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A Good Way to Mic and Mix Scoring Sessions

by Mel Lambert
written by Mel Lambert 3 minutes read

by Mel Lambert

Orchestral layout is highly dependent upon the type of film music being recorded, according to scoring mixer John Kurlander. “If there is going to be a lot of loops, pads and electronic elements within the score, more often than not these are pre-recorded by the composer in stereo,” he explains. “To match that left-right symmetry, instead of the traditional orchestral layout — violins on the left and violas, cellos and bass on the right — I prefer to lay out the orchestra with high strings left and right, which, because of the added symmetry, both matches the extra parts and adds more power to the 5.1- or 7.1-channel mix.” For A Good Day to Die Hard, he had violins split left and right, with cellos, woodwinds, trumpets and trombones clustered in the center.

“While I like that powerful, symmetrical sound for a big action score, such layouts depend upon the number of orchestral players, the room being used and the genre of the musical score,” Kurlander adds. “I prefer to have flexibility in orchestral layout to suit the musical requirements, although it is always down to the conductor’s preference; I always check with them first and secure their opinions.” For the score to Hotel Transylvania, which he recorded at Abbey Road with composer Mark Mothersbaugh and orchestrator/ conductor James Sales, he opted for the traditional high-left/low-right orchestral layout, “which worked well because there were no additional pads or electronic elements whatsoever.”

Regarding microphone choices for classical music and scoring sessions, Kurlander is conservative in his tastes. “I prefer Neumann M150 and TLM50 condenser mics for my main Decca Tree Array [three omni-directional models laid out in a T-shaped configuration on a tall boom above the conductor’s podium, plus hard-left and-right mics spaced 20-30 feet apart], together with a collection of AKG C12 and C24 stereo mics and Schoeps models. I use two C12s in cardioid mode as spot mics on the first and second violins, with an additional stereo C24 on the central cellos and violas. I like [Audio Engineering Associates’] R44 ribbon models for brass, and used a recently acquired Coles Model 4021 ‘ball-and- biscuit’ dynamic spot mic on the horns. For both woodwind and percussion overheads, I like to use a pair of Schoeps MK4 capsules in X-Y stereo mode.

“While I normally use Avalon 20102 pre-amplifiers on scoring dates, for the A Good Day to Die Hard sessions, we used the pre-amps within the Fox scoring stage’s 96-channel AMS-Neve 88R analogue console,” Kurlander continues. Assisting on the scoring dates were stage manager Tom Steel, stage technical engineer Denis St. Amand, recordist Tim Lauber and, at the headphone console, Christine Sirois.

Kurlander also selected an unusual transducer to capture the sound of the largest drums. “I used a 15-inch JBL loudspeaker wired as a microphone,” he reveals. “On Die Hard, we routed the output to the subwoofer/LFE channel; it works particularly well on high-action movies when we need that exaggerated, low-end subharmonic to anchor the track and compete with sound effects.”

In terms of comparisons between classical music sessions and film scores, Kurlander says, “People are familiar with traditional orchestral layouts, which we must replicate faithfully [for commercial recordings], whereas for motion pictures, we are more free to experiment in support of the score. But we also need to remember that the composer is working right up to the last minute and there will be lots of changes and re- orchestrations on the stage.”

As a result, the scoring mixer likes to rely on his main microphone array and then record a number of spot microphones that, in the end, will likely be redundant. “For example, on A Good Day to Die Hard, I recorded the outputs from 46 microphones,” he explains. “But I actually only used 25 on the final soundtrack.”

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Features

The Box That Shook Hollywood: Television’s Emergence

by Edward Landler
written by Edward Landler 16 minutes read

by Edward Landler

The people best fitted to make pictures for television will be those who combine a thorough knowledge of picture-making techniques with a real sense of entertainment values and the imagination to adapt their abilities to the new medium.

