My favourite character.....the microphone!!!
That was really lame...the microphone was everywhere!!!
Couldn't they have done anything about that?!
The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club
Do you mean when you saw it in the theatre? Because i saw it on DVD (in widescreen version) and didn't notice that. If it was in the theatre, then it probably means the film was being shown incorrectly by the projectionist. Rule of thumb, if you see the Mic in the movies, it is a fault of the theatre, not the movie.
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I know nothing about projecting a film, but I seriously doubt they're going to release a real of film to a movie theatre which could possibly be so horribly flawed as you described -- and if you ever enountered a movie like this, it would have to be a one or two time deal. Common sense says the guys who blame the projectionists are probably right; a lot of money goes into making these movies, and a lot of people double, triple, and quadruple check to make sure everything's right. Seems to me it's more likely the fault of the one guy in the back not being paid the big, big, big money. no offense meant.
Then again perhaps your theatre has outdated equipment or something... I'm just saying it's not very likely the fault of shoddy camera work, since they have guys looking at those shots a zillion times.
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This was a big problem with Lost In Translation because it was shot in an "Open Matte" format, meaning that the projectionist would have to pare down the image to be projected. A lot of them couldn't do it right, and across America people were complaining about seeing the boom mikes and the faces of the actors from only the eyebrows up (there's a good detailing of one man's story at http://www.theaterhopper.com/index.php?strip_id=179. One person wrote in to the artist, saying that leaving the "film at an open matte will give it a smaller aspect ratio, and expose everything that's supposed to be behind the matte. This type of filmmaking is supposed to be more cost-efficient").
The same thing happened to me with Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind; for the first five minutes of the movie, the Focus Features logo was cut off from the bottom up, we could only see the top of Jim Carrey's head (which meant we couldn't see the dent in the car, leading to some confusion), and there were a few microphones too (in the restaurant, for instance, sitting up in the top right-hand corner). It was so blatantly obviously misframed that someone went off to complain. Minutes later, the projectionist arrived, the image moved on the screen for a few seconds, and it was properly framed.
>Have you even seen inside a projection room?!?!?!
...yes. on two continents.
>if there are any boom microphones in the shot then it comes down to shotty (?)
>camera work on the cameramans behalf, they only appear on the film if the
>frame cannot be edited as such to remove them
not true. i've also shot both film and video and would shoot wide with film all the time. the image is cropped down a bit during editing anyway, which is why you have safety lines on the monitor and/or lens to show what will and won't be in frame. even if you screw up, you can zoom in on a shot a little more or adjust the framing in editing... you'd be very hard pressed to be able to blame the studio unless it was a low budget film.
oh, and it's "shoddy" by the way.
>if they are printed to film, the projectionist CANNOT do anything to remove
>them... if you adjust the framing up to try hide the mics what happens is you
>end up with the frame line (black line) across the bottom of the screen and
>possible the top of the next frame on screen...
that's only true with scope films. if it's flat (in europe they called it widescreen, although that made no sense to me) then you usually have black spacers at the top and bottom of every frame, but sometimes they will print the whole frame or nearly the whole frame and leave the framing (or racking) up to the venue. also, if you use the wrong setting for the aperature plate (scope for a flat print, for instance) you could be shooting out light for the top and bottom of the frame that will fall onto the masking cloth around the screen. i also know that some venues automate the masking to go with either the lens or aperature plate (i never had that luxury, but it's very common now), so all of that extra light would spill out onto the screen. if it were the wrong lens, it would be painfully obvious. but the aperature plate could throw you off.
thus, what Zauis said is possible and does happen fairly frequently. i still have to complain to the manager occasionally to get them to fix the framing.