Hugging Couples and Lavs

D

Deframer

New member
Hey guys! I'm a newbie to this forum and filmmaking both, but I'm trying to learn fast because I have a shoot rapidly approaching (late next month, anyway) and we're getting well and truly stuck into pre-production.

My specific question revolves around a particular setup: Guy and girl have finished packing up a room for guy to move. Girl is sitting against some boxes, guy sits right beside her. We have a few medium-full shots of the couple, while everything else is a closeup. Halfway through the scene, the guy puts his arm over the girl and she kind of cuddles into him. Aww.

Problem is, we can't use a hypercardioid for a couple of reasons: first, there is dialogue in the medium-full shots and there's nothing feasible to hide the mic behind and; second, and more importantly, we don't actually have a hypercardioid. We do, however, have two Sennheiser EW 122-p G3-B Wireless lavs. I've set them up - during crew-rehearsals to familiarise with equipment - with moleskin and am not getting any contact rustling whatsoever. What I'm finding, however, is that while I'm not having much trouble with rustling before the couple cuddle up together, afterwards every little move they make - her moving about in his arms, twisting her head up to look at him - is causing some rustle. I don't think it's contact but I can't rule it out being a newbie.

As a side note, when she twists her head up to look at him for an 'OTS' shot down at her, the sound also fades out a bit.

Any tips/hints as to how to fix this? Someone suggested switching to a mic on a boom during closeups but I've heard that's not a good thing to do for consistent sound design.

Anyone care to help out a newbie? Sorry!
 
Well, this seems to me to be another example of too much reading this forum and too little trying it out for yourself. Get rid of the lavs here, lavs are an option for very hard to do shots where you cant get good sound from a boom. Boom is where you start a scene. Boom almost always sounds better than lavs. So try around a bit. You can use the dialogue from the close shots on the wide shots if the intonation is similar. Get a hypercardiois such as Oktava MK012 or rent one for the shoot, won't cost you too much. Dont go ahead and do the shoot without a decent boom mic, by all means! If you have a shotgun you can try that too, but it might sound strange for interiors.
 
Thanks for the prompt response mate :)

Yeah, I guess I've been trying to force myself to use the lavs :S we've spent literally zero dollars on the film thus far and have a huge mental block against changing that. One of those stupid pride things haha :P also, this is essentially our practice run.

Now, we have some competent actors, but as an occasional actor myself I know how hard it is sometimes to pace words. And the scene is pretty dialogue heavy; presumably, then, even if we try to get it as similar as we can every time, we might be a tiny bit off as far as matching pacing and intonation goes. Is close enough good enough for syncing audio with the wide-shots? I'm assuming a clever editor might pick and choose when to cut to and from the wides depending on visual asthetic and dialogue sync. I don't think any of us have the relevant experience to perform some of the sound trickery and acrobatics to sync up sound and have it sound natural.

We're definitely going to give this a shot in a few days when we get together again, though! Thanks heaps for the advice.

Sorry if I'm being overly cautious but we're really trying to get this to run as smoothly as we can on the day so our actors don't pay the price for our inexperience!
 
You're right to think everything through beforehand, but I can predict that you will run into problems, because that's what filmmaking is about, facing problems, making mistakes and learning from them. If you dont want to spend any money, be creative. Make tests with your fellow students and see how you can get along with the gear and situations you have. And if you end up finding it impossible to get usable sound from the scene, find a compromise with the camera dept - narrowing the wide shot until you can boom it for example.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Trial and error is the best method to learn.
And don't expect the result to be as good as if you were spending money.
 
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