DPA Microphones said its condenser mics captured audio when a boom mic was out of the question in multi-camera shots for Taken 3.

Sound mixer and engineer Stéphane Bucher, owner of Parisian audio rental house A4Audio, had used DPA D:screet 4060 high-sensitivity microphones on director Luc Besson's Lucy, where they were stitched into the seams of Johansson's wardrobe and a boom mic was used as back-up. But on Taken 3, director Olivier Megaton was shooting with three cameras simultaneously to get both wide and tight angles on a given scene. In some cases, the demands of a given shooting situation precluded use of a boom mic. That meant working closely with the wardrobe department to make sure DPA's mics could be effectively hidden across a wide variety of costume changes.

DPA D:screet 4060 miniature microphone

"Hiding microphones in clothing only works if you can avoid scratching or chaffing noises," Bucher said in a prepared statement released by DPA. "We did pretty well with most of the costumes until we came up against a waterproof jacket that Liam Neeson wore in a few scenes. This was made from really noisy fabric, so the wardrobe department put a noiseless soft tissue into the jacket to prevent the mic from picking up the crackling of the cloth."

Stéphane Bucher shows how it's done on the set of Taken 3.

Mics had to be hidden inside cars, too. Bucher opted for DPA D:dicate MMC4018 capsules with MMP-ES active cables with side cable entry. "I used them for the first time and for one particular car chase where Liam was speeding down a highway, and they were great," Bucher continued. "I needed a very small mic to put into the car's sun visor. We bought two new sun visors, opened them up and put the 4018 mics inside. This was possible because the cable comes out of the side of the mic and it worked perfectly that way."

Bucher said the audio from the DPA mics matched the boom mic's audio closely — in the end, he estimates that 80 percent of the film's production audio was recorded with the DPA microphones.