Best way of micing actors

[JP12687]

So i'm doing a musical at a HS and i rigged up some ear hangers for the mics using pieces of hanger, and i was wondering what other people have done to secure mics to actors, and protect the mics from sweat.

[Footer]

condoms and surgical tape....

[dwt1]

As was suggested in the previous post, surgical tape and condoms, however, using condoms in a high school setting may be problematic. If sweat is a problem you might want to try baggies or something akin to that.

[koncept]

agreed. i saw a high school performance wehre they used over the ear boom mics with big wind screens...i thought it looked bad...personaly if I am going to use mics i don't want them to be seen. if you have a chance, speak with your costumer and see if they can quickly sow like a little puch for the pack to the inside of some costumes, that seems to work well when it can be done

[audioslavematt]

Are these temple mics you're using or some sort of lav? Temple mics are designed to be taped directly to the actor's skin without any sort of hanging device. Part of the sound actually comes from the vibrations in the actor's skin opposed to the air.

[JP12687]

DWT,

What kind of baggies would you use, and how would you make that so it wouldnt be ugly?

Audio

they are regular lav mics.

Besides the way i contructed them using hangers are there any other ways of doing it?

[mbenonis]

To clarify, the baggies and condoms are for the bodypack, not the mic element. As far as mounting the mic element goes, you have a couple of options. One popular option is to mount the element over the ear as you described. This can be done with hangers or floral wire (the floral wire is often used to make a loop that fits around the entire ear). Another popular technique is to mount the mic at the center of the forehead with hairpins - this can provide even better sound quality.

[RelativeMischief]

For the last production I did we rented a couple Sennheiser broadway series mics and hooked them into our belt packs. Essentially they're a mic about as thin as a couple strands of hair, coloured beige and are stiff with an ear mould that fits pretty snug.

For the rest of the actors the belt pack clipped on the underwear somewhere, usually the bra for girls. The mics were brought up under the costumes, over the ear and taped about 2inches down the cheek, or as close to the mouth as possible before smile lines got in the way.

We used medical tape to secure the mic then a line of beige e-tape over that. We're lucky our Make-up girls were talented, you could barely tell there was anything on the actors' faces unless you were looking for it.

It worked quite well with our Senn mics but the no name ones had too narrow a pickup pattern for good sound at that angle.

[koncept]

i've done that before, i loved the look and output we recieved off of doing that. i think the mic you are refering to is called a pickup element, at least thats what they have been called here.

[saxman0317]

For one of our shows, we duct taped the pac to the actors thigh...only spot, not my leg hair... and just used the putty stuff that make-up proplr use (im not up to date on that stuff) with a regular lav and took off the clip and the afro and it worked fine, u just gotta make sure that the mic is pointing the right way and about at the chin bone. Weve also done the hair weave with regular lavs, but leave the afro one for this one. Both worked great. But, its always just nice to have a few stage mics going and stuff if something happens you have to mute the lav. As to condoms, etc., on the leg, we just wrapped the pack in plastic wrap. Tape (even surgical tape) didnt work well on the face if the person was moving and dancing and sweaty and stuff on the face...