"Fox Holes" written and directed by Monica Puller

Very cool, Andrew, very cool!

I spy a China ball, an HV20 with a wide angle adapter and a Rode videomic!

You're the bee's knees, Jessica. I bought all of it based on your expert advice, and wouldn't dream of making a movie without them.

The china ball is one of my best friends. The stand I use for it was donated by a friend and came from a hospital. It was made to hold an i.v. bag so it has wheels and is quite heavy, and is height adjustable similar to a mic stand. The ball is attached using a handy vise grip clip thing with a powerfully pose-able extending arm.

I just am not sure if its okay, morally, to make a movie about the vaginas of foxes. I mean, the foxes don't even know they're being filmed. Is that okay? Do you have members of Peta around to make sure no animals are hurt during the sex scenes?

At least they aren't Megan foxes.

nice to see this. cant wait to see the movie.

On the Oblivion series, since we don't have a boom operator, we've put two mic on stands and placed them on either side of the frame as close to the actors as we can get them. Sound quality is much improved over an on camera shotgun mic - the actors' voices don't fade when they turn their heads away from camera. But this only really works if you shoot everyting on a tripod.

Jessica

That's a good idea! The Rode is pretty much the best solution for us given the size of our crew and the way we shoot. But getting dialog scenes from far away is basically impossible. I could always detach it and use a boom operator, but it's a pain in the ass having a person attached to the camera besides me. On Cannibal Sisters, we had a boom operator, and the sound ended up being all over the place. I have never had such a hard time editing sound - making it all match was a bitch.

If you're going to try it with just one mic, probably your best option is to place the mic stand about 2/3rds of the way from the camera to the talent just to the side of the frameline, then boom the mic on the stand over the frame and aim it down and forward towards the center of the actors. This only really works if the actors aren't moving around much.

If there's a lot of movement, however, you'll have to break it down into sections. Shoot the master with the mic on the camera and use the audio mainly as a reference track. Then whenever the actors stop moving to deliver lines, reposition the camera and put the mic on the stand. When they move from that spot, in editing you'd jsut cut back to the master, and you pick up coverage at the next place they stop. *Plus* (and this is important), get wild lines! When the entire scene is shot, have the actors stand around the mic on the stand and read the entire scene as if they were doing a radio play. This way, the audio quality will match the rest of the scene. This avoids the problem of doing ADR later on and trying to use the audio filters in FCP to match the sound quality of where you shot.

BTW, the further away you place your camera for a shot, the narrower the frame and the closer you can get the mic to the actors and the bigger your budget looks - audiences associate very long lenses with very high end commercials and big budget studio flicks because of the esthetically appealing way it looks. (For an exaggerated example of this, watch the "gas fight" scene from Zoolander.)

Jessica

Wild lines!!! I've got to do that more often. We shot part of Arinn's scene outdoors and there was so much noise, I knew we'd need ADR. So we had her stand in front of the mic when we got back inside, and say her lines again.