Warning! If you haven’t seen the movie this may “spoil” or distract you from the film’s content.
I saw “Catch Me If You Can” last night. While it was a solid entertaining movie, with great acting performances, there were some blatant editing gaffs.
I caught THREE seperate scenes where the boom mic was seen dangling at the top of the screen. It was visible enough to be distracting. Why would Spielberg or the film editor let that get through?
Also, there is a scene where Hanks’ character is looking through the high school yearbook of DiCaprio’s character. If you look carefully, you will see that every page in the yearbook is the same.
The boom mike thing may have been a projectionist’s error.
I’ve only seen it once, but I think I have a pretty keen eye for detail. The only time that I thought that I saw the boom mike, (in the FBI office, near the end,) it turned out to be a dark, rectangular object affixed to a wall in the background. It’s position, colour, and shape, along with its appearing in a static shot, made it appear to be a microphone. Subsequent shots revealed it to be attached to a far wall. (I think it may have been a passive-infrared motion detector, so it may still count as a gaffe…)
I think that I spotted a continuity error – it seemed to me that when Frank ran away from home, he changed shirts sometime between bolting for the door and running down the street. This might have been an illusion created by the sharp change in lighting, though. I’ll be looking for it the next time I see it.
Bad Booming
Booms that make it into the final print are often the first sign of a limited budget. Because the 35mm film exposed inside the camera contains a frame significantly larger than both the 1.85 aspect ratio picture that usually shows in theaters and the taller picture that plays on TV, the boom will appear within the D.P.'s eyepiece, but it shouldn’t dip below the frameline. On complicated dolly moves or scenes in which actors stand up and move around, this can be harder than it sounds. The boom gets in the shot when, as location mixer Brian Miksis (Gummo, Two Girls and a Guy, Buffalo 66, Wide Awake) says, “The boom operator thought he knew the boundaries but didn’t; the camera operator should have noticed but didn’t…”
And, as Williams adds, “Not only don’t independent filmmakers have the resources to shoot again, but a lot of first-time indie filmmakers don’t use video monitors. They may not even be getting dailies, so they don’t see the mistakes until they’re in post.”
Almost as common as the boom in the shot is the boom shadow in the shot. Boom shadows are often a result of limitations in the lighting package. Cheaper packages often contain smaller instruments with harsher light sources which create harder, more visible shadows. And of course, raising the boom higher in the frame to keep a shadow from falling means sacrificing sound quality. Lack of communication on set is also often responsible. “The better the relationship the sound department has with the D.P. and the lighting people, the better the film will be,” Miksis explains. “It’s important that everyone knows what the other departments’ needs and limitations are. Too often, however, you’ll have a D.P. who works very quickly and isn’t sound-friendly, who doesn’t communicate or doesn’t even know what the frame is. Or you’ll find a lighting department that isn’t keeping sound and shadows in mind. Sloppy communication leads to sloppy errors.”
Sounds like the framing issue should have been handled on the set…not in the theater.
This is the crucial bit. The boom may appear in eyepiece, but should not dip below the frameline into the area that will be projected onscreen. However, even if the boom stays above the frameline it will appear onscreen if the projectionist doesn’t get the picture lined up properly! If the projector is angled down too low then stuff will show up onscreen that is above the frameline. This is really the only possible explanation for multiple appearances of the boom mike in a current, big-budget film by a major Hollywood director. There’s no way in hell Spielburg and his team just missed three or more scenes with a boom mike dangling below the frameline.
When Frank Jr is having lunch with his father, his hand jumps from the table to his side between shots, and on and off his wine glass.
Frank Jr is not wearing his false pilot’s ID in several scenes, very bad considering it’s one of the two things vital to the impersonation.
In his mug shot taken in Atlanta, Frank Jr has short hair. he had long hair when he was delivered into custody and it’s unlikely that the authorities would have cut his hair before booking him.
