So, I'm sitting here at a restaurant eating dinner with my aunt and uncle, and my uncle starts to discuss Van Helsing. They just saw it on opening night I guess.

He starts out saying that they were sitting there and enjoying the movie (yes, don't go there), and all of a sudden a boom mic is visible out of the top of the picture, fairly close to the speaking people. He went on to say that this occurred at least 15 times. He said it almost looked planned.

Being the somewhat movie technical guru of the family I am, I did mention that perhaps the movie wasn't matted correctly in the theater, but he said that in some shots, that there was no way that the boom mic could have been matted out with the way the shot was set up.

He also said that the whole theater audience seemed to notice as well and it became a joke.

So are there boom mics visible in the film, or do you think that my local theater got a bad (pre-post-production) copy or something?

This happens a lot at drive in theaters, sometimes the projection isnt framed correctly. This happened when I saw Signs in fact.

Yeah, if the 'boom mic' was in every print of Van Helsing all over the country, there would be posts about it out the wazoo. You just had an isolated incident. But hey, it probably made the movie more interesting.

perhaps. but then again not everyone notices things like that. Resident Evil is one film that comes to mind that the boom mic was present. It happens.

did you guys see super troopers? there was one scene where the fat guy was in the shower. the camera showed off his penis full on and a boom mike was overhead. i thought it was really funny,simply because the nudity was SOOOOOOOOO uncessacary. i dont know if they messed the framing and we got to not only see the mike but a dick as well. anyone else notice this?

the theater probably just didnt have it matted right on the screen

maybe i'm missing something but the only thing i ever noticed out of place is that imperial troops in star wars had cough drops as a sign of rank. i have never noticed any mikes or any other stage props in any movie.

This happened to me when I saw Ghost World at the dollar cinema. Heck, the projector even screwed up twice, and we missed about ten minutes of the movie. I'm just glad that it held up until the movie was over.

Gothika was the absolute worst movie ever when it comes to visible boom mics.

Whenever you see this across multiple scenes, it's the fault of the projectionist. Do yourself a favor and step out to tell somebody what will happen, and they will fix it.

Exactly. This is almost NEVER the fault of the filmmakers. It's the zit-faced dude snoozing in the projection booth who's supposed to watch out for that. Roger Ebert's written a handful of columns on why this is but I can't find links to them right now.

Roger Ebert has written about zit-faced dudes? Cool. Where can I read about those?

::

Well, like I said, this apparently happened over a dozen times. However he said that some shots were so that there couldn't have been any frame matting that could have removed the boom mic. In fact, he said that one of them looked like one of the old-time mics from the '50s.

Well that's what I thought. I hadn't seen any posts about it on this BBS, so I figured that it had to be a bad matting job.

No, but the bootleg you saw did....

Where in Resident Evil is there a visible boom mic? I'm not gonna lie...I did see a bootleg of RE and in the bootleg, it was incorrectly framed. But point out where in the movie it is and i'll check my dvd right now.

Just got back from Van Helsing. Not one boom mic.

Change theaters!

Before I knew about misframed visible boom mics, some friends and I saw Bicentennial Man and it was filled with them. At the time we thought they just f'ed up royally, and the whole movie was just hilarious. All I can say is thank god it was misframed... that was the only enjoyment I got out of the movie!

Saw the same thing multiple times during "Spiderman" in the theatres but don't remember seeing it on the DVD. In "Annie Hall" (on video) I remember a couple of shots with the mic hovering in and out of the shot.

But the absolute WORST (I'll have to see it again because it was so long ago) was McBain with Christopher Walken. If I remember correctly in one outside scene you actually SEE the sound guy in the lower right part of the screen, and then he moves out of frame slowly as if someone is telling him to move out heh.

You can see a boom mic's shadow in desperado, Rodriguez even mentions it in the commentary.

similarily, and I don't know if this was intentional but in Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" the shadow of a boom mic is very obviousily seen in the first few minutes of the film.

When we saw School of Rock, the boom mic was visible in almost every single shot inside the classroom.