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Michael Kunkes

A longtime contributor to Editors Guild Magazine (the predecessor to CineMontage) and the Guild's website, Michael Kunkes was a freelance writer and editor specializing in post-production, production and and animation. He passed away in March 2010.

Features

Mixing with Vision: Technical Directors Call the Shots

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 16 minutes read

By Michael Kunkes

In the parking lot of LA’s Shrine Auditorium, it is the final rehearsal for the 59th Creative Arts Emmys, to be held the next evening, September 8. In the production room of the remote truck––a cramped space not much bigger than a Humvee––director Chris Donovan sits in the front row before some five-dozen monitors, flanked by technical directors Beth Stiller, working the switcher, and screens TD Rick Edwards, along with associate director Laura Lyons. With relaxed yet intense focus, the crew progresses methodically, item by item, through a paper script hundreds of pages long. Working with the crew onstage, the team goes through the timing for every transition, camera cut, wipe, pre-loaded effect, graphic, super and taped sequence as stand-ins stroll to the podium to accept imaginary awards.

For Stiller, it’s just another day at the office. Technical directors, one-time members of the Cinematographers Guild Local 600 (then 659), joined Local 700 (then 776) in the early 1980s. The Editors Guild is the appropriate affiliation for these craftspeople, for no other editorial position has so much split-second pressure riding on it, nor a smaller margin for error. Whether a sports event, live music performance, game show, reality show or taped sitcom, the TD, also known as the “vision mixer,” is the last stop, the final arbiter of what goes live on the air or live-to-tape.

The position of technical director goes back to the first generation of live television, when they were known as crew supervisors. They set up the show, put together the crew and saw that each member knew what he or she was supposed to do; and ensured that the cameras were properly positioned with the right lenses, that cabling was measured and in place, and that each camera cut was rehearsed. Then, the show ready for air, they would operate the primitive switcher in the control room (and later, the remote truck).

Jonathan X in KCET’s control room in Hollywood. Photo by
Gregory Schwartz

More than 50 years later, the job remains titularly the same, but the digital age, high definition, the proliferation of equipment manufacturers and the sheer scale of today’s entertainment and sports programming has made the job as it first existed almost unrecognizable today. While TDs are still looked to for crew leadership and a smooth-running show, changes are coming furiously.

“We babysit the grammar of transitions and are the gatekeepers of the video,” says Stiller, a veteran TD who represents the classification on the Guild’s Board of Directors and has won two Sports Emmys (XIX Winter Olympics, Games of the XXVIII Olympiad) and three Los Angeles-area Emmys (1999 L.A. Marathon, 2000 Rose Parade, 2000 KCAL Fight Night Live). “None of the video will go out to the record machines or to air unless we let it out.” However, according to Stiller, the technical director’s job has grown a lot more, well, technical.

“Switchers are way more sophisticated, and many more sources than ever before are being driven by the technical director,” she continues. “The switcher is also interfaced with other devices such as digital disc recorders (DDRs) that will play back different effects frames accurately. Over the last 10 years, manufacturers have been competing for the marketplace and we have had to keep up with the technology, so we have had to take it upon ourselves to learn all of this.”

Other industry jobs have not evolved in the same way, according to Stiller. “Directors still carry pencils and stopwatches, but our tool has evolved into a really challenging piece of equipment: a computer,” she explains. “But something that hasn’t changed in any TD job is that the entire crew has to work as one organism, and each part of the organism has to pull its weight. We’re only as good as our weakest link, and a fantastic synergy occurs when everyone is on top of his or her game.”

Robert Ennis at the controls for Wheel of Fortune in Los Angeles. Photo by Gregory Schwartz

“A crew is a collective formed to do quality work,” says J.J. Jackson, aka Jonathan X, a TD and director who has won four Sports Emmys for his work on Fox NFL and NHL telecasts. He currently directs The Tavis Smiley Show on PBS. The best thing that has happened to TDs, he says, is that they now receive full credit alongside directors and producers––a trend that started five years ago on Monday Night Football. Along with that recognition has come a lot more complexity in terms of what the TD has to oversee.

“The technology is much more software-based and much more complex in terms of multiple menus, more virtual instead of physical routing, switcher interface with DDRs, high-end graphic character generators, sound, etc.,” he explains. “It used to be ‘Cut, dissolve and mix’; what used to be 50 to 100 parameters in a show can now be as many as 400.”

Robert Ennis, another TD as well as director, is the winner of a daytime Emmy for Hollywood Squares. After 12 years at ABC and six at CBS, he was hired by switcher manufacturer Grass Valley Group and spent 11 years as a teacher, trainer and writer (and still freelances for the company). He was instrumental in developing software for Grass Valley’s 3000 and 4000 series switchers, and owns patents for some of the bells and whistles on the company’s Kalypso switcher, one of the industry’s current standard bearers. A fixed-wing and experimental helicopter pilot, Ennis makes his home in Nevada City, California, and commutes to Los Angeles for his technical directing work on Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.

He doesn’t play games though, when he talks about where the job of the TD is going today. “The TD has become more of a computer programmer than a crew supervisor,” he claims. “Everything is done with E-mems, which are basically timelines and snapshots of a show’s events, all of which require a lot of programming time.” This level of complexity has made the job of the TD even more critical, according to Ennis, who adds, “I know it messes with directors’ egos when I say this, but when the director calls for a camera cut, it’s really just a suggestion. The TD is really the one flying the plane. That is not to say you’re going to override the director, but when, for example, he calls for camera two and camera two didn’t rack focus in time, a good TD will wait that extra beat to let that camera get in focus.”

“The market is progressing to the point where everyone is going to have his or her own TV station at home,” – Bill Irwin

The bottom line, Ennis says, is that directors can sometimes make a mistake––but there’s nothing between a TD and the final transmission. “A ‘zero tolerance job’ is what my TD friend Wayne Parsons [Entertainment Tonight] used to call it,” he says. “You are required to be at your best at all times, and an absolutely perfect job is the minimum of what is expected of you. The best you can do is not to make any mistakes. There’s no rewind or fix button anywhere.”

“There are ballplayers making millions of bucks who are hitting .220,” says Jonathan X. “However, at any level, a TD needs to bat .950 and higher, because every cut, every keystroke, every motion has to have a certain synchronicity to it. If the wrong cut or wrong trigger is made––or the wrong button pushed––everyone will see it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the most underappreciated jobs in the industry.”

Speaking of sports, Stiller adds, “Now that switchers are highly programmable, a major challenge is to design the set-up to randomly access most efficiently, in the minimum number of keystrokes, instantaneous recall of any scenario. In live sports for example, we must be ready go from game play––with all it’s associated effects and graphics––to the shot of a hero or a goat followed by replays or a hero package, statistics, promos, a bumper sequence to commercial break, or back to the next game play. The best TDs solve the puzzle most ergonomically, appearing to hardly move while accomplishing the task. There is only one right button at any moment in time.”

Richard Wirth, a two-time Emmy winner (The Rachel Ray Show, 2006, and Sesame Street, 2005) and New York-based technical director, provides an example of the TD’s grueling preparation for each show. Wirth, who has TD’d PBS’ Live From Lincoln Center and Great Performances, relates the story of the production of a live-to-tape performance of the Broadway musical Fosse. “I worked with former Broadway dancer, now director, Matthew Diamond, who spent months breaking down the performance into some 1,500 numbered shots. When that’s done, we’ll tape a couple of performances and there will be extensive camera meetings that can last six hours a day between tapings.

“We babysit the grammar of transitions and are the gatekeepers of the video… None of the video will go out to the record machines or to air unless we let it out.” – Beth Stiller

“The TD has to listen to the score reader for the musical counts, as well as to the associate director for the selection of the next shot coming up, and to the director to take the shot at the precise moment,” Wirth continues. “The cameramen are receiving their computerized shot rolls so that they are ready for each upcoming shot. It’s total concentration and it doesn’t get more intense than this.”

There are plenty of changes coming in the newsroom too, including new equipment that may someday relegate either the director, associate director or TD to the scrap heap. For example, Grass Valley Group’s Igniter or Ross Video’s Overdrive Production Control System are touchscreen systems that extend the technical director’s reach to include all devices in an on-air production control room––including video servers, DVE effects, VTRs, DDRs, audio mixers, robotic cameras, teleprompters, graphics, routers, still stores and, of course, the switcher.

Comments Stiller, “A TD or director can move item numbers around, kill them, swap them and just point to the screen to launch the next event. And there’s just one person doing that, so it’s possible that either the TD or the director will disappear in the newsroom. In fact, it’s already starting to happen.”

Over the last few years, the latest bugaboo for TDs has been HD, which is still going through the growing pains of mixing multiple formats, despite its proliferation. Bill Irwin began as a technical director on sitcoms such as Alf and Roseanne, but switched to sports when film began taking over the sitcom world in the mid-1990s. Irwin was instrumental in organizing the Los Angeles sports community into the IA and convincing key employers to sign union contracts in the early 1990s. He claims that HD is still a myriad of different formats and aspect ratios.

“There are so many formats in which producers want their shows delivered,” he says. “ABC or Fox may want 720p, others may want 1080p. Producers bring in 4:3 NTSC tapes and ask you to put HD wings on them––so you can waste an hour a day just doing barn door wipes. It would be great if the government would just come in and say, ‘Put everything in 1080p and that’s your format.’ But frankly, the FCC has no interest in doing that, and it suits manufacturers to have multiple formats.”

“You are required to be at your best at all times, and an absolutely perfect job is the minimum of what is expected of you. The best you can do is not to make any mistakes. There’s no rewind or fix button anywhere.” – Robert Ennis

“If everyone was watching in HD, we’d have no problem with format conversion,” Ennis adds. “And from a pure switching point of view, it doesn’t matter what the format is; you’re gong to switch whatever the director calls. Fortunately, a couple of manufacturers are starting to come out with switchers––such as the Snell & Wilcox Kahuna––that are multi-format, because they see the migration and they know that people aren’t going to stop doing SD on Friday night and go to all HD on Saturday morning. But from a TD standpoint, it’s just another input source to deal with.”

Richard Wirth at EUE Screen Gems Studios in New York City. Photo by John Clifford

HD has prompted some new thinking in the way TDs cover a show. In the instance of Jeopardy, a game show mainstay for three decades, the familiar tight set had to be completely redesigned and spread out for the vagaries of the 16:9 format. Ennis relates that although the show is now produced in the letterboxed format, it has to be shot to satisfy both camps. “With the new set, you can easily tighten up for a close-up, but most of our audience still watches in standard definition. So we have to shoot in HD, but still protect the 4:3; if the set hadn’t been redesigned for HD, you’d end up with parts of other contestants in the close-ups.”

“HD is phenomenal, not only the quality of the resolution, but also the monitors,” says Jonathan X. “The only thing I don’t like is the trend of upconverting everything and protecting the 4:3 ratio at any cost. I am a true proponent of HD, and feel that anything that is shot in HD widescreen should be shown in letterbox on SD channels. The popular argument is that when people see the black on top and bottom of the HD image, they will think they are losing part of the picture. That argument is old and dated, and should be thrown out. Show it in letterbox and truly use the full frame for composition. People will get used to it.”

The increasing sophistication of the job has prompted a shakeout in the ranks––not unlike that which followed the introduction of non-linear editing for picture editors in the 1990s. More and more TDs turn to directing or retire. “They’re having a tough time out there finding new TDs,” explains Ennis. “Part of the reason is that the role of the TD is diminishing to one of only being tied to a switcher. More and more productions want the kind of 3-D effects that you can’t create fast enough in a live environment, though manufacturers are working on it.”

Irwin, winner of a 1992 Sports Emmy for The 1992 America’s Cup and another this year for The Pokerdome, adds, “The TD is invaluable when it comes to quality, large-scale productions, but it’s a changing business. A lot of TDs are in their 40s and 50s and there aren’t a lot of new people coming into it. The job has become so potentially intimidating that a lot of people who would have gone into it 10 to 15 years ago won’t go near it today. The technology changes so rapidly that today we have to be proficient on five or six different switchers. People are holding onto their jobs, but eventually will retire. Who is going to take their places?”

Bill Irwin in the remote truck outside of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Photo by Gregory Schwartz.

Wirth has a different perspective. “There’s so many more venues and avenues where switching is a part of the production and people are getting trained all the time on new switching equipment,” he says. “I come from more of an engineering background, and TDs from my generation would go out, work with a crew and set up an entire event. Now, it’s mainly becoming a switcher operation, where a lot of the traditional responsibilities are carried out by a tech manager outside the control room.”

“I’ve known a lot of camera operators who’ve tried to become TDs,” says Ennis. “They get tired of carrying the cameras up and down stadium steps; they want to become TDs so they can sit down all the time. Those people don’t necessarily make good TDs. However, some of the better ones that I’ve seen come into the market in the past 10 years have come from the graphics side. Maybe that is where the new people will come from because there is a certain amount of creativity involved that you don’t get from other television disciplines.”

“The market is progressing to the point where everyone is going to have his or her own TV station at home,” Irwin adds. “There are switchers coming out now [such as NewTek’s TriCaster] that you can carry in a backpack and run off a PC. They can import video, instantaneously cut, do playback, effects, etc.––even output directly to the Internet. That may be the future for high school football coverage, but producers will always need those high-end trucks for the big game.”

Jonathan X offers the best piece of advice to people looking to fill the vacant spaces: “Work with your equipment, play with it, experiment with it. And if you are fortunate to be in a facility where you can play after hours, take the time to do it. And most importantly, never let the pressure of the control room reflect in your fingers. The truth is, technology can eventually try to take away everything, but one thing it can’t take away is the human emotion and spirit of capturing the event as it’s happening live.”

