kit from the brands.
The contest’s prizes included DPA’s 4097 Micro Shotgun, 4017 Shotgun and 6060 Core Subminiature microphones - along with virtual mentoring sessions, an array of Rycote accessories and other equipment loaners. The recipients, Lijie Cheng of Singapore, Jacob Deming of the United States and Sergey Martynyuk of Austria, have been hard at work putting their new gear, and skills, to the test.
Singapore-based production sound mixer Lijie Cheng was excited to upgrade his microphone arsenal upon winning the competition and has already utilised them for an upcoming web mini-series, Maybe Marriage, and a short film, A Man Trembles premiering in this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
“I was so impressed with the 6060,” he says. “Normally, for mics with smaller capsules, it’s hard to achieve the same sound quality as a bigger mic. Since the 6060 is so small, it can be hidden in plain sight, which makes the sound more open and natural. That helped a lot with a particular costume on Maybe Marriage, which had a very complicated wardrobe. As for the 4097, I loved using it for car rigs, as spot microphones and spontaneous voiceovers.”
Jacob Deming, the owner of Corpsound Audio, which specialises in live performances and events, plans to utilise the DPA microphones he won for the upcoming Northwest Association for Performing Arts’ Percussion Championships when they resume. He has already put his DPA microphones to good use, capturing the performance of one of the leading contenders, the Sherwood Winter Percussion.
“It was absolutely imperative to have a range of microphones for the different situations that we operate in out on the field,” he says. “With other brands, I’ve seen mics perform for a year and then watch them age. I’m impressed by DPA’s consistency day-in and day-out.”
As he awaits production on his 3D virtual reality (VR) project to come out of postponement, sound engineer Sergey Martynyuk is currently heading up the sound production team for the upcoming Austrian film, Love Machine 2. In addition to the gear from the kit, Martynyuk, also chose to use DPA’s 4060 CORE Mini Omnidirectional Microphone with MicroDot for plant mic’ing applications.

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