I was at a friends house last night, and he was showing off some movies he downloaded from somewhere on the internet. They were new releases, still playing in the theatres. Some of the movies were obviously done with a video camera in the theatre, but others were high quality, almost as good as a a DVD. The only difference was that in most of the scenes you could see the boom mike hanging above the actors head. The type of microphone being used changed in each scene, so I know it was part of the original filming.
My question is: Where does a movie in that form come from? Some of my guesses are: copies sent to reviewers, a copy used to start manufacturing DVD’s, or a rough “director’s edit”. Any ideas?
This is my first post, I apologize if the “shady” nature of the question isn’t appropriate.
What generally happens in those cases is the studio sends the film to be copied and those copies are then to be sent out to the various theaters to be shown. Somewhere along the way someone manages to make an extra copy and then sell it.
I understand one such buyer is found in Malaysia. I forget what his name was but if you toss his name into a file sharing network you’d pop-up with lots of movies. It was something like “Mr. G” but it’s not.
And movies that are put on computer are the most vulnerable. I know I once watched a version of American Pie that was a pre-release version which still had yet to have stuff done to it.
A total, total WAG about the mikes would be a widescreen film actually filmed in a less-wide aspect ratio (that they were going to black-block the top and bottom of in post-production). So the final product would lose the mikes at the tops, but they might be there in the original footage.
That said, from my experience in TV filming, I find it strange that they would risk the mikes invading the shot at all, to any extent.
When we film for TV, we know that the viewer generally isn’t going to see the very edges of our picture - the monitors in our edit suite have a “safe” frame drawn on them so we can see what the home viewer will see. But even then, we wouldn’t risk deliberately leaving the mike showing at the edge in the hope it wouldn’t show up on most TVs.
What the OP saw was most likely a direct scan of the film from a release print. This could have originated from a lab or from a print while in transit from the distributor to the theatre and are easier to get a hold of than any workstage element from post-production.
Cecil and several other threads have discussed the whole business of how the picture gets masked when it’s projected (depending on its aspect ratio) so things like boom mikes which are actually on the film won’t show up on screen (though it still happens if the film isn’t projected correctly). Although some filmmakers do take care not to include it in the frame at all, this is often motivated by the fact that European standard aspect ratios are different, and also by the fact that they can transfer a 1.33 version straight to video without resorting to pan-&-scan (which would be less of an artistic compromise).