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Features

Minding Their Beats and Cues: Despite Some Discord, Music Editors Play On

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 16 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

In 1940, three years after its inception, the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors (SMPFE), the precursor to today’s Editors Guild, admitted Music Editors as an official classification. Previously, music editors were considered part of the sound editors classification––which then included sound effects and music––who joined SMPFE in 1937. Beginning in the mid-1940s, the craft began to grow in sophistication and importance. Today, with 243 members, music editors are one of the Local’s smaller yet most essential, detailed and creative categories. Now, 67 years later, music editors are facing challenges from both inside and out in Hollywood’s changing below-the-line landscape.

Stephanie Lowry, who represents the classification on the Guild’s Board of Directors, is a 2001 Emmy winner for HBO’s 61*, with other credits including Guess Who, Stranger Than Fiction and Rumor Has It. She provides a roadmap to some of the issues being dealt with by the rank and file.

“Productions are increasingly reluctant to bring music editors on early and keep them on until the end of the show,” says Lowry. “Many are completely relying on picture editors to cut temp music, and using Avid outputs to preview instead of doing dub stage temps. Productions are picking and choosing select weeks to have a music editor, and frequent lay-offs in the middle of post are becoming common. Sometimes, sound, music and picture crews are coming together for the first time when they meet on the final dub stage. The creative process suffers greatly from these trends.”

Lowry is a firm believer that filmmaking is a collaborative medium. “A good temp dub is a work of art in its own right, aside from being a critical formative, developmental process––and it is getting bastardized,” she continues. “Picture editors are having to do the work of music editors, sound editors and mixers––and that’s spreading them pretty thin.”

Bill Bernstein, left, and Bob Badami at composer Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions in Santa Monica, California. Photo by Gregory Schwartz

Well Composed

One constant, however, has always been the core dynamic of the composer-music editor relationship. Some music editors establish long working relationships with one composer; others prefer to go with a variety. A great place to start is with Kenny Hall. At 70, he has just received his 50-year card from the Guild and has begun a new career, as an associate professor and holder of the Ken Wannberg Endowed Chair in Music Editing at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Hall crafted 87 scores with the late Jerry Goldsmith, from George Cukor’s Justine in 1969, until the composer’s last, Loony Tunes: Back in Action in 2003. “Jerry was the most complex composer who ever lived, with so many odd-metered bars and flip-flop patterns,” recalls Hall. “You had to know precisely how to cue for him. Jerry’s secret was always to write the subtext in a scene. One time, he was scoring a chase scene and the director said, ‘You’re going to write some fast music, right?’ And Jerry said, ‘No, I’m going to write the torment and emotion of the man being chased.’ Wow! I’ve been accused of putting all my eggs in one basket, but it was a most incredible basket.”

Bill Bernstein’s relationship with composer Thomas Newman is one of the best a music editor could want. In the late 1980s, Bernstein, a young editor, was creating (along with Bob Badami and Bernstein’s brother, Richard, also a Guild music editor) a music editing tool called Streamline––which won a 1988 Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences–– when he got together with Newman, then a “B” composer. Since then, they have collaborated on dozens of films, including Road To Perdition, Jarhead, Cinderella Man and The Shawshank Redemption.

Angie Rubin, left, Ken Karman and Michael Dittrick at Dittrick’s MICDI facility in Burbank, California. Photo by Gregory Schwartz

“A music editor who hooks up long-term with a composer has more creative influence,” Bernstein claims. “I’m there with Tom when he writes; he’ll play me ideas and sometimes I get to suggest other ways of doing things. Sometimes we’ll improvise together, sample what we’ve done, and that will become the basis of a piece. But mainly, I get to be near the formative stages of a lot of the music, and that’s very exciting.”

For 20 years, Suzana Peric has worked in the more rarified atmosphere of New York, accumulating credits that include such musically rich films as The Fellowship of the Ring, Kundun and The Pianist, and working for composers such as Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Wojciech Kilar and the great Ennio Morricone. “Each composer works in his or her own way, and one adjusts to whatever that composer needs to organize his or her preparations for writing. But what they look for most of all is someone to provide a continuing relationship with the film and the director. That is the best part of my job––to be able to interact with the core and meaning of the film directly. I always have that as my goal.”

“I don’t think the position of music editor is going to completely go away anytime soon… Composers will always need someone to interface with editorial for them. It’s just a question of who does the work and how integrated they are into the post-production process as a whole.” – Stephanie Lowry

On a side note, Peric feels that New York does offer a different style of working. “I’ve heard stories from the West Coast about instances where a music editor would not stay on the film through the end of the final mix because of scheduling problems––typically, the composer to which the music editor is attached moves on to a new film, and he or she follows,” she explains. “Another music editor would be called in to cover the final mix. If you come in at the end of a film, for which you have not been a part of creating the music, then you have absolutely nothing to contribute creatively. You can be a pair of hands and move a cue left or right, or a frame here and a frame there, but you have no knowledge of how to guide the mixer at the final. That is something I have not experienced in New York, at least not on a regular basis.”

“Today’s music editor is a lot more than just a button pusher or someone who just cuts music into place and makes sure the stage is getting the right time code and sample rate,” Bernstein adds. “Today, the music editor ideally represents the composer all the way through to the final mix, acting as a go-between with the director to protect the integrity of the score.”

According to Badami, directors are not always the best judges of what’s correct musically for their own films. “Yes, it’s the director’s film, but I learned early on that many directors don’t understand music very well,” says Badami, whose career reaches back to 1979’s Boulevard Nights and also includes Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Hawk Down and Mars Attacks. “They are willing to do things that don’t sound musical. The composer has a lonely job; ours is to be the person he can rely on to follow through on his vision and deal with the things that occur after his music is recorded.”

Regarding the role of picture editors and temp music, Hall says, “Picture editors are truly gifted at what they do, and are so close to the director that I feel they sometimes do a disservice to that director in terms of pushing their music preferences prior to giving the ‘temp’ music editor a chance to create another point of view. Composers are constantly being dictated to by temp scores or cues, and this can stop the initial creative process of director/composer collaboration.”

“The temp dub has kind of become the tool by which directors sometimes take over ownership of the score. They will often approve the music for the temp and hold the composer against that.” – Bill Bernstein

Occasionally, a picture editor may overstep his or her bounds and start picking material that may push scenes along, but possibly not in the right direction, according to Hall. “For years, Jerry Goldsmith didn’t want to hear temp music when he saw a picture for the first time, and John Williams said that if he had seen Jaws with a temp score, he never would have come up with his famous ‘da-dum, da-dum’ theme,” he recalls.

Badami doesn’t see a huge problem here. “To me, that is within the realm of an editor’s work. Some are good at it, some are not. Picture editors can be on a film from the first day of shooting, and if they need to put in some music to make things play, they should do it. They have a point of view and are dealing with the project in a much deeper way.”

Temp Love…and Hate

Along with championing the score, the music editor’s most important function is to oversee the creation of the temp dub, which is often, as Lowry claims, a work of brilliance in itself––although that brilliance rarely gets to appear on screen. The temp dub began to appear in the early to mid-1980s as a way of showing a rough work in progress to a director or exhibitor, but rarely to an audience.

In recent years, however, driven by precision audio technology such as ProTools, the emergence of huge music libraries, and shortened post-production schedules, the temp dub has achieved an importance today that can be a do-or-die situation for the composer, the film, or both. It’s a situation that has come to be known as “Temp Love.”

Modern Music’s Ken Karman has been a feature film music editor since 1979. Associated with leading composers such as Newman, Alan Silvestri, James Horner and Danny Elfman, Karman agrees that the purpose of the temp dub hasn’t changed, only the expectations associated with the process. “Directors, producers and studios want to present their films in the best possible light,” he says. “With digital technology, editors are able to refine the temp music in a way that was not possible when I started in the business, and expectations have risen with our ability to do things like changing a cue’s tempo and pitch and to combine disparate pieces of music in a very precise way.”

“Each composer works in his or her own way, and one adjusts to whatever that composer needs to organize his or her preparations for writing. But what they look for most of all is someone to provide a continuing relationship with the film and the director.” – Suzana Peric 

Karman calls the temp a double-edged sword. “For better or for worse, temp dubs have become an integral part of modern post-production. While they do allow directors more time to explore various musical directions, they often have the effect of limiting a composer’s opportunity to approach the music with a fresh perspective. It’s not unusual for a composer to find himself in the position of having to compete with his own work from previous films. The process engenders a kind of musical inbreeding.”

While he acknowledges the importance of the temp, Hall does feel that it sometimes serves only to mask a director’s insecurities. “That’s only human nature, but sometimes the overuse of music becomes only a background and adds no emotion, ” he says.

“Music should start for a specific reason, play a point of view or an emotion, and then get the hell out, not drawing the audience’s attention. Music never saved bad acting, and it never saved a bad scene either.”

Michael Dittrick, like his mentor Hall, came out of the studio system, employed at Universal, Fox and Warner Bros. When the studios disbanded their music editorial departments in the mid-1980s, Dittrick first became a contract worker. Then, he started his own company, MICDI Productions, Inc. in 1987, through which he has worked on both TV series (Desperate Housewives, American Family, Boston Public) and features (Elektra, Halloween: Resurrection, The Princess Bride). He feels that temp love is a problem that is only going to get worse.

“It’s become common for music editors to do what they can to blow away the director,” says Dittrick. “They usually have more hands-on time to work closely with the director on a scene than the composer does, and a larger sound palette because they can choose anything in the world from their music libraries without having to clear it.” That’s where the challenges start, he feels.

Along with championing the score, the music editor’s most important function is to oversee the creation of the temp dub, which is often, as Lowry claims, a work of brilliance in itself.

“The producer or director goes into a spotting session with the composer, who will be told, ‘We really love this cue, can you just rip it?’” Dittrick continues. “Technology is going to allow the director and the picture editor to put more music in; in fact, it has come to be expected. It’s not uncommon for us to clean up OMF files from the Avid and take them to the dubbing stage, but it’s also becoming common for the picture editor to turn the music over to the sound department, who loads it into ProControl and creates a 5.1 mix that then becomes part of the temp dub for a test screening. It’s happening more and more.”

Adds Bernstein, “The temp dub has kind of become the tool by which directors sometimes take over ownership of the score. They will often approve the music for the temp and hold the composer against that. They will tell the composer, ‘Hey, I like the temp because it does this or that,’ so even if they don’t have the musical vocabulary to describe what they want, they can pull out some other piece of music and say, ‘Make it do that,’ which is really sad, especially on a low-budget movie where a composer is doing it just for the creative freedom.”

Some music editors, like Angie Rubin (Alpha Dog, Mrs. Harris, Rendition), see the temp in a more positive light. “I really do see the temp as a warm-up for the final mix,” she says. “Depending on how many temps there are––and there can be several––you get to fine tune musical ideas as you go. I also think it makes the process more of a team effort. Sound and music get to really see, hear, feel and know what each department is up to.”

Rubin adds that she has even begun asking that sound and music editors be together at the spotting sessions that help make up the temp. “I just like the idea of working together over weeks and months,” she explains. “Sound helping picture and picture helping sound; a true give and take. That way, we all can complement each other, and not overpower or try to out-do each other at our own sessions.”

Suzana Peric at her New York studio. Photo by John Clifford

At the same time that the temp dub is becoming more important, it is getting less and less time and resources devoted to it, Lowry feels. “Even if we didn’t have previews, I think films would benefit from the temp process because it’s like workshopping,” she says. “It’s a way for a team of people to get to know the film and each other and figure out what would best serve the end product.”

Job Stability?

Given all these factors, could the job of the music editor actually be in jeopardy? “The job itself? No,” responds Rubin. “But then again, I think of myself as a film’s music editor, not a composer’s. I believe a film needs a great music editor, and as long as there is a need to preview a film with music, the music editor will play a prominent role, especially the good ones.”

“Everyone is so worried that technology is going to eliminate jobs,” says Dittrick. “But Hollywood is so diversified, unlike in Europe, for example, where the sound editor does the music editor’s job. That could never happen here, because people do their jobs the way they are trained to; they are focused on one craft.

“And at least on TV shows, there’s no way for a picture editor to do what we do––spot, time, prep source, load score and supervise a two-day mix,” Dittrick continues. “When we leave the spotting session, we’re off to time the show for the composer who has usually moved on to the next episode. Picture editors, with some exceptions, just don’t have the music background and experience to be on the dubbing stage, especially with their hectic schedules. Therefore, I believe that picture, sound and music editors will be in demand for many years to come.”

“I don’t think the position of music editor is going to completely go away anytime soon––but it is definitely morphing,” Lowry predicts. “Composers will always need someone to interface with editorial for them. It’s just a question of who does the work and how integrated they are into the post-production process as a whole.

“It will be a sad day if music ever ends up being treated as a separate stand-alone compartment of filmmaking instead of something that is inextricably woven into the fabric of the artwork,” she concludes.

To put it another way, “Music in a film is like making a risotto,” explains Badami, himself of Sicilian descent. “Until you mix in the Parmesan, it’s not risotto.”

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Features

May the Sound Be with You: AMPAS Looks Back at Action-Adventure Sound Effects

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 13 minutes read

By Michael Kunkes

From the moment Tad Marburg––Chairman of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Public Programs and Education Subcommittee of the Science and Technology Council––asked the audience members at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre to turn their cell phones off with the codicil that “Ringtones are okay if they are interesting,” everyone knew it was going to be an evening of fun and nostalgia.

Last month, an audience of sound professionals and movie lovers, gathered for the culmination of the council’s “Sound, Camera Action” series, entitled, “The Sound Behind the Image.” The evening was divided into two parts: an exploration of some of the most groundbreaking films in the 80-year evolution of sound effects, hosted by Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt; and to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars, a panel discussion with key members of the movie’s sound team, led by the evening’s host and moderator, 19-time Oscar nominee and Academy Governor Kevin O’Connell (recordist on The Empire Strikes Back).

After looking for a long moment at the huge golden Oscar that dominates the Academy Theatre’s stage, O’Connell said, “What did I ever do to you?” drawing a big laugh from the audience. He then introduced Burtt, who presented clips from seven landmark films, each of which, he said, inspired him in his own career and helped create the rich artistic history of sound effects. Some of that commentary follows:

Set picture from The Adventures of Don Juan 1926. Copyright Warner Bros.

