recording interior car dialogue

chris f

chris f

Veteran
I imagine this has been covered before, but the search won't allow the word "car" because it's to common or whatever....

Anyways I've got a scene where two characters have a conversation while driving in a car and I was wandering what the best way to record the audio would be. I have an Oktava MK12 boom set up and I also have an Audio Technica wired lav.

With the boom set up I'm worried about space and keeping the boom out of the shot and I'm also worried about handling noise when going over bumps and such. The two actors would be in the front seats, I would be filming from one of the back seats and the boom operator would have to be booming from the other back seat.

I was also thinking about putting the wired lav on the actor or possibly hiding the lav on the visor or the roof of the car, but didn't know if that might be too directional if the actor turns his head or if the mic would pick up all the bumps and rattles of the car if it's taped to the ceiling or visor.

I'll definitely be running some tests, but just wanted to see if anyone had any advice, thanks.
 
Lavs on actors = hell. Tape it up on the roof between them (if it's an omni) and you might get passable sound. It's tough to fly a boom pole in a car because of the very limited headroom (unless you're using something like a Honda Element which has like two yards of headroom!)
 
Thanks for the advice. If we boomed I imagine we would boom from below because there's no way we'd have any headroom, my lead is 6'5", ha.
 
if you shooting only from the back you can place the lavaliers outside as the body willcover them in the shot
if you have acses to microphones with swivel joints , you can place them under the visor with heads down ( neuman, mbho , schoeps, akg) then use cardioid pattern
you can place the octava bello the passenger sit and take the other guy with lavalier or find better mic to tape it on the visor
.keep the windows down, keep the aircondition dow , choose car with bensin engine not diesel , take all **** that can make noise or not secured out of the car .
try to find the road if it possible the car can go without to much gear shifts and engine turing .
after shots , record car normal driving
 
some good advice already given.

I like to use one or two sanken CUB-01 taped or velcroed to the roof, but these mics are hard to find in hire shops (in scotland anyway) so I've got 3 of them ;0)

on top of this :
To use your octava you might consider borrowing a magic arm from the gaffer and securing it on the glove compartment (or somewhere sturdy) out of the bottom edge of frame.

a couple of omni lavs near the inside edges of the sun visor should be usable, but if they are come into shot in the last minute then you might be holding up everyone by moving them, not to mention the sound-continuity will change if you move them.
 
If at all poss, don't have the car driving while recording. At the very least stop after the shot and record the dialog with the engine off so post has some chance of usable dialog. And when you finish editing give post big handles in the OMF, four seconds or so, AND the other takes.
 
To clarify a bit. The only dialog you need to record with the car moving is when you can see lips move AND see something clearly out a window at the same time. In most car scenes that is a very few actual lines.
 
I agree with Noiz2.

But I also think that lavs are just fine because there should not be a lot of movement to create the rubbing issues.
 
Indywannabe said:
But I also think that lavs are just fine because there should not be a lot of movement to create the rubbing issues.
Click to expand...

A person shifting from one cheek to the other can be enough to mess up your take. Add a seatbelt and the inability for the sound guy to make quick adjustments on you actors and you are playing with fire. Mounting on visor is just so much easier and safer. If you are never going to get a shot from the front (I think Clerks shot like that) then you could leave the mic exposed on your actor and not worry about it.


Generally a process trailer would be the ideal choice and poor man's process is even used on some larger Hollywood productions but if you must shoot with the car running, for continuity sake, try to have the dialog delivered at the same RPMs. You would also do yourself a huge favor to shoot both sides at the same time. Maintaining continuity of sound and visuals is a real ***** otherwise.

Good luck
 
I imagine you are shooting only one person at a time and you won't be able to see their crouches so have the passenger hold the boom in a simple pistol grip rig. When they talk he points it at himself when the driver talks he points it at him. There are better ways to do it but for what you have it will work.

LAVS won't work.

Avoid the ceiling cause it will be the only unobstructed thing from the camera. Everyone hates the boom dipping in.

-Jared
 
drive amd point - sorry pal you are not on this plannet :-)
by the way - did ever heard about 2 person shot from the back sit - very common on films :-), that call wide angle shot when 2 people are talking each other in profile ,
did you ever hear about mooving the shot from one person to other in the same shot ?
.
you know not only your ears are not ok but your imaginotion is also sucks even you never did these shots .
 
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Thanks for all the advice and definitely keep it coming. Right now I'm leaning towards mounting the lav on the ceiling to pick up all the dialogue, and then doing ADR with the edited scene and recording it in the same car parked with the engine off. That way I can add engine and car noises in later so they are continuous.
 
I did a shot in a car with 2 people..but not driving.. from different angles with sound man in the back seat scrunched out of view and pointing the oktava using the hyper head. Very clean sound. But if you are driving, then nothing short of renting a camera car, using a out of sight lav or a taped down mike just might be your only choices. Other ways might be just to do a green screen and create a moving background using Aftereffects or similar in post to create the movement of the car moving.

http://www.videocopilot.net/seriousfx.html
 
Your going to do what your going to do but I had the unfortunate job of trying to salvage dialog on a short that was about 70% in a moving car and they used two plant mics. 90% of audio post was just trying to get usable (not clean) dialog. And I have quite a bit of experience and a lot of fairly pricey post tools to throw at that kind of problem. They didn't do "clean" wild take right after the shot. They did do what they called "ADR" before I got the film (the actors were just sort of ad-libbing lines, talking over each other etc. very USLESS).

The bigest problem of course was noise road bumps etc. Also there is pretty much no way to iso the actors so your will hear the other actor in the off mic. Not a big deal till you try to cut different takes together. If you have a over lapping lines you have a big problem because you have so much, dominant, BG that If you find a take where the line isn't stepped on you have a BG that will never come close to matching. Normally you can grab a word or line from somewhere else but the BG makes it VERY difficult.

So you MUST get lots of coverage and you MUST get some clean takes that can be used when you get to an impossible to make clean edit comes along, and it will.
A Lav in the hair is probably a better bet than most but? The visor trick works well if the car is being towed over smooth ground, the farther you get away from that the worse it gets. Maybe with lots of foam and taped to the roof? The problem is anything touching the car body is going to pick up a lot of road and engine noise.
And I still contend that if you look at your storyboard you will find very few shots that need to be done while the car is actually moving.
 
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