I know they can add audio in post by Foley artists, but how do they keep sounds of equipment, people, or other background noise that isn’t wanted out of the movie?
I’m especially curious about older movies that were made before the rise of digital audio.
In: Technology
If you look at a behind the scene photo of almost any movie, you’ll see a guy holding a long pole with the main microphone on it. He’s holding the mic _just_ above the camera frame on the boom pole so that the microphone is as close to the actors as possible. Just getting the mic super close to the actors means the actors are relatively louder than the other noises.
They will repeat a scene over and over again if something happens during a take that is loud enough to be a problem. Sound stages are often miserable because they turn off a lot of stuff like the air conditioning when doing takes to reduce the noise. A real coffee shop is near a street and a lot of cars drive past. A film set fake coffee shop is on a studio lot, away from traffic. And when possible, they shoot on fake sets on sound stages that are buildings with some amount of noise dampening in the walls, and not a lot of equipment that isn’t under the control of the film that they can turn off. There’s no refrigerator in the sound stage for example — lunch is in another building.
The microphone on a boom pole is usually a shotgun mic, which is a type of microphone designed with two pickups in it so it mostly picks up sound it’s pointed at, and doesn’t pick up as much sound coming from the sides.
There will often be secondary additional microphones hidden in the set. Sometimes they get hidden behind a potted plant, so they are called “plant mics,” but they can potentially be closer than the boom mic. On modern productions, there are small “lavalier” mics that are small enough to be hidden in the costume and worn on the actor’s body so they can be just a few inches from the actor’s mouth. One scene will secretly be flipping between tracks recorded on different microphones if one picked up a distracting noise and another didn’t.
Sets are designed with a lot of soft carpet to muffle footsteps. If you ever watch “Star Trek The Next Generation,” from the 80’s/90’s the space ship is covered in beige carpet instead of having metal and plastic industrial “space ship” looking floors like a real world warship. The modern spinoff Star Trek series now have flashier shiny floors partly because the actors now wear those body pack lav mics and it’s easier to filter out footstep noises than it used to be.
Background music helps cover up a lot of little muffled noises. You ever hear the music swell at a kind of random moment when it doesn’t seem like the most emotionally motivated story beat? Maybe a car drove past while they were shooting, and they just cranked up the music a little louder for a bit so you wouldn’t notice.
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