SETTING UP A LIVE TELEPHONE ON THE SET
by Edwin J. Somers, CAS

Now here is a solution to a problem that doesn't come up very often, but is incredibly challenging when it does. What do you do when the director tells you he wants a live telephone on the set while you're on location?

Usually it goes something like this: The director tells you that he wants a practical (live) phone in the set that he can have the off stage talent cue the on stage talent with. He usually has a prop telephone that he wants to use. All you have to do is make it magically come alive. In this scenario it probably would be nice to have a line input and a line output in this phone system in order to record both sides of the phone conversation.

The problem with trying to adopt an existing phone system is the total lack of control and the inconvenience. The phone will always ring with an incoming call at the worst possible time. The solution: the Viking two-way phone line simulator and any one of the JK Audio telephone interfaces. Oh, you will probably need two working telephones also. See illustration below.

The Viking line simulator offers several nice features such as a dial tone and one or two-way ring down. In other words, you can make the on-stage phone ring on demand.

The JK Audio phone interfaces offer varying degrees of interfacing to the audio signals on the telephone. The one I like for this application is the Inline Patch because it gives you all the access you will need, and it connects into the phone line.

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