Of course, these might not be mistakes at all. Spielberg and company are having a fun time spinning stories about the film. One of them will claim that such and such a part of the film is made up, while another member of the cast/crew will claim that it’s genuine. Since the film is about deception, it seems that they’ve decided to use that as part of their marketing ploy. The “gaffs” that you’ve mentioned might simply have been tricks they threw into the picture to make the viewer question what is reality as far as the story goes. Orson Welles did something similar in F is for Fake. Then again, there was that whopping continuity error in the first Jurassic Park movie…
Since it hasn’t been spelled out clearly in this thread yet, let me explain this business of the projectionist’s liability for your seeing boom mikes. (Or try to, anyway-- it’s probably better left to one of the industry Dopers like Johnny LA– I’m just a halfway informed film-geek… …but since the man himself doesn’t seem to be here, here goes: )
Catch Me If You Can is presented in the open matted 1.85:1 format, printed on 35mm stock. 35mm film will be familiar to you, even if you’ve never been inside a projectionist’s booth-- it’s the same sized film you load your camera with. But the aspect ratio of the image projected on the screen is somewhat wider than a frame of 35mm film stock. What’s the deal? Simple-- there’s material on the top and bottom of each frame that is masked out by the projector. You saw boom-mikes in Catch Me If You Can because the film wasn’t aligned properly-- you were missing stuff off the bottom of the frame in order to see stuff in the top of the frame that you were never meant to see.
I have a couple of trailers at home which are intended to be presented this way. At least one, Enough, w/ Jennifer Lopez, has boom-mikes all through it. (It has an even wider aspect ratio, though.) If it were an error on the part of the boom operator, they sure as hell would take care to leave it out of the trailer.
And, 'cuz I can’t resist a cheap tease, framing problems and property dept. shortcuts don’t fall into the category of “editing gaffes.”
Nice call on the yearbook thing, though. I didn’t notice that, I’ll look forward to looking for it next time.
Misframing by projectionists is pretty common. David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”, which was originally intended for TV and thus shot 1:33, was sent out to theatres with specific instructions to adjust the image slightly downward so as to focus more on the upper part of the frame and not the center. Of course, no one paid any attention to this, and in most theatres any close-up of a actor’s face tended to cut off their chin while leaving much headroom on top.
This might be to prevent that all embarrassing error where the actor cannot find the page. Having all identical pages makes it so that the actor can flip through for a suitable amount of time and then merely stop and, voila, have exactly what they’re looking for. It was also probably easier to get, say, twenty or thirty photos of the staff than it would be to get release forms from everyone in a “real” yearbook and change one picture.
I have a couple of trailers at home which are intended to be presented this way. At least one, Enough, w/ Jennifer Lopez, has boom-mikes all through it. (It has an even wider aspect ratio, though.) If it were an error on the part of the boom operator, they sure as hell would take care to leave it out of the trailer.
The Devil’s Advocate DVD includes a trailer for the film that clearly shows the shadow of a camera and its operator on a crane. The shadow falls on the street in a shot of Keanu Reeves walking through an empty New York City. The finished film had the shadow digitally removed, but it’s REALLY obvious in the trailer.
Notcynical, if I’m reading U.S. Patent Office’s Trademark search correctly, the currently registered mark for Duane Reade has been in use since May 8th, 1961.
Former Projectionist here.
Basically there is a knob on the projector that the operator turns that is labled FRAME.
Have you ever been watching a movie and suddenly there is a line in the middle of the screen and the top of the picture is on the bottom and the bottom is above the line at the top of the screen? Then the projectionist turns the knob till the picture is ‘correct’. (he will also swear) Anyway you can have no big line (the line that sepreats each frame) on the screen and still not be properly framed. There is some play there that the operator must work his or herself.
The Charles Theatre in Baltimore had a habit of showing all “soft-matted” 1:85 or 1:66 films at the full apeture. They curtained their screen to basically the dimensions of a TV set, and that’s how they showed the films. I think they’ve since corrected this.
I saw “Eyes Wide Shut”, “Crash”, and “The Big Lebowski” in this manner. None suffered from boom mikes, but at times it was obvious that you were seeing vertical image than intended. “Crash” in particular looked very geometrically wrong in the close-ups, with the actor’s face mid-screen and way too much headroom.