– Samuel Goldwyn, “Hollywood in the Television Age”

 

Legendary movie producer Sam Goldwyn wrote the quote, opposite, in an article for The New York Times Magazine in 1949, just as television was emerging as a major mass medium. During the previous year, the number of American cities served by the new medium rose from eight to 23, the number of stations jumped from 17 to 41 and the sale of TV sets multiplied five times over the number sold in 1947. It was estimated that between 1947 and 1949 the opportunities for viewing TV increased 4,000 percent.

Goldwyn sagely noted in his article, “Instead of any talk about how to lick television, motion picture people now need to discuss how to fit movies into the new world made possible by television.”

From the perspective of post-production personnel, Goldwyn’s perspective turned out to be prophetic. With the growth of television work, membership in the Editors Guild’s IATSE Locals 776 and 771 (merged now as Local 700) rose dramatically over the following 15 years. Over the same time, re-recording mixers, recordists, maintenance engineers and projectionists (all classifications in IATSE Local 695, which would transfer to the Editors Guild in 1998), as well as engineers and sound technicians also increased in ranks with the new medium’s growth. In addition, the dawn of television created the job of technical director.

A scene from The Howdy Doody Show, the first nationally televised children’s series, from the late 1940s. NBC

The first direct fitting of movie post-production people into television programming came in 1947 with the first hour-long filmed TV show, Hopalong Cassidy, starring William Boyd as the silver-haired, black-clothed cowboy hero. But these hour-long actioners were not originally produced for TV. They were the popular, low-budget Westerns produced from 1935 on for theatrical distribution, cut down (by union editors) for one-hour TV slots with commercial breaks. Later, from 1952 to 1954, a half-hour series version with Boyd was filmed especially for television.

But in 1952, more than 80 percent of all TV shows were broadcast live. Some film editors found work preparing filmed kinescopes of live shows for delayed broadcast to different time zones. News and public affairs programming, though, found a more crucial way to integrate film editors into their broadcasts.

In 1945, NBC’s first news show was produced by Paul Alley, who hired newsreel editor David Klein to splice together newsreels for TV to be narrated by Alley. This became the Camel Newsreel Theatre and then, in 1949, the Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze plugging Camel Cigarettes live on camera in between the news films. In 1948, the staff of The CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards, television’s first daily news show, included a film editor. The number of film editors on all three major network’s news shows increased steadily until film was superseded by videotape in the late 1960s.

Ed Sullivan, left, and Sid Caesar on Toast of The Town (aka The Ed Sullivan Show) in the 1950s. CBS

In those early days of news broadcasting, news film shot overseas was shipped to New York on a DC-6 fitted with bolted-down editing equipment so that the footage could be cut en route and broadcast immediately upon arrival. When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the three major networks raced for the prestige of airing the coronation footage first. ABC won the race when it made a deal to pick up the Canadian Broadcasting Company telecast of the event. ABC’s film reached Canada before NBC’s footage arrived in Boston to be broadcast by NBC’s affiliate there.

BUTTON PUSHING

Fresh out of USC’s film school, future film editor William Cartwright found work in the early days of Los Angeles TV at the CBS affiliate station KTSL, which became KNXT in 1951. He told CineMontage about his work as an engineer, which was actually early technical director work (he called it “the operator of buttons”), on live shows, including Sunday morning religious programs and an evening talk show called Bachelor’s Haven. Editing consisted of switching the live camera to the television opaque projector — the “tel op” — which superimposed advertising cards over the camera image. He also switched to the “film chain” to integrate film material into the show.

Cartwright worked at both KNXT and the Times Mirror station, KTTV, during the early 1950s when the IATSE organized the local stations and he became a member of Local 776. At KTTV, he edited for Confidential File, a half-hour exposĂŠ-style public affairs show created by newsman Paul Coates and future film director Irvin Kershner. For the first half of the show, Cartwright cut down MOS footage of subject matter like gambling houses, B-girls, religious quacks and unscrupulous businessmen. The edited footage was broadcast with narration and was followed in the second half of the show by live studio interviews on the subject at hand.

