Roderick Usher, I have a question for you
 

I'm asking you since you're in the movie business.

Who is responsible for keeping the mic/boom out of the shot? Whoever M. Night Shyamalan hired, he needs to stay away from that person.

I went to see The Happening yesterday, and in about a dozen shots you could see the mic/boom. Totally destroyed the movie for me.

After reading a few reviews I'm thinking M. Night should stay away from making movies.

It's sad, because I LOVED "The Sixth Sense" and "Signs". Well, I didn't LOVE "Signs", but I liked it. I really think his 15 minutes are up.

Boom in the SHOT! we used to play that as a drinking game - it adds excitement to lots of low budget flicks and makes you pay close attention!

edit: and for the record it is a "Boom Operator" who is in charge of the boom mic

For me its a slightly different story.

I absolutely adore Unbreakable. I think it could easily displace any of the movies in my Horror Top 20 (maybe 15), should I sit down to write them. Its a gorgeous movie, with a premise and climax which kicks some serious ass!

The Sixth Sense is second for me, but not by much.

I thought Signs was a largely decent effort, spoiled by the rubbish ending which totally took the movie away for me.

I need not say anything about The Village. Its a well-known fact in HDC about my relationship with THAT movie.

Lady in the Water held a very interesting premise. And I thought it held some potential for the middle 30 odd-minutes. But the rest was so downhill and full of rubbish, that the movie sucked, with a capital S.

And now from what I have been hearing about The Happening, (plus the fact that one of my friends went to watch it and came back totally disappointed) I will be skipping this one.


I think the appreciation he got for the first two movies has made him a filmmaker who is trying too hard to please the masses. If he sat down and tried to make a horror movie HIMSELF, he might succeed...


...eventually...



...maybe?

But who's responsible for making sure it doesn't show up in the final presentation?

Well, there's a lot of blame to spread around there- the camera operator should notice it when setting up the shots and call it to someone's attention.

The editor would notice it when editing.

But naturally the producer would say hell no, we're not reshooting all those shots!

Interesting. Thanks, neverending. You'd be watching a scene, and all of a sudden, you'd see this "thing" come into view at the top of the screen. It happened so many times that eventually you stop paying attention to the movie waiting for it to happen again.

I read somewhere that its got to do with the framing of the movie after the fact

the boom mike you see shouldnt be visible when viewing the movie.

in otherwords .. the boom wasnt actually protruding into the space that was was intended for viewing.

peter jackson made people basically the same height look as if they had a 3 foot height difference.

the Wachowski brothers bled green into every "Inside the Matrix" scene of those movies

Michael Bay made it look liuke there were 60 foot tall robots that changed into vehicles.


How fuckign hard is it to scrub out a boom mic?

Amen, brother. There is no excuse for a visible boom mike in a final cut with today's technology.

one result of a google search (on visible boom mike in movies)

there's more :


In response to that post, beloved commenter Dashiell suggested "the boom mike problem is the fault of the projectionist, not the filmmakers," which I assumed was true. It is a little-known fact that, when you see a movie in the theater, you're usually not getting the complete contents of the reel itself; the projectionist cuts off a bit of the top and a bit of the bottom to fit it properly on the screen1. Exactly how much is cut off depends on the film and the projectionist. I seem to remember reading somewhere that directors don't necessarily worry about boom mics slipping into the top of the frame, since it's assumed they'll be cropped.

Huh. So I should demand that Regal give me my money back? :p

nope

The fault lies with the Director, DP, Editor, Digital compositor and the Boom Operator. Any one of these people could have either prevnted or fixed the situation.

The excuse that it should be framed-out by the projectionist is a bullshit excuse for sloppy filmmaking.

Thank you, Rod. I guess Mr. Shyamalan is losing his touch. And hiring crappy people.

Wow, for a film with a budget this size, I wouldn't expect such sloppy, amateur, b-grade mistakes to repeat themselves so often.

Look out Uwe Boll, there's a new king of shit horror in town.

Normally this is the theatre's fault because they need to center the film correctly and it wouldn't be a problem.