Visible Microphone


Did anyone else notice during the first classroom scene with Shatner, that the studio recording microphone was clearly visible moving around at the top of the frame for several seconds? YIKES!....pretty obvious! Now available on Netflix!

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The boom mike is visible in several scenes throughout the entire movie. Probably the worst boom mike errors I've ever seen.

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LOL I cracked up. Maybe back then they didn't have the budget, time, technology or whatever to go in a edit that sucker out.



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Wow! I am absolutely the worst at seeing these kinds of things, even after ya'll eagle eyes see them first and tell us! But this one was so obvious!

I did notice, tho, that Shatner's character wasn't wearing a tie. I am pretty sure that ties and jackets, and dress shirts, were required for male teachers at that time. I'm from the Sourh, and female teachers couldn't wear pants until somewhere around 1970-1972, and they had to be a pantsuit, with the top being longer than fingertip length.

Student girls were the same--no pants until then, and no jeans until 1973, 1974?

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I watched it last night too and was surprised at how bad it was.

My guess is that the film was framed for a certain projection lens and aspect ratio. I'm not a film tech person, but I have read here that movies were specified to use various lenses on projection. This frequently resulted in only part of the film projecting -- in essence some is masked off. So it was intentional that more ended up on film than which was projected.

A lot of film to DVD transfers are straight and don't use any sort of mask. One could argue that makes it more archival. Or, it could cause arguments like this to wonder if the cinematographer was that bad to get the boom mike in so many frames.

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This is an unfair criticism of the movie. What should be criticized is the way it's shown.

I'm assuming you saw this in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, but it was meant to be seen in a 1.85:1 ratio. This is achieved by matting off the top and bottom of the frame.

When that's done, and it's shown correctly, you don't see the microphone.

There are many, many movies -- even those filmed by the world's greatest directors -- where this same kind of thing happens. Another example of this kind of "error," which isn't an error, is when someone is supposed to be naked but you can see they're wearing a swimming suit or something. This even happened in the shower scene in PSYCHO, and no one can make the case that Alfred Hitchcock didn't know what he was doing. It's totally due to the frame not being matted (shown in the intended aspect ratio).

To summarize, the director of this movie knew damn well that the microphone was visible, but he also knew the top and bottom of the frame would be matted off and no one would see it. What he didn't know was that this would be all botched up on TV and home video showings.

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