The Adventures of Don Juan (Warner Bros., 1926) “Shot as a silent but with Vitaphone orchestra and some rudimentary sound effects, especially in the climactic swordfight; this is the movie where sound mixing and effects were born.”

Set picture from Tarzan and His Mate. Copyright MGM

Tarzan and His Mate (MGM, 1934) “Tarzan’s yell was the most recognized sound effect of that generation. It’s a palindromic sound, one that sounds the same backwards as it does forwards. There are all kinds of stories about how it was achieved, but the most common one is that the first few notes were sung, then spliced together. A copy of that sound was then reversed and spliced onto the original sound. It’s an old sound editors’ trick. There was no music score in that movie, just sustained suspense and action with sound effects and great ambience. Also, the idea of Cheetah clearly communicating content and information just by using sound was really a breakthrough at the time. He was the first R2D2––a character that doesn’t speak English but can communicate and act.”

Set picture from Flash Gordon. Copyright Universal

Flash Gordon (Universal, 1936) “Sci-fi provided sound effects editors a free field to experiment in. I loved the sounds they gave to the spaceships, with those strange electrical buzzings; there was no public consciousness in those days about what a rocket should sound like. Flash Gordon opened my mind to the fact that you could take a sound from somewhere else (mostly 1931’s Frankenstein), impose it on a spaceship, and it could work quite effectively.”

Still from War of the Worlds. Copyright Paramount

War of the Worlds (Paramount, 1953) “An electric guitar, which was pretty new as a popular instrument, was used to create the sounds of the Martian ray guns and cyclical feedback effects. Every sci-fi weapon today, including the lasers in Star Wars, can be traced back, at least in spirit, to War of the Worlds, which won Loren Ryder an Oscar.”

Set picture from Shane. Copyright Paramount

Shane (Paramount, 1953) “One of the most influential films when it came to gunfire, Shane started a tradition of big gunshots that has been picked up by Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry, the Bond films and even Indiana Jones. George Stevens had been in the war and wanted to portray the power of guns. He slowed them down, and mixed in cannon fire. Then, to make the gunshots seem big, the violence would be preceded by something that would be very quiet for a long time, making effective use of floorboard creaks and the chink of spurs. Suddenly, when the fight begins, the gunshots seem much louder. It’s a good lesson for sound editors today to learn.”

Still from Lawrence of Arabia. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures/Photofest. Copyright Columbia Pictures

Lawrence of Arabia (Columbia, 1962) “When we talked about what the score and sound for Star Wars was going to be, Lawrence of Arabia was brought up many times because of its sweeping romantic cues and big images. George wanted Star Wars to have a grand orchestral score like that. The rest of the track is all organic, realistic, articulated sounds––as you would expect in a Middle East war––and that’s how George wanted Star Wars to sound.”

Animation still of Wile E. Coyote Copyright Warner Bros.

Wile E. Coyote (Warner Bros. cartoon) “Most cartoons used musical instruments for accents, but these films explored the power of real world sounds when they were combined with comic moments. It shows that the most effective moments are achieved when you find that real sound that works.”

After Burtt’s talk, O’Connell then introduced the evening’s panel, made up of Burtt, Academy Award-winning sound editor Richard Anderson, and Oscar winning mixers Don MacDougall, Steve Maslow, Gregg Landaker, Gary Summers, Gary Rydstrom, along with Donald C. Rogers, sound technical director and fellow Academy Governor. What follows are some excerpts from that panel, which concluded with a clip from one of the last few surviving original Dolby “A” prints of Star Wars.

O’CONNELL: Don, you were the music mixer on Star Wars. Did you think it was the coolest thing on the planet, or corny?

MacDOUGALL: When that Star Destroyer came on the screen for the first time, I went out and bought 10,000 shares of Fox stock [laughter]. Seriously though, when we finished the dub, I told George Lucas that the only way to hear this was in 70mm six-track. And he said, “Well, the world isn’t going to hear it like that, because we’re only making 24 prints.” It’s a shame the world can’t here that sonority today.

O’CONNELL: Donald, you were the Technical Director at Goldwyn Studios. Why was Star Wars mixed there instead of Warners?

ROGERS: In late 1976, Landaker, Varney and Maslow were working with Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson on The Last Waltz at Goldwyn. One day, I got a call from Gary Kurtz, who told me that Clint Eastwood was kicking us off the dubbing stage at Warners, and asked could we finish our movie at Goldwyn. I went to Robertson and Scorsese, who told us we could work there––but only if we could come in at 7:00 p.m. and be out by 7:00 a.m. every day. I then asked Don MacDougall, who was the scoring mixer at Goldwyn, if he would do the night work. We still had no dialogue or effects mixer, so I borrowed Ray West from Ryder Sound and got Bobby Minkler to do the sound effects.

“[The Millennium Falcon] was recorded from a 1929 Beech Travelaire plane, which used something called an inertia crank to start the engine.” – Richard Anderson

O’CONNELL: Richard, weren’t you the guy who lit himself on fire on the Foley Stage doing a prop sound?

ANDERSON: Ben and I used to make student films together at USC. He went to work for George and I was working on low-budget features for Roger Corman and others. Typical of what I used to do was when I found in the trash some ADR that John Wayne had recorded and turned it into an insect voice on Hollywood Boulevard, which was Joe Dante’s first feature, I believe. Later on, I was working at Gomillion Sound, the Star Wars crew came in to mix the Death Star battle, and I ended up doing all the lasers and explosions. So, before they got the opticals of the battle, to get the flow for the cutting, we used dirty dupes of old World War II aerial battles. You’d see a ship go by being chased by a German Stuka, but of course we gradually replaced those shots.

O’CONNELL: Greg, one day you asked me, “Hey buddy, you want to come over here and pan a couple of TIE fighters?” And I said, “Yeah, let me do it.” Well, I did the first one exactly right, while the second one wasn’t even close. I was about to do it the third time when George walked in and stood right behind me. You leaned over and said, “It’s sweaty palm time, buddy, the pressure’s on now.” Well, I had never heard that before but my hands started pouring out sweat and I couldn’t do anything.

But my real question is, did you know how you were going to attack each project?

LANDAKER: Mixing was a performing art back then, and our computer was a No. 2 pencil. You rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed every reel. You knew the footage, and you memorized every single sound effect and what you wanted to do with it.

MASLOW: We would rehearse the entire day, taking meticulous notes, including where to insert dialogue. For example, if I was playing music at 110 decibels , I could come down gradually without feeling the pull. The other problem is that Gregg and I were both using the same four-track recorder, so if someone made a mistake or I was too loud covering dialogue, we would have to back up and jump back into the same recording at the same level at that moment.

“I told George Lucas that the only way to hear this was in 70mm six-track. And he said, ‘Well, the world isn’t going to hear it like that, because we’re only making 24 prints.’ It’s a shame the world can’t here that sonority today.” – Don MacDougall

O’CONNELL: Gary, you and I were recordists on The Empire Strikes Back, and then you went on to mix Return of the Jedi. Did you feel a lot of pressure to toe the mark on that?

SUMMERS: I was Ben’s assistant on Empire. Later, when we worked on Jedi, George kept saying he was going to bring in the hottest mixers in LA to do the film, so Ben and I just said, “OK, fine, we’ll just do the temp mixes.” So the day of the mix came, we looked around and no one was there, so Ben did the effects, I mixed dialogue and Randy Thom mixed the music––and that was how it happened.

O’CONNELL: I’ve heard the Millennium Falcon in a hundred movies since Star Wars. How did you create those sounds, especially the hyperdrive?

ANDERSON: It was recorded from a 1929 Beech Travelaire plane, which used something called an inertia crank to start the engine. It was a spring-driven motor that the pilot would wind up outside the plane. Then he would get in he cockpit, release the spring and start the propeller. Treg Brown at Warner Bros. also used it as the sound for the Tasmanian Devil.

BURTT: I bought an inertia starter on e-Bay last month, just to show you how crazy we all are.

O’CONNELL: What percentage of what we do is artistic vs. technical?

LANDAKER: It’s very much artistic––at least 50-50 but more like 70-30 [artistic to technical]. You can have all the chops in the world about faders and EQ, but it’s actually the fine balancing act of putting that movie together than makes it a reality. You have to have a feeling for that screen.

“Mixing was a performing art back then, and our computer was a No. 2 pencil.” – Gregg Landaker

O’CONNELL: I’d like to relate one George Lucas anecdote. After we finished Empire, we went to lunch at the Farmer’s Market in LA, and we all paid for our own lunches. After that, George bought us some sugar-free cookies––and if you think they taste bad now, you should have tried them back then. George said something like, “Thanks guys, you did a great job,” and he got into his car and left. We got into ours. I can’t even tell you the things Bill Varney said in that car. We got back to the studio, and sitting in front of each of our spaces was a very generous check from George thanking us. It was unbelievable.

O’CONNELL: We used to do the foreign and airline versions. Do you think we are headed for the iPod version of mixing?

LANDAKER: I think we’re already there. I can just see a bunch of mix teams sitting over the console with those little ear buds.

SUMMERS: What we do hasn’t changed. Only the tools have changed, most of the redundancies have been eliminated and technology is opening new creative avenues. You guys had to match every time to punch in, where we can now go through and touch up little details and focus more on the small things. The downside is that some people get locked into that and never make a decision. Personally, I only embrace the things that help me serve my client and make creative decisions for them.

MASLOW: I still find that the weak point in film is badly recorded dialogue. Short of looping, there’s nothing you can do with a poorly recorded track to enhance the quality. And how many directors like to loop?

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Features

Mmmm… Popcorn: ‘The Simpsons’ Goes to the Movies

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 16 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

On July 27, that sucking sound you’ll hear at your local multiplex will be Maggie Simpson’s pacifier in all its 5.1 surround sound and widescreen glory. Maggie, along with Homer, Bart, Marge, Lisa, Mr. Burns, Smithers, Flanders and dozens of other denizens of Springfield, are making their big-screen debut. After 19 years and 400 episodes, the hit television series The Simpsons has finally spawned The Simpsons Movie, directed by David Silverman, released by 20th Century Fox and expected to be one of the biggest hits of the summer.

But it certainly won’t be one of the loudest. The Simpsons’ mindset, with its built-in, slightly fanatical audience, is that dialogue writing and all that goes with it––gag timing, topical humor, and musical and sound effects––is king. Even with a roster of A-list picture and sound editorial talent from some of the splashiest animated movies in history, as well as a Hans Zimmer score, The Simpsons Movie will not feel like most animated films of recent years, what with its 2-D production and (in comparison to most summer blockbusters) an almost minimalist soundscape.

“I started on the first day they began production dialogue, which was recorded ensemble-style with up to four characters at once on the Fox ADR stage,” says John Carnochan, a veteran animation editor whose feature work includes Robots, Beauty and the Beast, Ice Age, The Little Mermaid and The Lion King.

“This was a lot different from a typical 3-D animated show, where they go through a very long visual and story development phase,” he continues. “They already had a shooting script, cast, backgrounds and character designs, so a lot of the homework was already done. On the first day, we were already figuring out how we were going to cut it! It was almost like a radio show in that the artists are responding solely to what they hear. It was great for me because I like to start roughing out the soundtracks before I get the picture.”

The Glory of Two Dimensions
Carnochan also was thrilled to be back working in traditional 2-D animation, after years of 3-D and CGI. “You have a lot more freedom and flexibility in this process; it’s far less cumbersome and a lot easier to fix or change things,” he says. But more than anything else, he explains, “The challenge of The Simpsons Movie was about paying homage to the heritage of the series while developing a meaningful story and not being constrained by act breaks and musical play-ins and -outs.”

The picture editorial team for The Simpsons Movie at 20th Century Fox, from left, Mark Scheib, Jennifer Dolce and John Carnochan. Photo by Deverill Weekes

In a nod to the TV animation model, director Silverman did not direct the voices. “David was in charge of the visual part of the picture,” Carnochan reveals. “Executive producer James Brooks was at every recording session and very heavily involved in editing and rewriting. Producer Richard Sakai, show creator Matt Groening, Hans Zimmer and his music editor Dan Pinder were also major collaborators.”

At Fox Studios in West LA, an entirely new animation studio was assembled at what has been humorously dubbed “Stacked Animation,” in tribute to Pamela Anderson’s Stacked TV series, which was formerly housed in the complex. The facility included seven Avid Adrenaline systems, apportioned mainly to Carnochan, additional editor Mark Scheib, first assistant editor Jennifer Dolce and assistants John Currin, Vivek Sharma and Elaine Andrianos. There were also five After Effects stations.

“As we got into production, we needed to continually visualize the script––which would change after every screening––so having a quick, tight turnaround was essential,” Carnochan explains. “Our editing crew was augmented by up to 25 on-site artists, who worked in a unique way. We would listen to the dialogue and have ideas about how to stage shots. I could have a conversation with an artist about Homer’s performance and an hour or two later have a new edited version, melding picture and sound.”

Carnochan praised the 21 Wacom Cintiq systems (basically drawing tablets combined with monitors) that were installed in the studio. “You draw directly on the monitor and see your pencil strokes instantly where you draw them,” he says. “The artists export their drawings and the assistant editors import the files into the Avid for editing and further refinement if necessary. Some of the artists were specialists in either After Effects or Final Cut as well, allowing multi-planing effects.

“As a result, our story reels were very specific as to action and performance, although usually in black-and-white,” he continues. “To prepare for previews, the shots that hadn’t been animated and returned to us in color could be colored in Photoshop, and even up-rezzed to HD, which was how we previewed. The use of the Cintiqs, several terabytes of storage, Avid Unity and the file-sharing between the editorial world and visual world gave me a unique opportunity to help shape this film.”