Richard Rogers, left, Gertrude Lawrence and Oscar Hammerstein II perform “Whistle a Happy Tune” from The King and I on Toast of the Town in 1951. CBS

In the early 1960s, Cartwright won Emmy Awards for his editing of David L. Wolper’s The Making of the President 1960 and The Making of the President 1964 — television documentaries that helped to introduce a new style of filmmaking, which in turn influenced fiction filmmaking. Adapting his cutting to the sense of immediacy evoked by handheld camera work, Cartwright’s editing gave the audience the sense of “capturing the verisimilitude of a scene instead of viewing it as a theatrical arrangement.”

But, as Cartwright’s earliest experiences suggest, the overwhelmingly live TV programming of the late 1940s and early ‘50s brought the figures of the engineer and the technical director to prominence in the medium. With the debuts of Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre and Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town variety shows, American audiences were drawn away from movie theatres to experience the intimacy of live performances in their homes.

The CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards in the early 1950s. CBS

The attraction of TV was further enhanced by the immediacy of the comedy of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and the intensity of the drama of live anthology shows like Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, the US Steel Hour, Hallmark Hall of Fame and Playhouse 90. The live dramas — adapting classics and new theatre, along with original teleplays by writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose and featuring New York-based stage actors — are often cited as the reason for dubbing the early ‘50s as the Golden Age of Television. But there were also live episodic genre series: detective shows like Martin Kane, sci-fi series like Space Patrol and soap operas (called such because so many were sponsored by Proctor & Gamble) like Love of Life.

For all live drama on TV, though, production on a single stage in a fixed time encouraged the presentation of stories with tight structures and limited sets and scenes. This demanded a vastly different approach from the multi-scene story structure of movie storytelling. The technical director, as the live equivalent to the editor of film, had to develop his methods and skills through experience and trial-and- error — particularly the techniques of switching views on multi-camera live shoots at the command of the dramatic director.

Unlike filming movies, shooting in television studios with bulky TV cameras demanded a dependence on interior settings. Also, the size of TV screens and the need for strong lighting for video to capture the image promoted the use of close shots and close-ups. The earliest feature films of directors like Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer or Franklin Schaffner — who started in live television — reflect this tendency to shoot in close-up.

Assistant editor Lynn McCallon on the Moviola with My Favorite Husband sitcom star Vanessa Brown in 1955. Courtesy of Lynn McCallon

In 2008, the Archive of American Television videotaped a series of interviews with veteran technical director Heino Ripp, who passed away in 2009. In the late ’40s, the multiple-Emmy winner Ripp worked as an engineer with the NBC Development Group to create the modern television system. Over more than 40 years in television, he served as technical director for everything from The Howdy Doody Show (the first nationally televised children’s show in 1947), Your Show of Shows and the Kraft Television Theatre to numerous live specials and even Saturday Night Live.

In the archive interviews, Ripp described the role of the technical director in the early days. Not only were the early TDs responsible for pushing the switching buttons; they also prepared the video cameras and planned out with the director each camera’s movements throughout the show. No matter what the format or genre, Ripp noted, the cameras basically moved from three positions.

THE DEATH OF LIVE

By the late ’50s, two general trends in commercial television became apparent. First, more network programming was taking the place of local material on affiliate stations, and second, film programming and, during the 1960s, videotaped programming largely replaced live production on both the networks and the local stations. By 1961, less than 30 percent of TV shows were broadcast live.

A major reason for the decline in local station production was the sale of pre-1948 features to TV for broadcast. In 1955, the dying RKO Pictures was the first studio to offers its catalogue of 740 movies, followed in 1956 by Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox and Paramount. Screen Gems, Columbia’s TV production division, distributed both the Columbia and the Universal libraries. Thus, the “movie generation” got its first education in cinema watching local movie shows like Million Dollar Movie — with the films edited down and segmented for commercials and time slots by editors.

