Oxford: External Mic

During our time in Oxford we managed to have the opportunity to perform a vox pop interview with an employee in one of the locations we visited. We decided that one of the yes ways to go about this would be to use the external boom mic which would pick up the sound more clearly on the camera, so we set up everything we needed such as the camera and tripod, then one of us set up and operated the boom mic while another person was assigned to ask the employee questions about the local area or the culture.

This is the interview we had with the employee of the record shop we visited as one of our locations in Oxford.


Oxford - Interview from Lewis Mercer on Vimeo.

During the time we were filming there didn't seem to be any problems with this footage however after being reviewed once we returned we found that due to an awkward positioning of the boom mic it had been placed next to a radio speaker and the music being played distorted the audio of the interview so it is quite difficult to hear what is being said. However this type of footage is useful as it bears similarities to New Wave films, such as Godards "Breathless" that features a scene where a man is being interviewed at an airport but the sound of planes drowns out their voice and distorts the audio. This shows signs of being New Wave as since they are filmed on a budget they couldn't afford to reshoot and the background noise is natural anyways so they needed to just use what they got even if the audio was distorted, similar to the footage that we got and since we didn't realise what had happened until after we left Oxford we couldn't reshoot it. So through this we have captured some footage that is similar to New Wave due to the background noise of the location and the positioning of the boom mic.