Dolce, whose animation experience includes An Extremely Goofy Movie and Space Jam, says, “Because The Simpsons Movie is so focused on dialogue, we used script-based editing in the Avid. For over 10 years, Avid has supported a script-based program where you can load a script into a traditional Avid project and line it the way a script supervisor would line it on the set; all this does is mimic that process. She adds that although she had never used it before, it didn’t take long to realize the benefits.

Most contemporary animation directors want to emulate modern live-action films and make the sound more naturalistic.

“The writers’ assistant constantly gave us script updates in Final Draft,” Dolce continues. “John Currin was mainly responsible for lining these electronic scripts when the next round of records would come to us. Script-based editing is very quick to edit with––and it’s also a handy tool for tracking and playing back takes for the directors and writers. Takes were often reviewed in editorial as well as on the stage during any one of our four temp dubs.”

Scheib jumped at the chance to work on the movie based on his favorite television show. Primarily a single-camera comedy show editor (Arrested Development, Monk, Entourage, Crack-ing Up), Scheib says that the world of feature animation is enormously complex. “From my standpoint of working on sitcoms, what you have to work with, you work with––with the exception of re-shoots,” he explains. “In an animated feature, if a camera angle doesn’t work, a new one is quickly drawn. Or new expressions, backgrounds, shadings, etc. You don’t worry about coverage because an artist in another room will quickly pound out another version for you.”

The animation for The Simpsons Movie was completed at several studios besides Fox, including Film Roman in Burbank, Rough Draft in Glendale, and the Korean studio Akom. Each had its own sequence directors to control and divide the workload. “Working with the animators was probably my most valuable function,” adds Dolce. “I talked to them about six times a day regarding new footage and dialogue notes. We made a lot of QuickTime and AIFF files with footage-counter information so that they were aware of our new timings, and we generated a lot of written coverage via change notes on a shot-by-shot basis.”

Dolce ganged old versions with new versions and went through them manually to nail all the notes as quickly as possible in order to get them back to the studios. “There was a lot of updating all around to keep us all on the same page,” she adds. “It was not an easy task with a constantly moving target.”

The Power of the Temp Mix
The key to the sound post for The Simpsons Movie was the series of four intensive temp mixes––one every three and a half weeks. According to supervising sound editor Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, MPSE, a two-time Golden Reel Award-winner (Titanic, Saving Private Ryan), “The movie grew through each temp mix, though the main story arc has pretty much remained the same. As the temps evolved, we added a lot of things: mainly dialogue, some light ambience, sound effects––and a lot of simple, almost unnoticeable things that help fill out the track. The whole temp process was very organic and kept changing constantly as we scrambled to keep up with the picture side. It was done at breakneck speed, and the turnaround time was phenomenal––mostly because this kind of animation is so simple and easy to change.”

“Dry ice makes very odd squealing sounds when you press warm metal against it.”– Randy Thom

The temp mixes were done at Fox and Todd-AO West in Santa Monica. The staffs have varied with each mix, with the main exceptions being Whittle, temp re-recording mixer/co-sound designer Chris Scarabosio, effects editor Al Nelson, MPSE, and first assistant Stuart McCowan. “Even with all these different crews, it was the most fluid flow between dialogue and picture I’ve ever seen,” says Whittle. “On our last temp, John Carnochan was sitting next to me with his Avid laptop. I’d attach a portable hard drive, start my ProTools and away we’d go.”

Whittle adds that ProTools was an extremely flexible tool during production––even in its traditional form of use. “We’d been on so many soundstages, and so many people were working on it, that the virtual mixing thing––where everything is fluid and live and nothing gets printed––just didn’t seem to make any sense. Because of all the variables, we were carrying around every temp mix with us, and it worked out great.

“It was always an option to go back three temps and pull out that one vocal they liked,” she continues. “Most movies have a lot of layers, tons of ambience, Foley and sound design. But The Simpsons was just not that unwieldy, so we were able to use a lot of different people without having to spend days bringing them up to speed. Because it’s mainly dialogue, you just cut straight down the middle and you don’t have to do a lot of panning. It’s a much simpler show.”

“The four temp mixes have been the Rosetta Stone that we constantly refer to,” adds Nelson (winner of an MPSE Golden Reel for The Incredibles), who cut the ambiences and hard effects for the movie along with Shannon Mills and Bob Shoup. “No reel was ever locked, so we were always conforming, re-mixing and re-editing. The good part of this process was that we got multiple opportunities to fine-tune and finesse scenes as they returned to the pre-mix stage.”

The sound editorial team for The Simpsons Movie at Skywalker Sound, from left, Al Nelson, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle and Chris Scarabosio. Photo by David Klein

McCowan, assistant supervising sound editor (whose main task was to maintain a smooth workflow at Skywalker Sound in San Rafael, California, in addition to liaising with the picture department), explains that moving the whole show down to Los Angeles for the final mix (with re-recording mixers Anna Behlmer and Andy Nelson) was a huge challenge. “Not only did we have everything on Firewire drives, but we also carried a duplicate set––and sometimes triplicate––when we were working on two stages,” he says. “It was a lot of drives to be carrying through airport security.”

The other challenge for the sound department was keeping up with the rapid pace of picture changes. “That was tricky in the best of times,” McCowan recalls. “Right before the final, we were mixing on three stages [two at Skywalker for effects and one at Fox for dialogue]. Fortunately, there are two other amazing assistants on the show––Kevin Bailey and Josh Gold––and we managed to keep everything smooth for the editors.”

Skywalker’s Randy Thom came on board as co-sound designer to create the initial sound design for The Simpsons Movie. Thom, who has won Oscars for Sound Mixing (The Right Stuff) and Sound Editing (The Incredibles), worked on the film off and on since it was in storyboard stage. He takes no issue with the show’s reliance on dialogue: “On the one hand, we walk a fine line between wanting to make it extremely cinematic and take advantage of all the things you can’t do on TV; on the other, we don’t want to turn it into a sound effects extravaganza–– which it is not––and distract the audience from what’s funny about it.

The Funny Thing About Animation
“There’s a funny thing about animation,” Thom continues, putting the movie into an historical perspective. “Everyone admires the sound created by Jimmy MacDonald and others on the classic ‘toons of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. But no contemporary directors or producers really want to emulate that style today in any way––and that’s at least partly because people associate that style with a short-form medium. If you attempt to do that style over the course of a feature, it gets tiring or overly ‘cartoony.’ What it comes down to is that most contemporary animation directors want to emulate modern live-action films and make the sound more naturalistic.”

Randy Thom.
Photo courtesy of Skywalker Sound

According to Thom, the bulk of the sound effects created for The Simpsons Movie came from the Skywalker library and were then mixed with newly fabricated organic effects. In a typical Simpsons moment (without revealing any plot points) in the film, a metal silo falls into a lake so polluted that it dissolves into nothing. It was a scene that provided a bit of a sound effects challenge for Thom. Sounds of water splashing and boiling, along with the sounds of frying sausages were recorded; then dry ice was employed. “Dry ice makes very odd squealing sounds when you press warm metal against it,” explains Thom. “And it does this process called sublimation–– where the vapor just shoots off and causes the metal to resonate and sound like guitar feedback. We mixed that in with the other sounds in that scene.”

In another sequence involving a giant dome that is cracking and breaking, Scarabosio tried to get certain sounds out of splintering glass. “Glass really doesn’t like to splinter; it likes to shatter and break,” says Scarabosio, a jack-of-all-sounds whose credits include sound effects editor and re-recording mixer on Munich; sound design editor on Pearl Harbor and re-recording mixer on Star Wars: Episode III. “We recorded everything at 192 kHz and then pitched it down, but it still takes time to go through and find the best elements of the cracking and scraping, and then layer the sounds to try different effect processing. Actually, we solved the one sound design problem with one of my wife’s domed cake plates and an empty tennis ball container that I threw in there. There are lots of benefits to having a wife who knows how to bake.”

Much like old-style live action, each sound editor was assigned certain reels, as opposed to working on the movie as a whole. “As it developed, it was necessary to do things almost scene to scene,” reveals Scarabosio. “Breaking the film up into reels allowed us to develop certain scenes that were a little more solid, where other scenes were still in flux. By working in chunks, we didn’t have to be constantly conforming.”

Stuart McCowan.
Photo by Deverill Weekes

Ideally, it would have been great to have the recording done all in one session. But the reality is that Skywalker works on a fiber channel system, so only one person can have a volume in write mode at a time. “If all the editors had the entire film in one session––and each was writing to his own volume––it would get pretty confusing as to who had done what, and who had the most updated version of a scene,” Scarabosio explains.

When it comes to sound effects, things really haven’t changed much in decades, according to Thom. “It’s still about finding and recording natural sounds in the real world and then manipulating and modifying them to do what you need them to do,” he says. Will there be a time when recording sounds won’t be necessary? “Theoretically, it’s possible to create every sound in a film electronically, including the voices,” he says. “The problem is that it’s massively inefficient and extremely expensive––so I don’t see it happening any time in the near future.”

Scarabosio says that The Simpsons Movie was not about layering sounds like in a big action film; there was far more subtlety. “It was about finding the right sounds for the right moment,” he says. “The creators and producers of The Simpsons have different aesthetics. Some have a more realistic approach; others want to see and hear more cartoonish things. It varies according to the situation and the animation as to what works best. The moment can be exciting, dangerous, tender or funny. They come and go by very fast, but each one is important.”

“Dialogue is the queen of this whole show,” explains Whittle. “The biggest challenge for all of us was to grow out of that TV sound and picture and to help support the music and dialogue with effects that fit the style and tradition that’s been set for almost 20 years––only translating it to the big screen.
“It’s all very realistic,” she concludes. “That is, if you believe in a yellow world.”

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Features

Read On!: Story Analysts Strive for More Recognition

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 11 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

It might come as a surprise to a lot of people in the industry to learn that the job of the story analyst goes way beyond reading a script and writing coverage for executives. In truth, the analysts involvement has been reaching beyond that narrow definition for some time now.

“Were a pretty well-educated, intelligent bunch of people,” says analyst Calvin Yocum, who once served as secretary/treasurer of Local 854, the story analysts IATSE affiliation before they became a part of Local 700 at the turn of the century. He has been working at 20th Century Fox since 1997 and spent seven years at Columbia before that.

We are always trying to improve a script and focus it from one draft to the next, Yocum says, explaining the story analysts task. We will compare new drafts to previous ones so that we know all the actual changes. We might provide them as a list, or a synopsis in which changes are italicized to provide a legal record of what a screenwriter has done for his money this time around.

A far more important part of that process is to evaluate whether changes work and which ones still need to be made, according to Yocum. Oftentimes, projects will lose their focus over the course of the process and that’s where we can provide a really valuable perspective because we’re the ones who can remember all the way back to draft three, which may ultimately have been the best version.

Garby Leon. Photo by Wm.Stetz

Yocum recalls reading the script for Men In Black during the 1990s. Ed Solomon, the screenwriter, couldn’t quite nail the story, and that was something I brought up repeatedly in coverage of successive drafts, he says. The studio brought in another writer, David Koepp, who improved the story but imparted a much darker tonality on the piece. And much of the humor that appealed to us in the first place was lost.

We got so wrapped up in what was working in Koepp’s material, and not working in Solomon’s, that we lost sight of the whole gestalt which was that this was supposed to be a fun movie, he continues. I kept hammering away at that, and eventually the studio rehired Solomon, who kept a lot of Koepp’s story elements, but brought back his own twist on the characterizations and the comedy. And it made around a half-billion dollars.

Sometimes, we’ll even end up working on scripts that we initially passed on, but because we were the original analysts when the projects came through the door, we remain the persons on those projects throughout the development process, reading successive drafts, says Jana Carole, who has been a story analyst with Columbia Pictures for 18 years. Whether it’s five or 45 drafts, we will analyze the differences between the various drafts down to the smallest detail and provide input as to whether a project is moving forwards or backwards.

There is also a potentially large employment base in the legal community, where story analysts are used by studios as expert witnesses but they’re also highly qualified to do legal research in intellectual property cases in the entertainment industry, says the Garby Leon, most recently an analyst at Fox who also has held executive positions at Silver Pictures (where he developed The Matrix), Fox Family Film Division and Mosaic Media Group. We’ve even had analysts fly to foreign countries to testify.

I’ve prepared materials for some Writers Guild arbitrations, admits Guy Phillippi, an independent analyst who has worked at various times for Warner Bros., Disney, Universal and Fox. He recalls the time when Sondra Locke was given a deal at Warners after her well-publicized break-up with Clint Eastwood. Because she wasn’t getting many scripts made, she claimed that the deal was set up as an appeasement so that she wouldn’t sue Eastwood, he relates. She also claimed that the story analysts were told to pass on all of her scripts. Well, no one at a studio would ever tell you that.

“Why would you turn someone down just because she had a bad relationship with a star?” he asks rhetorically. Besides, a studio would make a deal with the devil if someone came in with a good script.

Jana Carole. Photo by Christopher Briscoe

Deconstructive Analysis
Fellow analyst David Bruskin, who represents the story analyst classification on the Editors Guilds Board of Directors, provides another perspective on how the job of the old-fashioned title of reader has evolved into a scientific process. If you look at old coverage from studio files, the synopsis used to be way, way longer, he explains. Given that movies are different, analysts have had to become very deconstructionist in terms of what is working and what isn’t. A screenplay can be compared to a car: Everyone knows what it’s supposed to do, but until you look under the hood and take the engine apart, you don’t know how it works. Current coverage involves that kind of analytical ability, according to Bruskin. Older movies relied more on the gut instinct of the producers and studio heads, he says. Now it relies more on what’s making the money this weekend.

The goal of deconstructive analysis is not to dumb down a script. Sometimes something is written so well it can obfuscate the flaws, Bruskin explains. When I worked on Stephen Frears Hero (1992), the screenplay was by David Webb Peoples, a fine writer. Frank Price, the head of Columbia at the time and a former analyst himself, said something wasn’t working for him, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. I happened to put my finger on it for him and that launched my career into a very fertile period. But I was only able to do that by completely taking it apart to see what really made it tick.

