Mike and Boom in Shot

[Store Hadji]

Several years ago I saw Spielberg's AI in a second run showing at some small and old theater in, I think, Redford Michigan. Skip Rosenthal played banjo before the picture. The straight-back seats were utter agony to sit in for 2+ hours.

I think I posted on this subject some time ago - if I'm repeating myself I apologize.

As the movie ran, the bottom of the overhead microphone could clearly be seen protuding down into the image in many of the scenes. So much for suspension of disbelief. I'd guess that the film should have been projected onto a different shaped screen - more rectangular - which would have clipped off the top portion of the screen containing the mike. AI on DVD is matted so as not to include the mike. What surprised me was that a release print of anything should contain the microphone. That almost seems to negate the concept of frame composition, if films as released contain the gaffer standing just at the edge of the frame - though you can't see him because he spilled off the edge of the projection screen. It seems that zoom back should let us see such things, though I've never found that to be the case.

A very strange occurance which I've never properly sorted out.

[Roger Ryan]

A friend of mine once told me about watching Adrian Lyne's "Unfaithful" in a second run theatre where the boom mic appeared in no less than 11 scenes. "It literally became a character in the film", he exclaimed. This problem must occur because the film is not properly matted during projection. It's interesting it was a second run theatre in both instances. I saw "A.I." twice theatrically and neither time was I subjected to the boom mic showing (the film, by the way, is 1 to 1:85 ratio). A filmmaker should never count on projection overscan to hide unwanted images on the sides of the frame, but expecting a film to be matted properly when projected is a different matter.

[jaime marzol]

i had the same argument with a freind a few years back. a film he saw had tons of boom mics and mic shadows, and in a newspaper review the producers blamed it on the theaters not properly masking the projection, and my friend swallowed that. i say, if the boom mic is on the negative, it's a defect.

[Store Hadji]

"Matted properly when projected"

Does this mean that film negatives actually aren't the film compositions intended by the director (or whomever)? It seems a pretty vague practice - like slipping a card with the correct size rectangle in it over the projector lens - unless someone forgot to put the card in, or got the one for a different aspect ratio - or was still using the English-standard version when everybody else had switched to metric.

If celluloid has to be matted and isn't simply exactly what's on the roll of film - which I heretofore had thought was the exact image the director wanted, then there's no such thing as a director-authorized matting of anything.

I prefer the idea of a defective negative - though not knowing anything yet about the practice of projector matting in movie theaters, I'll keep asking questions and may have to do homework again.

[jbrooks]

It is a common practice for films shot in the Academy ratio (1 to 1:85) to be filmed using standard 35mm film (ratio of 1 to 1.37) and then masked to 1 to 1.85 either in the camera or in the projector. Sometimes the films are not masked in camera because the filmmakers intend to show the entire frame on television. This was done "The Princess Bride" and many other "open matte" films. (For scope films (1 to 2.35) this same thing can be done with Super 35 MM film). For these films, the letterboxed version actually contains less image than the full-screen version. This is the case with Touch of Evil. [On "Lolita" and "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick sometimes masked the shots and sometimes didn't, and he preferred that the video versions match the negative. Thus, the approved video versions of these films have aspect ratios that vary from shot to shot.]

I've seen a a few films where the projectionist did not properly crop the movie. Sometimes the shape of the screen is incorrect, and sometimes the projectionist has not aligned the frame correctly -- so for example, part of the bottom that should cropped is instead visible and much of the top of the frame that should be visible is cropped.