Clear-Com’s intercom system has helped keep the producers, remote camera operators, and contestants in contact with one another during filming of the latest season of Netflix series, Love is Blind.
Audio engineer and intercom system designer Glenn Gaines of G2 Sound designed and provided the intercom system for the show using a Clear-Com system that included Eclipse HX, HelixNet, FreeSpeak II, FreeSpeak Edge, LQ(R) Series of IP interfaces and Agent IC.
Each of the simultaneous ten dates had a separate system connected to a central control area from which they were monitored.
The first Clear-Com system deployed by Gaines was for RuPaul’s Drag Race – a HelixNet system that included FreeSpeak beltpacks and a FreeSpeak base station. “That was also the system I used for season one of Love Is Blind, but we realised very early on that, given the show’s requirements, we were taxing the limits of the HelixNet system. We had no idea what we were stepping into on season one beyond broad strokes, so we designed that system to be scalable in case it got bigger.
“We finished the first season, did our post-mortem, and decided to upgrade because the requirements for intercom were much greater than we originally believed. So we were on the HelixNet system one season, and the next, we were on an Eclipse matrix with fully loaded IP and Dante cards.
“I knew I could easily implement those within the architecture of the Eclipse matrix system,” Gaines added, “and, after taking a look at the EHX software, I knew immediately that myself and my comms people (who weren’t really comms specialists, but audio mixers who were interested in setting up comms systems) would find the EHX software very straightforward; something we could figure out and set up on our own because the learning curve wasn’t very steep.”
Having started with a HelixNet, a FreeSpeak base station, and 25 belt packs, the show is now up to over 50 belt packs split across three sound stages between FSII (1.9GHz) and the FreeSpeak Edge system operating on 5GHz.
“I’ve been working with Clear-Com for ten years,” Gaines said, “and familiarity is probably the greatest factor in this whole thing. I’m so familiar with Clear-Com that it’s second nature, for example, to use the audio system to convey outputs from Clear-Com to IFBs for the hosts and to the pods. It’s all become one universe where you can’t separate audio from intercom.”