I Love Lucy editors Bud Molin, left, and Dann Cahn with the three-headed Moviola developed to edit the multi-camera TV series in the early 1950s. Dann Cahn collection

Meanwhile, stories on film found new ways to fit themselves into what Goldwyn called “the new world made possible by television.” By 1949, episodic series filmed for television were introduced. Producer Frederick W. Ziv took the lead with shows such as The Cisco Kid and Highway Patrol that were syndicated for broadcast on local stations.

The first filmed situation comedy, Jackson and Jill, also hit the air in 1949. To streamline production to keep up with a weekly schedule, the producers of Jackson and Jill shot each show with three film cameras running simultaneously. Originally devised for NBC by producer Jerry Fairbanks, the multi-camera film set up was appropriated by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz when they launched I Love Lucy for CBS in 1951. But they added a major precedent-setting innovation — they filmed the show in front of a live audience to heighten the comedy with laughter. The show’s editors, Dann Cahn, A.C.E., and Bud Molin, cut on a three-headed Moviola that could play all three camera angles at the same time. By 1957, the success of I Love Lucy allowed Desilu Productions to buy the RKO Studio, where it produced a wealth of episodic series for both networks and syndication.

During the 1950s, Lynn McCallon worked in editorial for The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, as well as for syndicated Desilu series like Whirly Birds and The Adventures of Jim Bowie. He recalled for CineMontage a “leapfrogging” editing procedure devised for Burns and Allen to keep up with TV’s weekly schedule — two editors would work on a half-hour series, with each given two weeks to cut alternating episodes.

Twelve Angry Men aired live on CBS’ Studio One in 1954. CBS

By 1957, the filmed episodic series dominated the airwaves. More than 100 filmed series were on the air, with the major studios producing their own series. Columbia set up its TV subsidiary Screen Gems in 1951, producing such shows as Captain Midnight and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. Warner Bros. followed suit in 1955 with Westerns and detective shows and, by 1958, provided ABC with 10 hours of programming every week.

Many film editors who had worked on studio features for years now found new careers in TV. For example, editor Art Seid had worked his way up the ladder at Columbia, from cutting Three Stooges comedies and other shorts to major features (including soon- to-be blacklisted writer-director Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil with John Garfield). With the rise of the filmed series, he moved over to television — where he amassed a mountain of credits, including The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show, Perry Mason, I Spy, The Mod Squad and a host of TV movies.

SOUND INFLUENCE

Another area of innovation in TV that significantly influenced the movie industry was sound editing. In 1953, engineers at Bing Crosby Enterprises developed 35mm magnetic stripe for recording sound on film in place of optical track. This breakthrough allowed far more accuracy in spotting sound for editing than previously possible, and also helped paved the way for multi-track sound recording on magnetic tape.

Television sound editor James Nelson at work in 1956. Courtesy of James Nelson

By coincidence, James Nelson was working at the same time as an apprentice editor on Rebound, a filmed anthology series produced by Crosby. Nelson moved on to sound editing and, in 1958, partnered with music executive Irving Friedman in the Primrose Company to provide music and sound effects editing services for television. Primrose became the leading sound effects company in the industry with the skills of sound editors like Milton Burrow, Fred Brown, Kay Rose, Bill Phillips and others, and provided its services to all of Screen Gems’ TV series, including Father Knows Best, Naked City, Dennis the Menace and The Donna Reed Show.

Nelson was credited as supervising sound editor on all these shows, and at one time worked on as many as six series in a single week. He put together the largest independently owned sound effects library in the field. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to state that Nelson originated the concept of sound design.

“The transfer process of individual sound effects was all developed for TV shows,” Nelson told CineMontage. “This was before stereo. Our editors did the pre-dubs for as many as 50 to 60 sound effects reels for each show, layering them down to one track. They had all the separate tracks ready for the show, and I would go to the stage to supervise the process.”