Studios have been known to buy material off a pitch or a terrific concept alone, adds Carole. We can recommend a concept, saying that the execution is not very good, but that the seed of the idea is really fabulous and the studio might nevertheless want to consider developing this further.

When I read 50 First Dates, it was a written as a vehicle for two completely different actors, had simpler plot devices, and was set in Seattle, not Hawaii, she continues. But it had a great dramatic concept and a lot of heart, and changed for the better on its way to becoming an Adam Sandler vehicle. An idea is almost incorruptible as long as you have people working on it who really appreciate it.

Calvin Yokum.

Analysts are also called upon to work in acquisitions, usually for smaller producers and distributors, where an analyst will be called on to watch a movie thats already made. It’s a little more difficult to write a synopsis, because you can’t go back and refer to a script, says Phillippi. In those cases, you almost become a movie reviewer.

Yocum speculates on another way that analysts could get more notice. I wish we had more of a sliding pay scale based on the contributions we really make, he says. We can make a recommendation that will eventually earn millions for a studio. Yet we don’t get studio heads coming over, giving us a pat on the back and saying, Hey, that was a really great piece of coverage you wrote yesterday.

Story analysts’ uniquely intuitive skills can also be utilized to cover screenings of foreign films for remakes, chart comedy beats, report on pitch meetings, match a writer to a project, write treatment synopses, create any number of specialized breakdowns, and do translations from foreign languages. But still, the bottom line is finding that great story with the kernel of genius.

My job is all about storytelling; whether it’s movies or books or kids telling stories around a campfire, it’s all the same, says Yocum philosophically. The rules of story have been the same since the collective consciousness appeared out of the darkness, and I just try and apply those universal rules to whatever is put in front of me.

The process of good storytelling hasn’t really changed in the 80 years that story analysts have been employed by studios, says Carole. Some of the technical dynamics are different, the budgets are exceedingly different, and the complexities of an international market are also different. All these things have a trickle-down effect on how we will read any given script on a given day. But it still doesn’t change what we are looking for: a great, solid story.

There should never be a formula; when you read a script, you bring your whole experience to it, Leon opines. In a strange way, all of us are experts; we all have PhDs in entertainment, and it’s rather extraordinary.

David Bruskin. Photo by Wm.Stetz

Pressure on Signatories
So-called entertainment degrees or not, story analysts are certainly feeling their oats these days. It wasn’t always the case. When they were folded into the Editors Guild from their previous roost at Local 854 in 2000, they were a dispirited group of studio employees and independents without much faith in what their union could do for them. That was a sad commentary on a group of individuals who have been serving studios and independent producers for over 80 years, have been organized for some 50 years, and are widely regarded as the gatekeepers of Hollywood though they receive no screen credit and are rarely given their choice of projects. Now, backed by the strength of the Editors Guild, the 141 union story analysts have embarked on a campaign to raise awareness of their important role in the industry, hopefully right a few wrongs, and find new ways to expand their membership.

Over the past year, the Guild has embarked on a campaign to organize non-signatory companies that are under no obligation to hire union analysts, as well as bring to task signatories to the union basic agreement. The effort has been spearheaded by analyst Leon, with help from and Bruskin, support from the Guild Board and oversight by Assistant Executive Director Cathy Repola.

I was floored when I realized that there were numerous companies among the hundreds of signatories who were undoubtedly using readers while not employing them under the agreement, so I decided to pursue this situation something the old Local wasn’t even interested in finding out about, recalls Leon, who played an activist role in the changeover from Local 854 to Local 700.

Guy Phillippi. Photo by Peggy Vargas

A number of companies were even claiming they had no story analysts at all, he continues. Under that scenario, are we supposed to believe that ICM just sends a script over to the studio and they shoot it Leon feels that when a company says that, they are either subcontracting the work or they are getting it done for free. I realized that we needed to rock that boat, he says. By enforcing the contract, we were looking at a tremendous opportunity to expand our membership.

The Guild has tested the waters and filed some 20 separate grievances, but the process is expected to take some time. However, according to Leon, the crucial time is now. If we do really well with a few of these situations, it will send a message to dozens of other companies that they should skip a useless battle and abide by the contract, he says. I think we are in a strong position and I am cautiously optimistic, but it’s going to be tough.

Nonetheless, the board is totally justified in taking these actions, which could bring in hundreds of new members, he continues. We are on the threshold of a very historic revolution about how story analysts are hired in the industry and how they are treated. Nobody has ever gone to bat for us before like the Guild has, and we are all very happy and excited about it.

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Byte Club: David Fincher on Digital Filmmaking and ‘Zodiac’

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 4 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

Director David Fincher has made some of Hollywood’s darkest themed films: Seven, The Game, Fight Club and Panic Room. Now, with Zodiac, he and editor Angus Wall are taking on another disturbing subject–– the San Francisco Bay Area’s notorious Zodiac Killer––while finding the light at the end of the digital tunnel. Fincher spoke with CineMontage about his new film.

CineMontage: What attracted you to the story of the Zodiac Killer?

David Fincher: For me, Zodiac was so much a part of growing up in Marin County. A lot of Seven had to do with the fear that was instilled by Zodiac. It was the idea that monsters could be among us, that someone was out there, picking off stragglers. When you are seven years old, it’s a pretty big deal to have police cars following your school bus. The story was compelling to me, and that’s always my primary criteria.

CM: Why does the character continue to fascinate people?

DF: Zodiac was way ahead of his time as a marketer. I found the graphic nature of his letters fascinating, as well as his relentless taunting of law enforcement. He wanted to be talked about; he wanted people to wear his buttons. He was good at getting his message out.

CM: How do you balance a story like that and keep the audience interested?

DF: I don’t know. There are those, I am sure, who will tell you we didn’t. I just tried to go for the beats that I was interested in.

CM: How did you pick Angus Wall to edit Zodiac?

DF: Angus and I have worked together for many years––exclusively for the past couple––and on commercials. Beyond his skill and sensitivity with character, and his tireless pursuit of the most streamlined narrative, we’ve been talking about our all-digital pipeline for some time. And he was, in my mind, the only guy to lead this charge. We both hate tape, and with the Viper camera as a “performance harvesting” tool, and the S.two [digital field recorder system] as a “mastering device,” we could finally do it.

“The great thing about digital moviemaking is that for the first time in the history of motion pictures, everyone––from the cameraman to the hair and makeup people––is looking at the same 23-inch monitor… It’s just another way of democratizing information.” – David Fincher

CM: What was your day-to-day interaction like?

DF: Angus and I have a very intuitive relationship. I leave him alone because I trust what he does, and also because I want to see what he comes up with. So often, he can look at footage and say, “You didn’t mean that, you meant this.”

CM: Like Seven and Fight Club, Zodiac is very darkly themed. How does it differ from your other movies?

DF: This movie is very different for me in terms of the staging. There are not a lot of close-ups, because I wanted everything to play as wide as it possibly could. Most scenes are: Two guys walk into a room, sit down over a cup of coffee and then proceed to rip through six pages of dialogue. We were trying to be super-simple and super-direct and wanted audiences to form their own opinions of things, and not have to go, “Oh, that’s the killer; that’s the evil guy.”

CM: What was the reaction at Paramount and Warner Bros. to your workflow?

DF: I think that in the end, they were freaked out by little weird things, like, “Who’s going to handle the digital material?“ “What’s going to happen to these D.Mags [digital film magazines]?” “Where will they go?” The answer is that they’ll be dealt with in the same way that your single copy of your camera negative is dealt with: A production assistant delivers it somewhere in a van, and it’s ingested there. Once they realized they were going to have back-ups and copies of everything––and once they started seeing stuff happen on PIX [Private Internet Exchange firewall], which put everyone on the same page––they were sold.

CM: As a filmmaker, what did Zodiac mean to your craft?

DF: The great thing about digital moviemaking is that for the first time in the history of motion pictures, everyone––from the cameraman to the hair and makeup people––is looking at the same 23-inch monitor, reviewing a take and talking about the exact same thing, and that’s never been possible before. The idea was not to be as “digital” as we could for its own sake. The idea is to use everything that’s available to us to make the filmmaking process cleaner, keep everyone informed, and communicate better so we can get more of what we want. It’s just another way of democratizing information.

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‘Zodiac’ Sign: Angus Wall on the Cusp of FILMMAKING’S FUTURE

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 13 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

The San Francisco Bay Area experienced something new in serial killers during the years 1968-1970. He came out of nowhere, did his work quickly, and left no trail of physical evidence. He called himself “Zodiac,” and his methods in many ways matched the completely tapeless post-production workflow conceived by director David Fincher and editor Angus Wall for their new film.

Zodiac, the docudrama on the unsolved manhunt to apprehend the mysterious murderer, was produced by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures, and opens nationally via Paramount March 2. It features an ensemble cast, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards and ChloĂŤ Sevigny.

Wall’s association with Fincher goes back to Propaganda Films, a pioneering music video and commercial company co-founded by Fincher in 1987. Wall, working in the company vault, was cutting together directors’ reels while Fincher was directing spots for clients such as Nike and Coca-Cola, as well as videos for Michael Jackson, Madonna, Sting and others. Wall later edited the main title sequence for Fincher’s Se7en in 1995. He was credited as an editorial consultant on 1999’s Fight Club, and his professional relationship with Fincher greatly expanded when he co-edited the director’s Panic Room, his second feature, in 2002. The editor began working on Zodiac in September of 2005 and locked the picture almost exactly a year later.

At the heart of the production was the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream 2K camera. Fincher had already shot numerous TV commercials with the Viper, but the director and Wall wanted to create an entirely new kind of moviemaking for Zodiac, one that kept the post process––editorial, storage, color timing and correction and visual effects––entirely under their control with a minimum of staff and expensive equipment. And with a reported $85 million budget, Zodiac is the first major Hollywood feature with this workflow to be shot and captured using totally uncompressed 4:4:4 full-range RGB.

“Stylistically, Zodiac is much more All the President’s Men than Dirty Harry” – Angus Wall

The actual shooting of the film consisted of the acquisition of over 18 million DPX (digital motion picture exchange) digital files––shot by cinematographer and longtime Fincher collaborator Harris Savides, ACS––placed onto S.two DFRs (digital film recorders), using the company’s D.Mag (Digital Film Magazine) drives, each of which could hold up to 33 minutes of uncompressed digital material. Those 18 million DPX files ultimately represented 144 terabytes of storage, the approximate equivalent of 1.6 million feet of film––enough for Peter Jackson to shoot another The Lord of the Rings sequel.

The lean and mean team assembled by Wall for Zodiac included assistant editors Peter Warren, Brian Ufberg and Wyatt Jones. Once production filled a D.Mag with thousands of DPX frames, it was delivered to Jones, who became the keeper of the digital files throughout the production. The frames were pulled from the D.Mags onto a 34 terabyte X-SAN network using a machine called an F-Dock. Two LTO Technology LTO-3 archives were made of these DPX files, which Jones then put through a bit-by-bit verification process.

“Any camera original––whether film or data file––represents the efforts of many people and a lot of money, time and thought,” Wall explains. “It would be stupid to lose any of it, so job one was maintaining the integrity of the data. And ultimately, not a single frame was lost.” After verification, the D.Mags were wiped clean and returned to the set for re-use.

To create editable media, these frames were converted to DVCPRO HD in Apple’s Shake program, where a basic LUT (look-up table) was also applied. All metadata, including script notes, was preserved and added to a MYSQL open-source database that became the central nervous system for the project. After that, Warren synched the DVCPRO HD media to Aaton Cantar-X digital recorder audio files. The merged DVCPRO HD media was then passed off to Ufberg for multi-clipping, script notes and final organization before being given to Wall for cutting––which was all done on Final Cut Pro 5 to take advantage of its native HD abilities and multi-clip features. It was there that the creative process began.

An illustration of the Zodiac killer from the film Zodiac. Photo by Merrick Morton. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

“One of the things that drew me to Zodiac is that the story stuck to real events as much as possible––right down to its attempts to replicate original conversations,” Wall reveals. “The character of Zodiac is quite bizarre and unique, especially in the way he taunted police and the media with his handwritten letters, codes and phone calls.”

Zodiac is based on the books Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked by Robert Graysmith (portrayed by Gyllenhaal in the film), the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who pursued the case for years, long after the trail grew cold. Zodiac the movie is actually two stories. The first section, around the first 45 minutes, covers the series of seemingly random killings that terrorized the Bay Area for nearly two years. Then, Zodiac turns into a detective story for the remainder of its 151-minute (at press time) running time, tracking the effects the hunt has on the lives of the police and newspapermen trying with increasing frustration to find a suspect.

“Stylistically, Zodiac is much more All the President’s Men than Dirty Harry [which was loosely based on the Zodiac murders, but with a wish-fulfillment Hollywood finish]. What I love is its grounding in detail; its specificity. Truth is definitely stranger than fiction, and it always makes a story more interesting and complex.”

Wall points to two favorite sequences. “For obvious reasons, I like the tension of the murder scenes, but I also loved the scene late in the movie between Graysmith and Toschi [Mark Ruffalo],” he says. “It’s basically just the two of them sitting in a booth in a diner. There is a muted emotional resolution to the scene, which gives the two characters some measure of closure. That scene is followed by Graysmith going to see the man he thinks is the killer, Arthur Leigh Allen [John Carroll Lynch], in the hardware store where he works, which is the obvious emotional payoff of the movie.

Demonstrating its resourcefulness, the team was able to create a render farm entirely from off-the-shelf computers.

“David’s movies are often about dark subjects, but they aren’t without levity,” Wall continues. “It would be a mistake to think of Zodiac as a slasher movie. Rather, it’s about the lives of people who are pursuing a killer who is still unidentified today.”

