Wes here, this week I am in dispose on some projects, so I thought I would bring you guys this funny little tutorial submitted to me by Mogulville's own Griff. It's real simple, but it's got some good basic advice in it on how to think about mics and mic placement that I think could benefit you guys. Take it away Griff. 

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Hey guys, it’s Griff from the forums and I’ll be doing the tutorial today. Now I know what you’re thinking, and don’t worry I haven’t taken off the ankle tracking device™…yet. As for the tutorial, it’s nothing interesting; it’s just a tutorial on LAV Mics.
These things come in handy an awful lot, you can get great sound quality outside, indoors, in the basement, in the neighbors shower… Despite these uses a lot of people seem to neglect them, but they really are just misunderstood.
   

A common myth with LAV Mics is that they need to be hooked up to an actual person, but that’s not true at all! It can be hooked up any still object, pretty much anywhere! And they’re so small nobody even notices! It’s like they’re not even there…   

This boy goes to the public library quite often. He seems to respond to Kjell, but investigation is pending. I sent him to “1 Guy 1 Jar” which is why he’s making that face, but let’s ignore that. You could hook a LAV Mic up under his hood sure, and nobody would ever see. But suppose he wasn’t’ wearing that hoodie and was actually displaying his red eyed face. Then what? Well in that case you’d want to put it on the side of the computer closest to the wall, as indicated by the red circle.

The audio sounds great as long as he speaks towards the mic, otherwise it’ll sound hollow and distant. Obviously this will take some staging to make sure you maximize how clear the audio is, but I’m sure you know how to do that. Oh god, I hope you know how to do that. 

   “Alright,” you say “but what about outdoors scenes?” Well if you’re outdoors in this time of year, I’m assuming you’ll be wearing lots of clothing, a jacket and scarf maybe, so it’s simple enough to hook it up under the scarf, just run the mic through your coat and under the scarf. But what if it’s summer? What if you’re just wearing T-shirts? Well in that case you’re going to want to pick up Rycote Undercovers. It’s basically like a condom for your mics, it minimizes the sound of clothing rubbing against it at the cost of a bit of audio quality. Don’t use it for any prolonged scenes, but it can come in handy.  Now it’s been said many, many, many, many, times but I’ll say it again for good measure. Always record some ambient noise, so that way later when something goes wrong and you have to dub a few lines (which you will have to do, I assure you, if your shoot goes 100% perfect you need to seriously heightens your expectations) it won’t sound so “studio-ized.” I’m sorry to have to say this again but screaming over and over just doesn’t work sometimes, like that young girl from down the street who broke her legs and nobody could hear her. It’s really insulated in my crawlspace…Wait, what was I talking about again?

    Anyways, if you do all this right (I’m skeptical) you’ll be well on your way to making your movies not totally suck. The next big obvious I’ll be tackling? Well that depends entirely on those Commies running Hollywood. We’ll see.