A scene from Father Knows Best from the mid-1950s. NBC

Apart from influencing sound editing, megastar Crosby also played a large role in the future of video recording. Industry legend has it that he wanted to find an inexpensive way to record and watch live TV programs that aired when he wanted to play golf, but he must have seen the commercial possibilities of such a technology. For whatever reason, he was a major investor in Ampex and, in 1956, Ampex introduced the first practical videotape-recording format. The recorder — named the VRX-1000 and later renamed Mark IV — was the size of two washing machines. Roy Dolby (who would go on to develop the Dolby noise reduction process and the multi-source theatre sound system) was one of the Ampex engineers credited with its invention.

In 1960, Ampex received an Oscar for technical achievement to go along with the Emmy it had received in 1957. Then, in 1961, Ampex invented helical scanning, the technology used in all electronic recording today. In 1963, the company introduced Editec for electronic video editing. It gave broadcast TV editors frame-by-frame recording control, simplifying tape editing and enabling animation, and was the basis for all subsequent electronic editing systems. The rest, to say the very least, is history — for editing both television and movies.

Finally, it should be noted that Goldwyn made one specific prediction about movies on television in his 1949 article: “The production of full-length pictures designed especially for home television will not become a practical reality for at least five or 10 years more.” He was right again. The first made-for-TV movie was See How They Run, broadcast on NBC in 1964.

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Features

The Ones That Got Away: Editing and Sound Oscars That Should Have Been

by Edward Landler
written by Edward Landler 15 minutes read

by Edward Landler

From its very beginnings in the late 1920s, the Academy Awards has spawned spectator speculation on potential nominees and winners. When it was all over, and every winner-announcing envelope (please) was opened — no matter what the category — some industry-watchers approved of the choices, while others objected that sentimental favorites, over-hyped entries or downright fixes won over the really outstanding pieces of work.  Arguments invariably ensued.

But over the years, the knowledge of what pictures have actually endured the test of time adds support to judgments about what pictures, or their makers, may have been robbed of rightful recognition for their achievements. This is certainly true for the category of Film Editing as well as the ever-changing sound categories: Sound Recording, Sound, Sound Mixing; and Sound Effects, Sound Effects Editing and Sound Editing.

The sound categories are the source of some confusion as their names have mutated multiple times in Oscar history. Presently, they are labeled Sound Mixing and Sound Editing. But at least Sound Recording was recognized as a category by 1929, within two years of the introduction of synchronized sound films and the Oscars themselves. Surprisingly, awards for picture editing — a craft absolutely crucial to making movies — were omitted by the Academy until 1934, when the first Oscar for Film Editing was presented.

To provide some balance to the history of perceived neglect and omissions committed by the award-selection process, CineMontage offers a sampling of motion pictures and the achievements of their post-production practitioners that qualify them for “Oscars That Should Have Been.” The singular achievements of these films represent the introduction of major innovations in the arts of editing and sound. Their qualities set these films, editors and sound personnel apart as pioneers influencing the evolution of their crafts — pioneers who should have been appropriately recognized by the Academy.

Walter Murch. Photo: MPEG

There is good cause to question the Oscar nominations from the very first year the Academy recognized Film Editing as a category. While winning the 1934 award for Art Direction, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, based on the Franz Lehar operetta, was not nominated for either Film Editing or Sound Recording. The Best Editing winner that year, Eskimo (Conrad Nervig), could be commended for its stark simplicity, and the operatic pieces of the Sound Recording winner, One Night of Love (John Livadary, sound director, Columbia Studio Sound Department), were neatly reproduced. But, in The Merry Widow, Frances Marsh’s editing and MGM’s sound recording under the direction of Douglas Shearer established standards for the integration of visuals and audio for decades of musicals to come.