Zodiac’s main creative challenge was the effort to make the story feel alive, while telling it as efficiently as possible, according to Wall. “The story spans a lot of time and the script is long, but every scene contains information that is relevant,” he says. “Lifting a scene always threatened to dislodge a thread of information that would be paid off later. It was also very important to respect the veracity of the material, so any restructure or lift was considered in those terms as well. David went to great lengths to respect the story and the people in it.”

To keep everyone involved on the same page, the team utilized PIX (Private Internet Exchange Firewall) a sophisticated permission-based FTP interface that allows different users to view material depending on levels of access. PIX was also used to get material to the Northern California-based sound team, including re-recording mixers David Parker and Michael Semanick, and composer David Shire in New York.

In this rarified post environment, color correction of dailies was also done very differently. Using a demo version of Apple’s Final Touch software, the team created nine LUTs for use on the footage. “David went into production with these nine LUTs and, instead of creating more, eliminated all but one,” says Wall. “This single-color setting was used for 95 percent of the dailies. This is not only a testament to David and Harris’ ingenuity, but also representative of digital photography––where you immediately know on set what your image looks like without the overnight anxieties of film. With a file-based workflow, color correction can be more like editorial––you can consider your choices instead of waiting for the end and making hurried decisions.”

Scene from Zodiac. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

A digital conform tool was created that proved invaluable. It gave Jones the ability to conform the movie automatically on the SAN (storage area network) and allowed changes to be made instantaneously without ever having to leave the edit bay. “When a sequence was ready to be conformed, I would break it down into one layer of video on the timeline and export an .xml document,” says Jones. “From that, I would run a script through the online database that would create a large tape batch. I would then load up our scalar and pull in all the DPX frames we needed for each sequence, with a ten-frame handle. Finally, I’d run a separate script which created a frame-accurate conform of all the DPX files.”

Demonstrating its resourcefulness, the team was able to create a render farm entirely from off-the-shelf computers. “On the second week of shooting, David pulled out a second Viper camera and it never went back,” says Wall. “An X-Serve render node was benchmarked against a Mac Mini and we discovered that the Mini did 50 percent of the work at 10 percent of the cost.” The team’s total render farm was four Mac Minis and six G5s, which also doubled as workstations for Final Cut Pro, Shake and other applications. “We kept up with production despite the fact that there was a lot of footage [one set-up had 67 takes],” Wall continues. “But David had very specific ideas of the performances he wanted, which meant that he shot a lot.”

Compared to effects-laden blockbusters, contained only some 380 visual effects shots––mainly splits, comps and bluescreens. A total of 13 vendors, large and small, contributed shots, with Jones contributing about 20 himself. “When an effects shot was needed, I would grab the timecode from FCP and prep a log to accompany the files to each vendor,” he explains. “Next, I would trace back the LTO, on which the files lived via our online database, and the previously uploaded D.Mag information. When the vendor returned the shots, I would ‘bake’ the modified DPX files back into QuickTime media and go over them with David and Peter, before plugging them back into the offline.” After a visual effects shot was approved, Jones would bring the sequence of DPX frames into Shake and do a difference matte with the original frames, basically checking the vendors’ work to ensure quality.

With the entire film being done by a small group of people, everyone’s jobs were interlinked. In simplified terms, Jones processed the picture dailies from the D.Mag, and verified that each frame was copied to a back-up digital tape. Warren processed the sound files from Cantar files using Majax and BWF-XML Pro to keep the timecode intact. He would then sync sound and picture, an intricate proposition, since Fincher eschews the use of a smart slate or clapperboard so as not to disturb the actors. He would also prepare and organize the footage for the studios, the director and for Wall.

“One of the things that drew me to Zodiac is that the story stuck to real events as much as possible––right down to its attempts to replicate original conversations,” – Angus Wall

Of the three assistants, Ufberg’s role was the most traditional. “I inserted notes from the script supervisor’s line script––which were important to the cutting choices––adding shot descriptions and other database info and grouping multi-camera shots together. This was a little different because to make those shots work for FCP, we had to export and then re-import the QuickTimes to unify the sound with the picture as one QuickTime unit in order to maintain the sync integrity of both the A and B Viper cameras. This was a major setback in terms of turning over reels to the sound department, but we got through it.”

Warren and Ufberg further broke down the dailies to create line-grouping breakdowns to assist Wall in performance choices, with each set-up created as a separate sequence with anywhere from three to ten line groupings. For preview screenings, the pair would line up the conform against the FCP offline to check for accuracy and make the D5 master.

“Coming from TV commercials, the pioneering workflow combined with the grandeur of the project was a little intimidating to me until we got into a flow with it,” Warren recalls. “We never actually executed the plan until dailies started coming in, so it really was ‘learn as you go.’ My main duties were taking the BWF [broadcast wave format] audio files that were recorded on set with the Aaton Cantar-X and getting them into the system so we could create an xml (extensible mark-up language) of the files that was then imported into FCP.” Once the xml was in FCP, Warren would organize the video dailies and sync with the BWF wave audio files.

Wall had nothing but effusive praise for his assistants: “The challenge each day was to keep up with production. I was blown away by how diligent everyone was and how well it all went. Brian, Pete and Wyatt made this movie. They brought multi-tasking to a new level. We didn’t lose a single frame and the show was finished without incident. For me, it was exhilarating to have those kinds of tools.”

Wall credits Fincher for the ultimate success of the workflow. “The sole reason this process worked, and that we were able to run with it as far as we did, was David. He just reassured everyone that even though there wouldn’t be any film to hold, there would be a movie to show.

“This is the future of moviemaking, and we’re just at the beginning,” Wall concludes. “There is so much potential for making the entire production and post process simpler, better and less expensive.”

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Big Sound, Small Budget: Sonically Recreating the Sixties for ‘Bobby’

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 11 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

It was all an elaborate conspiracy, plotted down to the most minute detail among like-minded mixers and sound and picture editors. This was the only way, it was reasoned, that the detailed, highly emotional soundtrack for MGM and the Weinstein Company’s Bobby, about the day Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) was killed at LA’s Ambassador Hotel, could be carved out of a budget that belied the importance of writer/director Emilio Estevez’s dream project that was a decade in the making.

Recreating the sounds of June 5, 1968—from the smallest period flavors such as teletypes, electric fans and tinny TV speakers, to the vast and chaotic soundscape of those final minutes in the Ambassador’s ballroom and pantry—became a balancing act, a collision between funding and passion that somehow all ended up working together in total harmony.

Oscar-winning film editor Richard Chew, ASC, who was working at Todd-AO West on the picture side of the project since the first day of shooting, was joined by re-recording mixer Mike Minkler, CAS, a two-time Oscar winner for Chicago and Black Hawk Down, and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) winner, interestingly enough, for his work on Oliver Stone’s JFK. “I’ve known Emilio for many years and when I heard he was beginning post-production, I offered my support to him and Richard,” he recalls. “There wasn’t much money left in the budget for post, but this was a labor of love for Emilio and we all wanted to get it done any way we could.”

Minkler brought in Glenn T. Morgan, MPSE (Open Water, Live From Baghdad, Monsters Ball), as supervising sound editor, and fellow re-recording mixer Tony Lamberti (My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Sideways, Monster) as sound effects mixer. “I’ve had a lot of success working on what I call ‘financially challenged’ films, but only because I tend to be very selective in what those films are,” Morgan says. “I was honored to be working with talent like Mike, Richard and Tony.”

Work began in earnest on the sound for Bobby after a first temp dub was created in March of this year, shortly after principal photography wrapped. “We just saw wonderful potential there,” Minkler says. “Everyone came up with a lot of different ideas and we went back into the studio, made a real temp mix.”

“This is what a ‘60s film should sound like. If you were to play Bobby after The Graduate, which was kind of our template, you wouldn’t hear much difference in the soundtracks.” – Mike Minkler

The “financially challenged” nature of Bobby kept the use of locations, especially outdoor ones, to a minimum. Due to limited shooting time at the Ambassador, which was under partial demolition, the 1921-vintage, 500-room landmark was constructed from bits and pieces of Los Angeles locales—primarily Santa Anita Racetrack for the pantry, the Park Plaza Hotel for the lobby, Castle Green in Pasadena for the gardens, and a lot of stage work at Santa Clarita Sound Stages. The hotel itself became another big-name cast member.

ADR played a key role in Bobby’s commitment to authenticity, especially in the scenes involving the Latino kitchen help. Originally, there was no budget for the Latino voices, but Minkler, Morgan and Chew were insistent on getting that single day of group Walla. “The Spanish language in LA is a lot different today than it was 40 years ago; the colloquialisms were way different, as were the dialects,” says Morgan. “Also, the Latin population wasn’t as diverse then as it is today, where there are Dominicans, Argentineans, Peruvians, etc., and a lot more English mixed in with street slang.”

Morgan pre-cast and directed the loop group with the idea in mind of casting half the voices from an age group that experienced the 1960s, so they could impart their speech and knowledge of that era to the younger members of the troupe, which was wrangled by Caitlin McKenna. “Each of the kitchen help scenes are different,” says Morgan. “As the film opens, they are frantically preparing free breakfast for guests who have been put out by an early morning fire alarm. Then they are seen getting ready for lunch or for the ballroom activities. There was always a purpose whenever we went back into the kitchen.”

In another moment, Anthony Hopkins has just said goodnight to Harry Belafonte and is standing at the hotel entrance when RFK’s entourage suddenly arrives and blows past him. Says Chew, “I listened to it first without the group Walla and I was very specific in the way I asked Glenn to construct the sound, with this whoosh of attention and energy that blows by Hopkins and then leaves him standing there alone in a dramatic silence.

Scene from Bobby. Copyright The Weinstein Company

“Over a series of four different temp dubs, I was able to work with Glenn to hone in on what was working and what wasn’t,” Chew recalls. “In the scene in the hotel room where hotel manager Bill Macy and switchboard operator Heather Graham are breaking off their affair, I wanted the sound of a helicopter outside the hotel room window. I didn’t want it to be a sentimental scene; I wanted to provide the sense that something was not right. It worked much better than some non-specific exterior street sounds and made the scene much more stark.” “That scene was Richard’s homage to Apocalypse Now,” Morgan interjects, laughing.

The biggest challenge for the sound effects team was the sequence that covered roughly the last ten minutes of Bobby—from the time the crowds assemble in the ballroom through the assassination and end titles. The sequence was difficult to pull off because while the archival footage shows the size and density of the crowded room, the newly filmed sequences were shot largely in small, compressed spaces. “It was critical that we create a sonic density that would match that archival footage and make everything bigger,” says Morgan.

The team assembled every bit of archival sound they could get from June 5, from the ballroom, the speeches, the kitchen, the pantry, and the chaos outside the hotel. Morgan adds, “We had to work backwards from the archival recordings out, as opposed to integrating archival sound into what we had already did. It ended up becoming quite seamless.”

“Once we had all that sound, we had to work backwards, because we knew we were going to end up at that location at the end,” says Minkler. “So I knew I had to make a choice. I couldn’t go in and out of a sonic world that was archival into today’s world, because the archival material was so many generations away from the original. I had to take the production tracks and sonically treat them through a lot of older analog and tube equipment to degrade them to a point where they both meshed together (that equipment included a Teletronix LA-2A tube-leveling amplifier and a Urei 1176 compressor at 565 filter set). I had to make choices scene-by-scene how far to go with that. It was a matter of finding the proper moments before we decided what was most important to deal with.”

“I’ve had a lot of success working on what I call ‘financially challenged’ films, but only because I tend to be very selective in what those films are,” – Glenn T. Morgan

The archival news footage from that fateful day in late spring 1968 proved to be a goldmine for the audio as wellas the imagery. “Inside that footage was also the archival audio of Kennedy taking the podium while the crowd was chanting, ‘We want Kennedy,’ and ‘We want Bobby.’ Those chants are actually embedded in the recordings and are very powerful, moving and unbelievably eerie. There was magic in those tracks and we wanted to capture it,” acknowledges Morgan.

Again, ADR and the loop group were utilized. “We took the archival footage of the chants onto Mike’s stage, set up four mics and played the audio out over the speakers, recording it back into four tracks,” Morgan explains. “Then we brought the loop group in and put them behind the mics to do more chanting along with the original archival audio. Then we took that recording and overdubbed it.

“We were able to get a natural spread of chanting to get that density, and that’s how we were able to replicate the sound of that room and really get a sense of actually being there,” Morgan continues, adding that the entire process was recorded directly into ProTools. “Some people call that ‘world-izing,’ he says. “It was used quite a bit by the sound crew on Walk the Line as a way of recreating a sonic environment that no longer exists in reality.”

“More than any other show I can remember, this was a movie that was done in steps,” states Minkler. “Usually, you get a feel for what’s working or not working, acclimate to the show, block out time for each process and go. Bobby however, was an experiment from start to finish. Everything was shifting all the time—from the score to the songs to the sound effects.” And while everyone’s different ideas made things seem chaotic, the final result did not come about through compromise but from “pushing and pulling things as far as we dared to,” admits the mixer.

Sen. Robert Kennedy (C) addressing crowd from stage moments before Kennedy’s assassination, Ambassador Hotel. (Photo by Julian Wasser//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

“We had a certain sound in mind and worked backwards, quickly trying out different ways to get it right—without a pre-conceived notion of how we could get there,

Minkler recalls. “If this were a movie that took place in 2006, I would have made it way slicker and more elegant with much higher artistic qualities. And if Bobby had been a big-budget studio film, there’s much more I would have re-done in ADR. But that was not this movie.

“We wanted it to have a harder, older quality and stay within the integrity of the period,” he continues. “This is what a ‘60s film should sound like. If you were to play Bobby after The Graduate, which was kind of our template, you wouldn’t hear much difference in the soundtracks.”

