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Boom in the Shot.


Todd Weaver

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Yes "boom in shot" or similar, is often said with a tone that seems to me to be strangely aggressive and somehow smug at the same time, and I've found myself trying to work out if it's my reaction or whether that aggression and smugness is really there and I think I've decided that it really often is?

But that leads to another question why .......?

Anyone else feel this? Or am I just over- sensitive?

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I told a director a little while ago that if I wasn't dipping in now and again I wasn't getting close enough. It didn't go down that well - The same director had a very poor understanding of overscan as well and was getting upset at seeing boom even though the DP was telling her it was nowhere near the frame.

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Digitally erasing a boom mic in the shot is extremely trivial nowadays, unless it gets in front of the actor's face. The only time it's really an issue is if it's a handheld camera, camera move, or steadicam shot. If it's a static shot, it's cheap and easy to fix if it's just in the frame a little bit.

NOBODY should care if the boom is in the frame on a VFX shot, as long as the boom is just in the green/blue-screen area. Any shoot with a VFX supervisor on-set will tell them not to worry about it, since the compositing artists will just garbage matte the mic out. Having said that: on Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland shoot, I noticed that the sound crew often used colored-cloth-covered boom mics on the picture, in case they did get in the frame. My guess was that they were doing live temporary mattes on set, and it was easier for the director to "see" the temp framing that way.

The exception would be any productions that have zero time and zero money to fix this stuff in post. (I'm thinking in particular of live shoots, documentaries, and reality productions.)

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I die a little bit inside every time a "producer" in video village starts complaining "boom shadow.... boom shadow.....BOOM SHADOW...."

Learn the song and sing along:

"I'm being followed by a boom shadow

Boom shadow boom shadow

Leaping and hopping on a boom shadow

"Boom shadow boom shadow..."

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  • 1 month later...

Just goes to show that the people calling these things out dont have a clue what they are doing and have no right be called a producer or director. Production sound school should be a mandate in film school first before learning how to bark orders at others.

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I was called back to the set during an MOS shot because our DP Laszlo Kovacs said that "The C stand was making a boom shadow".

To me there is nothing better than watching the camera operators squirming lizard rotating, left skunk eye, trying to get your attention because you are too close to the frame line for their comfort (while the mixer is telling you to come down 1" on the PL). Good times!

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