My name is Conner Cobabe, and for my senior project, I helped with the production of my capstone documentary, Foundations – a Spirit of Ricks documentary. While the official title of producer belongs to Dawson Fenn, my roles involved production design and audio tech.
Foundations is a documentary that highlights the spirit of Ricks through the lens of its impact on the lives of all who attend BYU-Idaho. This includes current or prospective students, alumni, and faculty. This way, it would highlight how the lessons learned here can stick with us always, encouraging us to become better people and stronger disciples of Jesus Christ.
Pre-Production
During the pre-production phase, I served as the production designer. It was my job to make sure we had plans for filming locations, the appropriate sets and props for those locations, and the proper wardrobe to help set the right tone.
Our set design would be focused on the homes and workplaces of our talent. That would help emphasize how the Spirit of Ricks impacts the lives of those involved beyond the university itself. As for wardrobe, we had our talent dress in business casual, which captured an everyday tone while still looking well put together. Finally, our props focused on different memorabilia our talent would have from their time at Ricks, to help them reminisce about their experience and how it has shaped their lives.
Production (Filming)
After those plans were complete, I shifted my focus to my other role in the film, audio technician. As an audio technician, I was responsible for recording clean, crisp audio on-site for our sound designer to use in the edit. My approach to this varied slightly depending on what we were recording that day.
When we recorded interviews, I would make sure that a lavaliere microphone was attached to the subject. It was attached to their torso underneath their shirt, so there were no visible microphones. The lav mic was connected to a wireless transmitter, which sent the audio signals to a wireless receiver that fed into an H6 Zoom recorder. To ensure we had multiple copies of the audio, I also set up a shotgun boom mic on a C-stand and fed that audio directly into the camera. Once all my audio gear was set up, I would focus on monitoring the H6’s levels to ensure the audio came out clean.
When we were filming b-roll, I chose not to worry about lav mics. Since our interviews would include all of our audio, there was no need to attach a microphone to the talent. I could then focus on using a boom mic to capture any sound effects we would gather from recording b-roll. To do that, I fed the audio from a shotgun boom mic directly into a Zoom H6 and held the boom mic in a position that would best capture our talent’s audio.
Post-Production
My last major responsibility was ensuring the audio was properly archived and shared with the editor and sound designer for the final edit. To do this, I made sure to separate the audio into folders based on what shoot it pertained to (interview vs b-roll, which person) and label those folders for easier parsing in the edit. If you wish to listen to the audio we recorded, use the Google Drive link below.
Foundations – Spirit of Ricks lav audio
If you are curious about the documentary as a whole, beyond my involvement, I would recommend checking out the posts from the director (Alexia Atwood) and the producer (Dawson Fenn). The final documentary is still deep in editing, so I can’t link the film here. But if you are interested, we will show it on April 7th, 2026, at 7 PM in Spori 035. Thank you so much for reading this far, and I hope you can make it to the premiere.