In Focus: Sound, Volume Two

I'm responsible for all of the sound during production. So I'll be the person that looks after crewing of the film, for all of the different units that we might have during production. I'll be responsible for recording on the main unit and deciding how the production sound is recorded. My role in production is merely to capture the performances. If there's actors, there's effects, there's whatever's happening on set, I have to get a good recording of that for sound, which then gets provided to my colleagues in post-production who will assemble the final track from that. But also to record things within the environment, sound effects that you think will be useful editorially or creatively. At the end of the sound process, there's been editorial before I receive the sound, but you're ultimately, with a colleague, typically there's one or two of you involved. The responsibility is to deliver the final soundtrack for the film. So it would be a combination of typically music, dialogue and sound effects. First thing is that I'll get a script. I'll read a script and I'll do some work on that, breaking it down, deciding what it means to me for sound, what needs to be thought about. I'll then have meetings with the director and we'll talk about what his vision is about the film. Then probably we'll start to scout locations. Scouting locations is a valuable time. That's when you're all together, you're together with the DP, the director, the production designer, key people of the film, and you start to talk about what's going to happen on each of those locations or those sets. And the director will talk about shots he wants to do, what he's got in mind. The only thing that's consistent day-to-day generally is breakfast. Even the lunches aren't always predictable. But the work is always different. After three decades in the job, there's a lot of things that we do that we've done before, but it's always different. Every day is a new invention of our work. You're shooting multi-camera now, generally. So whereas in the past you'd have one camera, there'd be a frame size and you could work out whether you could get your microphone in or not and where to put radio mics. But with multi-camera, usually you've got to cover the whole scene and then actors, for their performance, they usually want to overlap their dialogue. And again, you have to find ways through of making that work, both technically and for the actors. You can't just say, don't do this, don't do that. Now, Gravity is a completely different film. Now, Gravity is starting again. And we used pretty much all the equipment that was available to us, but a lot of it was custom-built. So you see a microphone on her face? That's a practical microphone. That's a microphone we use. We took a standard, very small microphone and we molded the end of it to, A, look right, but also to help us to keep out any noise from outside. So on Lewin Davis, when we could, we would record using two microphones for the music, particularly when he goes into the Columbia recording session. We wanted a microphone that looked right for the period and sounded right for the period. And we managed to get a variety of U-47s, which we used for recording the scene. But the scene in the gaslight, they wanted a period microphone on stage, which was a dynamic, I think, a Shure SH-55, but the prop mic we had wasn't functional. So Randy and I disassembled it and hid a Scheps inside of it and then we recorded almost all of those tracks on our little hidden Scheps microphone. My responsibility is dialogue and music, whereas my colleague might have the sound effects, the foleys, which are the footsteps, and all the small sound effects. We break down the mixing process into two defined sections. One is the pre-mix section, and I have to take all the dialogue, which is recorded on location, and any other dialogue that might be recorded, like we call it ADR, which is dialogue that's recorded in the studio, which is replacement dialogue. You might need it because of technical problems on set. On the next process, which is the final mix, the decision makers can basically say they want the dialogue louder, quieter, coming out the left speaker, coming out the right speaker, more bassy, so we do lots of very technical things at that stage, removing camera, whistle, lighting, hum, lots of background traffic we might want to take, but if we're doing a period drama, we can't have modern-day traffic in the background. When I started, you'd have one reel-to-reel recorder, and you might have two boom mics out. You'd hardly ever use personal radio mics. Now everything is non-linear, it's all computer-based, there's no tape to deal with, and tape provided its own level of noise, so there are all those technical things that have changed. On the post-production side, again, it's changed enormously. When I started, you'd physically run the sound with a, this is me doing this, or a mime of the pixing, and you'd find where the sound you wanted was, you'd mark it with a bit of chinagraph, you'd put that against the picture, and you might combine it with one or two sounds on top of that, but often you'd have to guess what they sound like together, because you sometimes only could hear two things at once. And now on Rush, when we put all our tracks together, that's the whole team, the other effects guys, the other sound designer, guys doing the atmospheres, all the feet, I mean, I don't know, it was hundreds of tracks, hundreds and hundreds of tracks, and you can listen, you can hear them together as well. The question that people always ask me is, what do you need to succeed at being a sound mixer? I think I would always say, be a filmmaker that specialises in sound, rather than the sound person that specialises in film. A keen interest in all aspects of filmmaking, I think is essential for any particular department. See what other departments are available. That's my first advice. Then I recommend working with people who know what they're doing. Experience is everything, but if you can share in somebody else's experience, then it saves you a lot of time making the mistakes for yourself. Work with as many different sound crews as you can, and definitely to work in both the production, sound mixing side, and post-production side. Even if you're sure that you just want to be a location sound mixer, even if you know, I don't want to sit in a room with a load of computers designing sound, it's so useful to know the other side of the job. You have to embrace the whole of film, you have to be interested in film. Sound is an important part of the film, but it is part of the film. You can't think of it in isolation.