The two texts I used when researching Post-Production Sound were The Foley Grail (Theme Ament, 2014) and The Sound Effects Bible (Viers, 2008). I’ll write a little about the information I got out of both of them.
The boom operator is the person in control of the boom pole and the mic attached to it. They must be confident when controlling the boom, as the audio they capture is extremely important. In terms of quality, boomed dialogue is by far the best, if compared to lavaliers or boundary mics. As our roles on set will be different each day, in order that all of us will get a decent amount of experience in each role, no one person will be booming all the time. So we will all need to practice and research effective booming techniques.
This is a short post about the potential use of boundary mics when recording audio for Cognition. Boundary mics are exceptionally useful tools when used correctly.
When recording sound on location, a sound recordist must be aware of the microphones they will need in order to obtain the best possible audio on set. The two most well-known types of microphone for recording dialogue are mics mounted on booms (cardioid mics, or more commonly used shotgun mics, which have super or hyper-cardioid polar patterns); and lavalier microphones, also called lavs. We will almost certainly be using a combination of both of these microphones to capture the majority of the dialogue on location, and potentially some on-site foley as well. We would also like to experiment with boundary mics where appropriate, and in regards to atmospheres and room tone, I’d quite like to gather some stereo recordings, using either a single stereo mic or a matched pair of mono mics. Most of my research on microphone types has been from The Location Sound Bible (Viers, 2012), which I’ll reference at the bottom of this post.