Testing (Microphone)

We tested the microphone in several environments and in the locations that we had selected for scenes in our movie. We found that particually in restaurants a lot of background sound was present and this was due to other conversations that went on in the room. This hindered the dialogue that actors had to say in our movie and affected the volume of their voice, making it hard to be picked up by the camera. Ouside the same incident was present and this was due to factors such as wind and transport affecting the sensitivity of the microphone. Our group realise when it comes to actual shooting that we will need to over come this constraint. We thus looked at how close the actor has to be towards the mic for relatively clear speech to be present. We tested the actor from a range of distances varying from 3feet all the way to 6feet. Our findings where that from when it got to about 5-6 feet the actors voice became rather quiet and bleneded into the background noise that was around them. However, at 3-4 feet their voice stood out more and was more clearly heard with background noise a minimal problem.  This test was useful for us as it meant we could alter shots to overcome background noise and we would know where the actor would have to be positioned to be heard effectively.