For health and safety issues for this shoot please click link.
A boom microphone is a directional microphone, most often used in film and television production. Allowing speech to be picked up clearly, without having to have a microphone in the shot, boom mics, are microphones attached to a long pole, enabling the operator to capture sound from many angles. They can not only pick up one voice, but are also useful for group conversation as they can pick up multiple voices. However, due to the microphones being so sensitive, they are also liable to pick up background sounds and even motion from shaky hands, this is why most commonly they will come with some kind sound isolation attachment, usually this is a foam padding.
When we went out to oxford to film, we filmed in a record store, making the most of our time there we asked if the shop assistant would like to take part in a short interview for us, he agreed (permission slip in 'Oxford Shoot' post) on to this an so we began setting up the equipment. As this was the first time we had actually used the boom mic in a serious situation, it was vital we set it up right. We had a short tutorial in how to set it up before we went.
Below is the footage from our interview with the record store assistant, as you'll be able to here the sound didn't turn out as well as we'd hoped it would. We found the boom mic must have been to close to the speaker that was above our interviewee, therefore it picked up far too much background noise and almost completely drowned out the interviewee's speech. This was quite disappointing as the rest of the shoot went well. The composition of this piece works quite well, we managed to keep to the rule of thirds, though the subjects eye level could be a little lower, which we could have achieved silly by lowering the legs of the tripod.
The aperture in this shot is around f/16, the majority of the shot is in focus, however you can see outside the window the focus is slightly off. I would say that due to the brightness through the window, we may have needed to lower the ISO number so that the image wouldn't have looked quite so over exposed, despite the small lens opening due to small aperture.
Interview in oxford 1 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
The clip below was taken from the same interview shoot, however in the editing process, I tested out lowering the background noise in the audio settings, this has intact helped to make the speech slightly clearer. This could mean that the interview can still be used. If we relate this back to the new wave, with particular reference to Godard's A Bout de Souffle, there is a scene in which an interview is taking place near an airport and the noise of planes taking off makes it difficult to understand the speech. (This scene is in a clip below) We could also add subtitles to footage to make it more understandable if needs be, or in true new wave fashion, we could simply have a very short clip of the interview and then cut to a new scene. Actively finding ways to fix problems or work with footage we have keeps in line with our original brief as these are conventional of new wave film makers. Often there would not have been enough money left in the budget to reshoot imperfect footage, so they found creative ways of working with what they had.
Record Store Interview 2 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
Interview scene from Jean Luc Godard's, A Bout de Souffle
Using The Internal Mic
At the same time as filming the interview, using the boom mic, we had another camera taking some cut away shots of the interview, this camera had an internal mic. The clip below is footage from the interview that is making use of the internal mic. This has in fact come out clearer than than the footage using the boom mic as it is not as sensitive and therefore less background noise has been picked up. This use of internal mic, is a feature of the new wave movement as it is a cheap, portable way of recording sound, maintaining a link with our brief.
The way in which this piece of footage has been shot, focuses on the subject in an interesting way, by filming through the mirror reflection we are avoiding conventional methods, again relating this piece to the work of the new wave directors.
The quality of this image is not quite as crisp as we would have liked, we perhaps should have checked that the ISO was set at around 100, to insure the best possible quality, which may have meant we would have had to set the aperture to an f/2 or f/4 in order to make sure the light sensitivity is counteracted by a small lens opening so that the image isn't over exposed. Also, the smudging on the mirror has not helped, the unfocussed image.
interview cut away from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
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