Feb 8, 2013 3:10 PM, By Blair Jackson

Andy Nelson (dialog and music), Mark Paterson (FX), Simon Hayes (production)

Hayes on the production recording Hayes:
Normally on a film set, what we do its prioritize the boom—the boom matches the camera perspective and the boom is a known quantity. Traditionally, we would only start relying on radio microphones and lavaliers if the boom can’t get close enough. But when Tom [Hooper, director] and I were planning to record Les Miz, what became evident from our first meeting was that because he wanted to shoot multicamera, and I was very supportive of that, we couldn’t always rely on the boom to be close enough. So we had to have a complete shift in how we prioritize production sound and rather than prioritize the booms, we had to prioritize radio microphones. Tom said from the outset, “If you’re going to prioritize radio mics, I want you to celebrate every advance in sound, filmmaking and the wider electronic industry. There have been huge advance in all those area, and I want you to use whatever will allow me to get the live performances.”

Now, with radio mics, traditionally, there have been three problems—range, meaning we sometimes get splats and pops—but radio mics have moved forward in the last few years so fast with the advanced digital mics that we don’t have those issues anymore. The second thing is the quality of the lavaliers; the actual microphones themselves. In the past, they had always been secondary in terms of sound quality to a boom microphone. However, just recently, new lavaliers have been designed that are very close to a boom condenser mic and will give us studio-quality sound.

But a big problem with Les Miz was the fact even if you’ve got great radio mics and great lavaliers, you still have to hide them under costumes, which means you’re going to have clothing rustle, a lot or a little depending on the costume. It’s very much a gamble. And clothing rustle on top of dialog is notoriously difficult to remove, regardless of how good the plugins are now and the ability for a dialog editor and a rerecording mixer to remove background noise.

So my suggestion to Tom was, if we’re going to use every modern advance in technology to enable him to use the live singing on the set and not resort to ADR afterwards, why not put the radio mics on the outside of the costume and use the advances in CGI and visual effects to be able to fix the radio mics afterwards? That would protect the actor’s performances, which was paramount.

What we did is we put the radio mics on the outside of the costume and worked really closely with the costume designer Paco Delgado and his team. We asked them to give us very small off-cuts of the exact material costume designer was made of, so rather than just put the lavalier completely on the outside, where it would be easy to see, we put it in a little plastic mount on the outside of the costume, but we covered the plastic mount with small pieces of the costume material. However, the grill of the mic did not have any fabric covering it, and for all intents and purposes, the microphone was in a premium position on the outside of the costume. When you looked at it with the human eye, you could see the microphone, but by disguising it the way we did, on a the wide shot it would be disguised to an extent where they wouldn’t have to “paint” it out, and then on the close-ups, because the premium spot for singing is to put the lavalier in the solar plexus, which in the center of the chest, it would actually be below the bottom of the camera frame. What that meant what Tom and his visual effects team in post-production could say, “We don’t need to worry about the wide shot, because the lavaliers are disguised and we don’t need to worry about the close-ups because the lavaliers are actually out of the frame line. So what they did was a lavalier spotting session where they looked at all the mid shots and decided whether the lavaliers were in focus and could be seen, and that’s when they used the advances in modern technology to “paint” the microphones out.

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