All told, there was a week devoted to the final mix, which was completed on a Euphonix System 5 console on Stage One at Todd-AO West. “There was almost no time for pre-dubs and spotting; you just had to pick your spots,” reveals Morgan. “But Mike plays the console like an instrument––always tweaking things and getting emotional about the project.” Lamberti adds, “When Mike mixes a show he has a very specific sound in mind. My editing experience allowed me to manipulate the raw tracks when needed to help support the track and help all the pieces fit.”

“To be economical means to be accurate,” says Minkler. “You can try a lot of different things, but only once. You have to have the experience to get it right the first time. Working on a low-budget feature requires more experience, not less. Personally, I don’t believe someone is a good mixer until they’ve done this for 10 or 15 years and has 50 films under the belt.”

What comes through in Bobby, from start to finish, is the trueness of all the performances and the passion that went into making it. “There was a collective feeling of love and support for Emilio and Richard by everyone who worked on it, ”Minkler concludes. “Because of those feelings, a lot of us went way beyond what we will normally will do.

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Features

Cutting with a Conscience: Richard Chew

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 19 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes • photos by Gregory Schwartz

Richard Chew, ACE, knows all about the independent spirit. From his initial feature editing credit in 1974, The Conversation, to Bobby, his current project, he has largely chosen to work on films that he believes in both personally and creatively. Born to Chinese immigrant parents in downtown Los Angeles, Chew was educated in inner-city schools in Los Angeles. He later earned a degree in philosophy from UCLA and attended Harvard Law School before embarking on a film career that includes editing credits on indies such as Mi Vida Loca, Clean and Sober, Singles, Waiting to Exhale and I Am Sam, as well as more Hollywood features such as Risky Business, Men Don’t Leave and That Thing You Do!

He co-edited arguably Hollywood’s ultimate independent film, Star Wars, for which he shared the 1977 Best Editing Oscar with Marcia Lucas and Paul Hirsch, ACE. Chew also earned British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards for The Conversation and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as three ACE Eddie nominations.

Bobby, Chew’s 27th feature as an editor, concerns the day that Democratic presidential candidate hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It is being released by MGM––coincidentally on November 22, the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. The culmination of a ten-year struggle by writer and director Emilio Estevez, Bobby is a story of hope––both for a nation poised on the verge of change and for the fictionalized individuals who inhabited the Ambassador Hotel that fateful day and night of June 5, 1968. On many levels, the way so much A-list talent (both above and below the line) came together and gave of their time and abilities to stamp a big picture look on this modest independent project is a parallel to the grass-roots level of political commitment that represents the American spirit at its best.

CineMontage spoke with Chew as he was putting the finishing touches on Bobby in his cutting room at the Lantana studio complex in Santa Monica, California.

Scene from Bobby. Copyright The Weinstein Company

CineMontage: What initially attracted you to Bobby?

Richard Chew: When my agent sent me Emilio Estevez’s script, I was drawn by the multiplicity of stories and characters, and I thought it was very ambitious for a low-budget film. It was also about characters we don’t normally see in mainstream films––just like the everyday people in the barrio in Allison Anders’ Mi Vida Loca, which I also cut. It cared about the kitchen help, and not just because the kitchen played a key role in the events of June 5; it was about Latino workers, the switchboard operators, and the hotel guests.

Robert F. Kennedy does not even appear until the last act of the script, and then only as an extra seen from behind and in archival footage. This was a script that starts out as just stories of unrelated individuals and couples going about their lives, when all of a sudden they are united by a stroke of history that brings them together in a way they never envisioned. I thought it was pretty amazing.

CM: Were you on the show right from the beginning?

RC: Right from the first shoot day. We had a very short schedule and Emilio wanted me to start putting stuff together right at the start so he could see what kind of things might be missing. And because he was moving around so much, we never even watched dailies together or exchanged notes. As would any editor, I prefer more direct communication, but fortunately, our sensibilities were very much in alignment.

CM: Did you miss screening film dailies?

RC: It’s really difficult, especially on a show such as Bobby that uses a lot of handheld photography. With all that movement, its almost impossible to see a high quality image on a monitor, but fortunately, the in-your-face newsreel-style camerawork somehow made it okay. The assistant cameraman and camera operator did a really terrific job, even though they were just thrown into the mix and didn’t really have any rehearsal time.

CM: What does it mean to work on a low-budget project?

RC: Even when something is presented as a low-budget project, we don’t always realize the sacrifices that have to be made all the way down the line in terms of staff and equipment, as well as how it affects the music, sound editing and final mix. But as an editor, I’m just happy to be working on a project that I believe in strongly.

“[The assassination scene] was something Emilio Estevez was willing to take a risk with. When he said we were going to blend the archival footage with the live action, I felt it was kind of iffy. His thought was to bring up the quality of the archival material as much as possible and actually degrade the new footage.” – Richard Chew

CM: How does the story of Bobby resonate for you personally?

RC: The ‘60s to me was a time of personal, political and spiritual awakening. I was just beginning my career in documentaries and it’s taken almost 40 years to be presented with this opportunity to work on something that has real meaning for me because of the parallels to the situation in America today. It’s so seldom that a so-called Hollywood movie chooses to address something that has consequences for the country today. Bobby takes place in a time that spoke to a war being prosecuted thousands of miles away that many of us had doubts about. It has to do with undocumented workers, voting rights and how people across the racial divide see each other. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

CM: While not overtly political, does Bobby present itself as a sociopolitical statement?

RC: I think it works on two fronts. Of course, Emilio wanted to emphasize how a giant voice of leadership was stilled, leading in many ways to the prolonging of the Vietnam War, Watergate and other things that might not have happened had RFK been elected. But also, we were interested in illustrating the present-day lack of visionary political leadership and noble goals, which might unify our divided society. So, through Bobby, we want to inspire people to become more activist as individuals.

CM: How did you address the material without the benefit of regular contact with the director?

RC: Nothing depresses directors more than the first screening of the first cut. They see what they feel are all the mistakes, omissions, things they didn’t shoot right, etc. I just said to Emilio, “Because you had almost no rehearsal time with your actors and you are shooting so many scenes out of sequence, let’s not get hung up on all those details you’re not going to like and just let me concentrate on performance only for the first cut. I’m not going to worry about issues of style, story structure, pacing or transitions. Ultimately, I think this is going to be a very stylized picture, but we can address all of that together later.”

I just wanted to see if I could get the best performances that seemed appropriate for each character at certain moments in the story. It just seemed that was the best service I could give to Emilio, so he could at least see that the performances were on track and that he was getting the best interpretation of each scene. I just had to go with my own instincts about how to interweave the varying strands of the picture.

Scene from Bobby. Copyright The Weinstein Company

CM: One thing that helped overcome the lack of rehearsal time was having a slew of highly professional, world-class talent. How were you able to balance the weight of so many performances?

RC: When you have so many actors that are so well known, I think one of the issues is how compatible their acting styles are. Some actors nail it after one or two takes, and others might need seven or eight takes to gear up. And because we had so many pairings of actors––like Sharon Stone with William Macy, Harry Belafonte and Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Lohan with Elijah Wood––you better hope they can adapt to each other quickly. The weight of balancing performances can be slid along the scale of various storylines. And sometimes, in applying the old saw “less is more,” we find the equilibrium. Believe it or not, we’re still making adjustments in the film, even after it’s played at three major film festivals.

CM: The Freddy Rodríguez character of the busboy, José, was based on Juan Romero, who actually did cradle RFK’s head on the floor of the pantry after the shooting. Were there other real-life occurrences concerning the fictional characters in the film?

RC: I learned that the phrase “the once and future king,” which the Laurence Fishburne character wrote on the wall of the Ambassador kitchen, was actually discovered there the night of June 5. This was an instance where Emilio the writer created a storyline which could have given rise to how that phrase got up there on the kitchen wall. He invented the scene between Rodríguez and Fishburne about the Dodgers tickets. It was quite wonderful the way he did that. And just as wonderful were the two actors.

CM: The interwoven stories are going to bring up comparisons with Robert Altman’s work, especially Nashville and Short Cuts, in terms of the way the large cast of unrelated characters is brought together at the end.

RC: Emilio is a great admirer of Altman’s work and is good friends with Joan Tewkesbury, the screenwriter of Nashville. I think that if there had been the means to allow for a longer shooting schedule, there would have been a lot more of that continuous Altmanesque interweaving of actors in and out of each other’s scenes, as well as having every actor mic’d all the time. Difficulties in scheduling the actors prevented us from using such a technique. But with Bobby we faced a different task: The audience knows Kennedy will get shot, but how do we take them to that moment?

“It’s so seldom that a so-called Hollywood movie chooses to address something that has consequences for the country today.” – Richard Chew

CM: Some of the shows you’ve worked on, such as Star Wars and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, may look like studio system features but actually were independents. What attracts you to that oeuvre?

RC: It was never an ambition of mine to work in Hollywood. I was happy working in documentaries, but I was starting a family then and the opportunity came up to work on features. That said, I am, so to speak, a child of the ‘60s, and when I get a script, I ask myself some questions. What are the underlying values of this story? Why is this being made? What’s on the mind of the creator? That’s why I prefer whenever possible to work with writer/directors such as Emilio. I’ve turned down projects that went on to be hugely successful, but were too violent or exploitive for my taste.

CM: Can you give me an example?

RC: Allison Anders’ Mi Vida Loca (1993) is the kind of film that really attracts me because it gives voice to people who are under-represented in film. There are plenty of movies that portray gang violence, but this film brought to the foreground Hispanic teenage girls who usually form the background behind the guy gang-bangers. This was a subculture that needed to have a voice, and Allison portrayed their lives in a stripped-down way.

CM: Bobby has screened as a work-in-progress at the Deauville, Venice and Toronto film festivals. What do you think will be some of the changes we will see between this interview [conducted in mid-September] and the release date?

RC: There will be picture trims. Some of the source music cues will be changed. This is not unusual. And more picture trims. Maybe some new intercutting of scenes. Remix some of the soundtrack. More trims. You get the drift.

CM: What is a favorite moment of this film for you?

RC: One of the strong-est shots for me occurs in the opening prologue montage of the flag-draped coffins being escorted by soldiers. We’d always used that shot but keep on changing the sound behind it. Finally, we found a line from an earlier RFK speech where he says, “I do not want it to be said of us as they said of Rome, ‘They made a desert and called it peace.’” That quote over the coffin shot is a powerful combination of words and image.

Scene from Bobby. Copyright The Weinstein Company

CM: You said earlier that in the screenplay, RFK didn’t appear until the last act, yet in the film he starts with the announcement of his candidacy and is followed by a three-minute archival sequence. How did this come about?

RC: After our initial screenings, there was concern that today’s audiences have forgotten what RFK stood for––or were completely ignorant of him. In fact, some people were confused enough that they thought he got shot in Dallas while riding in a motorcade. To remedy this, Emilio felt we needed to introduce RFK at the top, to start the film with him. At first I resisted that notion. I thought that by doing so, audiences would expect a biopic about him and become impatient with a film about all these other common people. I’m glad I was wrong.

CM: Not only did you start with a prologue about the ‘60s, you inserted all these other campaign TV commercials. Were you concerned about having too much of RFK?

RC: When we realized how invested audiences become with all the characters we introduced, we became bolder about how much of RFK we could include. Our researcher Deborah Ricketts found old TV spots as well as coverage of old speeches. Consequently, they were sprinkled through the first two acts so that RFK’s campaign presence was felt throughout the day. This additional footage created a greater understanding of his broad appeal so that when he is silenced at the end, the tragedy is that much the greater.

CM: Let’s talk about the archival footage.

RC: One of the problems editors face is that their directors will say, “Okay, let’s cut to archival footage here,” but they don’t consider whether or not we can find the original source material and, when we do, what kind of shape it’s going to be in, can we negotiate the rights, and how much is it going to cost? I have an assistant and a researcher trying to locate the material, but most everything from that time is available either on 16mm film or two-inch video––and in many cases it’s so degraded or generations removed from the original that we have to compromise with what we can get. We’re using the DI process to clean it up, but our resources are limited.
My current assistant, Cindy Fret, who came on in August after my original assistant, Colby Enders, had to move on to another project, has been working on solving many of the problems with the archival footage and visual effects. Not only that, but every time I make a change in a reel, she has to spend hours making outputs for the sound editors, music editors and various producers, so it has been a nightmare for her. I often feel that assistants are overloaded and undervalued.

“I like to think that I learn from certain pictures because of the subject matter of a particular story.” – Richard Chew

CM: Can you talk about the closing assassination sequence, which takes up the last act of Bobby and brings together the characters, the footage, the music and voiceover in a very dramatic final ten minutes?

RC: It’s something Emilio was willing to take a risk with. When he said we were going to blend the archival footage with the live action, I felt it was kind of iffy and knew we’d be flying by the seat of our pants. His thought was to bring up the quality of the archival material as much as possible and actually degrade the new footage. He had no idea technically how it could be done, but I just said, well, okay.

CM: What were some of your concerns in cutting the sequence?

RC: One of the worries we had was that the ballroom set was very small and we didn’t have enough extras due to budget constraints. We were afraid that if we juxtaposed the two environments the audience would be able to see that our actors were in a small set and we were trying to place them in this large ballroom. Those concerns got bigger as we got bolder with the cutting.

CM: How did that work out?

RC: Our director of photography, Michael Barrett, helped a lot with his lighting style and color correction, which gave the new live stuff an edgier look so that the contrast would blend with that of the older material. Then, as we followed the extra playing RFK into the kitchen, Emilio staged it as if it were all the footage we had. And starting with the sequence of RFK entering the kitchen, Michael increased the movement of his handheld camera so it became very erratic and unpredictable. We found archival footage that had a similar feel. Once I found a way to stitch it all together, the emotion of the scene carried us past the mismatches and it worked out really well.

Scene from Bobby. Copyright The Weinstein Company

CM: Since there must have been a lot of video and film of the shooting and its aftermath, how did you determine how much of it to use?

RC: There were some classic raw moments in the archival stuff. We initially used much of it, throwing it into the last ten minutes. But at one of the previews, we found that we went overboard and had too many archival shots––like in front of the hotel when the real Bobby was being put into the ambulance. It hit us that we were trying too hard, so we pulled some of that stuff back.

CM: What about the speech that was used over the final sequence? How was that selected and edited?

RC: First, we chose not to feature his victory speech at the Ambassador that night because it was a political nuts-and-bolts speech thanking his supporters. We used it only tangentially. Instead, we featured an eloquent speech made only two months before, which he gave a few days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was eight minutes long, so we couldn’t use the entire text, but we kept the linear structure of the speech and moved it around in a way that would open up space for the musical statements that composer Mark Isham was creating.

CM: Do you feel you learn something with each new show?

RC: I like to think that I learn from certain pictures because of the subject matter of a particular story. Also, in the last 10 or 15 years of my career, I’ve learned how to better relate to a director. Maybe it’s just a wisdom that comes from experience, but I truly believe in the collaborative process, and that’s why I like the challenge of working with different writer-directors. Cameron Crowe is different from Paul Brickman who is different from Tom Hanks who is different from Emilio Estevez. I welcome the stimulation of working with filmmakers of different sensibilities. That’s why I like to mix it up.

CM: What will you take away with you from this experience?

RC: My very special relationship with Emilio Estevez. He showed me how hard it is to transform your own vision to the screen. He developed this project himself; he was not a director for hire. It was his vision that carried this project through. He suffered from limitations of budget and staff. He suffered from lack of support from important quarters. Yet he persevered, and made a memorable piece of work. I’m lucky we found each other for Bobby.

CM: And finally, the burning question: In Star Wars, did George Lucas name Chewbacca after you?

RC: I never had the nerve to ask George––just because I would be embarrassed if he were to say no. However, I like to entertain the illusion!

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Features

Serial Thrillers: TV’s New ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Dexter’ Present Challenges for Editors

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 14 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

Serialized dramas with one story arc per season aren’t a new thing in television; they go back to Stephen J. Cannell’s Wiseguy (1987-1990) and Steven Bochco’s less successful Murder One in 1995. And of course, there’s the current hit 24. While several new shows of the 2006-07 television season fall into this category, two of them look particularly promising.

Kidnapped, which reaches TV screens first, debuts Wednesday, September 20 on NBC. It’s a high-stakes serialized crime thriller with a first season given over to the kidnapping of the son of a super-wealthy New York family, the Cains, played by Timothy Hutton and Dana Delany. Premiering Sunday, October 1, is Dexter, Showtime’s ambitious new series about a blood-spatter expert (Michael C. Hall of HBO’s Six Feet Under) for the Miami-Dade Police Department, who, in his spare time, is a sociopathic serial killer. While Dexter is not as serialized as Kidnapped, throughout the season Dexter does find himself pursued by someone who seems to be on to his secret identity.

Although it resembles a cross between Fox’s hit series 24 and Ron Howard’s feature Ransom, the actual genesis for Kidnapped comes from High and Low, Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 dissection of the swirl of events surrounding a kidnapping. Kidnapped’s director and executive producer Michael Dinner, who previously partnered with writer and executive producer Jason Smilovic on Karen Sisco in 2003, said, “Jason brought up the idea of a series that would show, from every angle, the anatomy of a kidnapping. We both had deals at Sony Television, pitched the show to NBC late in 2005 and started shooting before Christmas, way before normal pilot season.”

From left, Kidnapped pilot editors Steve Flicker and Victor DuBois and series editors Steve Polivka and Bill Johnson. Photo by Gregory Schwartz.

In contrast, Dexter is adapted from the books of Florida novelist and playwright Jeff Lindsay, who created the character of Dexter Morgan out of an epiphany that “Serial murder isn’t always a bad thing.” His two novels, Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter, formed the basis for this series. The cheerful, children-loving Dexter limits his killing to “acceptable” victims (usually other, nastier, serial killers) making him a curiously moral and sympathetic character––more like a vigilante.

There are several key similarities between the two shows. In each, the city is a central character—New York in Kidnapped and Miami in Dexter. Both shows are about dissection: In the former, it’s the stripping to the bone of the inter-relationships of nearly two-dozen cast members; in the latter, it’s the physical act that Dexter literally performs on his victims (this is cable, of course). Also, each series have developed a variation on the flashback as a leitmotif that will help brand its look, and each uses it differently (see below).

Dissecting Dexter

Elena Maganini, who cut the Dexter pilot, is no stranger to serial murderers. After working on commercials in Chicago, she edited her first feature, the cult classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in 1986, a film so gory that it has been said the film was not released, but rather escaped. Henry began her working relationship with director John McNaughton, which continued through a series of unusual projects: Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Eric Bogosian’s one-man showcase; the violent Mad Dog and Glory; TV’s Push, Nevada; and 1995’s steamy thriller Wild Things, which first brought her to the seething underbelly of South Florida.

“I have always been drawn to shows that have a dark theme,” she says. “What’s interesting to me about Dexter is that it features a character who is extremely disturbed and yet is trying to present himself as someone normal; he says and does all the right things. When his dark side takes over, you are totally in his psychotic world. The intersection where these two things meet makes for a lot of tension.”

One example of this comes in the pilot when Dexter, in the middle of neatly cutting up a murderer, gets a call from his sweet (but also damaged) girlfriend, who invites him over. “I’m in the middle of something; I’ll be there soon,” he tells her matter-of-factly. “With Henry, the horror was unrelenting,” Maganini says. But Dexter has a release valve.”

Michael C. Hall in a scene from the Dexter pilot.

The Dexter pilot was directed by co-executive producer Michael Cuesta, whose career has moved freely among indie features (L.I.E., Twelve and Holding), series television (Six Feet Under), commercials and music videos. “When I met Elena, I thought she had great instincts, was relaxed and didn’t pretend to know exactly who this character was. That, and all her work with John McNaughton, helped convince me to bring her onto the pilot. She’s done serial killers; she’s done noirs. She gets that world.”

Scott K. Wallace, a veteran TV editor, was hired for Dexter on Maganini’s recommendation after the two worked together in 2002 on Tarzan, the Ape Man––again, a dark interpretation. Wallace, who started in features as an assistant on Airplane! and Brainstorm and moved up to features on Weird Science, has worked exclusively on series for ten years, including One Tree Hill, Eyes, Fastlane and Closer to Truth.

Cuesta credits Maganini and Wallace as fine collaborators for the show. “I do a lot of pre-editing in my design, and my stuff has to be cut in a certain way,” he explains. “I saw the show very subjectively, as if it were being directed by Dexter himself, and it was very important for both Elena and Scott to see it that way and keep that point of view.”

Maganini adds, “Michael has a visual style that is quite distinctive. For example, in the scene where Dexter and his sister are at Jimbo’s Crab Shack, Michael shot standard coverage as one piece. But then there were all these other bits of business—drifting down from faces to the food, the condensation on a glass while Dexter talks about a killer using a refrigeration truck. These are ways of making more out of the conversation than the literal stuff they’re talking about. That’s the kind of thing Michael does to tell the story––and it makes it much more interesting.”

Flashbacks, in Dexter, are a key plot device. His murderous impulses manifest early in life, and his adoptive father, a policeman, has frequent talks with the 12-year-old budding killer, channeling the boy’s dark desires into something more positive. “The great thing about a flashback is that you don’t have to treat it like a normal scene in terms of cutting style,” says Wallace. “In Dexter, the style is very dreamlike; we see the ‘dark passenger’ that Lindsay defines in the novels. If you have the material, you can change the chronological position and jump around as much as you want because it isn’t reality; it’s not constrained in a linear way.”

Michael C. Hall, left, in a scene from Dexter. Photo by Dan Littlejohn. Courtesy of Showtime.

“We try to make those flashbacks an emotional jumping-off point from whatever Dexter was dealing with in his day-to-day life, adds Maganini. “Sometimes we’ve been able to make that jump work editorially, and other times we’ve needed the help of a voiceover. It’s a very tough thing, because too much voiceover can be very distracting. Sometimes you just need that extra focus so that people can get into Dexter’s head the way we want them to. We experimented quite a lot on the pilot.”

Cutting Kidnapped

The Kidnapped pilot was edited (along with additional editor Bill Flicker) by Victor DuBois, a veteran of both features (The Last Samurai, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) and television (The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, Grey’s Anatomy). He won an ACE Eddie Award in 1989 for his work on the series Thirtysomething. Since completing Kidnapped early this year, he has moved on to his current project, a documentary for the George Washington Museum in Mt. Vernon, New York, but one mark he left on the pilot will carry on through the first season.

DuBois was instrumental in creating Kidnapped’s chief mnemonic, the brief jump cuts that are used as a flashback-style recap to close each act. “Sony wanted something contemporary that would end each act with impact,” he explains. So we went back and played with the footage of the kidnap sequence, which was shot mainly hand-cranked, on reversal stock that gave it a pastel high-contrast look. We came up with these little jump cuts of three or four frames each, and they looked great. When we ran out of that coverage, we manipulated other images to mimic that look. Those sequences grounded each act firmly in the storytelling.”

“A pilot is basically a stand-alone piece,” says veteran editor Steve Polivka, ACE, one of the three editors on the series Kidnapped (a fourth, William Scharf, ACE, declined to be interviewed). His TV credits include Surface, Law & Order: SVU, the pilot for The Shield and James Cameron’s Dark Angel. “There’s nothing that says that the tone of the pilot is the way the series is going to go. Ultimately, it depends on how rigidly the writers and directors adhere to the direction set in the pilot. Because Michael Dinner is so creative and understands the cutting room so well, I think Kidnapped will take on a life of its own.”

Timothy Hutton, left, and Delroy Lindo in a scene from Kidnapped. Photo by Dennis Yeandle. Courtesy of NBC.

With over 30 speaking parts in the show, and a regular cast of more than a dozen, Polivka keeps a board of cast photos on the cutting room wall. “This is the first time I’ve had to do that in 20 years of editing,” he says. “It just takes a little while to absorb them all. But that’s part of what makes Kidnapped a great show.”

Cable vs. Network
The debate on the relative values of cable vs. network series continues, as these two series illustrate. “I don’t believe the whole concept of Dexter would work for broadcast; no network is going to make a show about a serial killer who is somewhat likable and on the side of law enforcement,” Wallace believes. “It isn’t just because on cable, you can say ‘fuck’ and show oral sex. The difference is that network shows will have four, five and even six acts––and each act has to be situated in such a way as to bring you back after the break. That’s an exclamation point every seven minutes.

“But a cable episode can run 55 minutes with no interruptions,” he continues. “It’s not that the peak moments cease to matter on cable, but you can propel the story forward with more inertia. It’s much more like cutting a feature. There’s more time for things to develop and play out, and you don’t have to worry about all those climactic act outs.”

DuBois feels that now that networks are competing with cable on a stylistic level, the standards are starting to merge. “Whether the issue is violence, language or sexuality, I have not personally worked on anything so radically out of bounds that it couldn’t play on network,” he says. “We showed two men kissing 15 years ago on Thirtysomething, and that was very radical at the time. I worked on a show a few years ago on Fx cable called Sins of the Father, about Bobby Cherry, who was charged after 37 years with killing four little girls in Civil Rights-era Alabama. We had to retool one of the final scenes because the character was being perceived as insane––and not as the hunted man he had become. This shows that cable is also mindful of the impression it creates for the public.”

Kidnapped’s assistant editors Debra Weinfeld and Benjamin Stokes. Photo by Gregory Schwartz.

“The great thing about cable is that we are doing 12 episodes, no matter what, whereas on network, you can be here today and gone tomorrow,” Dexter’s Maganini explains. “We’re not shooting, cutting and locking each show the way they do with a network schedule. We’re working on two or three shows at the same time.”

“The current wisdom at the networks seems to be that creating stand-alone episodes is the most lucrative business model,” opines Kidnapped’s Bill Johnson, ACE, a veteran editor who also has worked almost exclusively in TV on shows such as House, M.D., Robbery Homicide Division and Ally McBeal, capped by a 2001 Emmy Award for his work on The West Wing. “So we are delighted that NBC is totally behind this kind of serialized show. To attract talent like Tim Hutton and Dana Delany and let them go through a season-long story gives the audience a real opportunity to get inside their heads, which you don’t get in more modular episodes. It’s also great that they are airing the series in High Definition (HD) and 1:85. Obviously, it makes the show much more cinematic.”

Film vs. HD
Despite the high-definition broadcast, Kidnapped is an all-film show. For the pilot, processing and telecine were done in New York, digitized on Avids identical to the ones set up at the show’s Culver City, California cutting rooms (OS 9 Meridiens and 540 Gb Unity system). Digital dailies were sent via copper connection to Hollywood, where the files were copied to a FireWire drive and delivered to assistant editor Debra Weinfeld at Apple Street Warehouse, the Sony facility where the pilot was cut.

Dailies for subsequent shows are shipped to Hollywood for processing and telecine. HD masters are created and DV-Cam down-conversions are made and delivered to Weinfeld and fellow assistant Benjamin Stokes to prepare for the editors.

Both shows are about dissection: In Kidnapped, it’s the stripping to the bone of the inter-relationships of its cast members; in Dexter, it’s the physical act that the protagonist literally performs on his victims.

Dexter, on the other hand, is shot on HD-Cam with some elements––mainly slow motion––done on film. Circle takes are then transferred to D5 and down-converted to DV-Cam tapes, which are then delivered to assistant editors Jeff Ervin and Harry Berenson and digitized at the cutting rooms at Sunset-Gower Studios in Hollywood. Four Avid Meridiens are being used, linked to a Unity with two Tb of storage, and the show is finished in HD and delivered on D5, with sound handled by Technicolor Sound.

“We have a very rational setup—two editors, two assistants and four Avids; there’s no congestion, and no jockeying for position,” editor Wallace says. “Showtime had the foresight to give us the tools we needed, and we have our assistants right there.

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