From the very first shot of a magnifying glass searching for a tiny Balkan country on a map with an iris out on Maurice Chevalier leading a military parade through the cow-filled streets of Marshovia, the editing maintains the pace to match the film’s wit. The sure progression of dissolves and cuts marking the metamorphosis to merriment of Jeanette MacDonald’s widow as she sings, writes in her diary and changes her décor and wardrobe — and her pet dog — from black to white turns the movie into a visual symphony of ebony and ivory. “The Merry Widow Waltz” at the Marshovian Embassy in Paris culminates the symphony, intricately inter-cutting MacDonald dancing with Chevalier as empty rooms and halls fill with waltzing partners and the evolution of the central romance is matched metaphorically in both picture and sound.

Just as The Merry Widow set the bar for editing in musicals, George Stevens’ Gunga Din in 1939 set the bar for editing action and adventure. Not only does the editing follow the physical progress of the scene itself, it also clearly tracks the emotional relationships among the key characters as the action continues. During the first major action sequence — the battle in the deserted village — editors Henry Berman and John Lockert carefully maintain the viewer’s sense of geography as the army squad retreats to the river. At the same time, they inter-cut intricate bits of derring-do with the three sergeants (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) exchanging telling glances and reactions.

The editing style proceeds briskly throughout the film’s drama and comedy, yet always hinging around the character interaction. This emotional continuity contributes to the involving build-up and climax at the Temple of Kali in the last third of the film. But Gunga Din’s editors were not nominated for the Oscar. Perhaps the movie’s jaunty high spirits were simply overlooked by the Academy in the wake of the Gone with the Wind sweep (which bestowed Oscars on editors Hal C. Kern and James E. Newcom).

Dody Dorn. Photo: MPEG

Also shut out of Academy nominations was a remarkable feat of sound recording in 1944 for Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero. In the days of mono-track audio, sound recordists Wallace Nogle and Walter Oberst were able to pull off a multi-layered effect with a definition lacking in that year’s winner, the stodgy political biopic, Wilson (Edmund H. Hansen and the 20th Century-Fox Studio Sound Department). In Hero, the sound recordists’ work strongly enhances the pointed comedy of a classified 4-F defense plant worker, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (played by Eddie Bracken), shanghaied by seven real Marines into pretending to be a Marine so he can go home to visit his mother.

Unfortunately, the whole hometown learns of his return and sets up a hero’s welcome for him at the train station. The hero’s welcome involves four bands and five songs — including a diva singing the Marine Corps Hymn — along with the mayor’s speech, which inadvertently cues each of the bands to start playing over each other, as well as over and in between the dialogue introducing townspeople.

Later in the film, Nogle and Oberst also create a rich and realistic sound background over a long single tracking shot following two characters talking as they walk from the town’s business district to its residential area.

For 1955, the Film Editing Oscar went to Joshua Logan’s Picnic (Charles Nelson and William A. Lyon), shot in widescreen and color but, in the same year, it was Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean that first fully utilized the possibilities of editing widescreen and color composition for dramatic effect. Perhaps the movie was dismissed in its time as just a picture for teens, so the Academy neglected to nominate William Ziegler for his innovations in editing. But Rebel’s insights into American middle-class society have not dated — nor has Ziegler’s work.

Instead of adhering to the style of standard-frame eye-line, POV and reverse cutting, Ziegler often uses the widescreen perspective to cut into the background. He also cuts on striking colors (reds, greens and blues) to draw the viewer’s eye into the next shot. Other times, he cuts to and from opposing angles that have sparsely composed and densely composed frames. These strategies of editing, explored and modified for each physical setting (police station, suburban home, planetarium) also consistently suggest character relationships and sympathies.

Richard Hymns. Photo: David Klein

There are many films for which the legendary editor Dede Allen, A.C.E., should have won the Oscar, but Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde stands out.  Yet her editing was not even nominated. The award winner for 1967, Hal Ashby, did strong and solid, if not especially groundbreaking, work on In the Heat of the Night. But Allen — influenced by David Newman and Robert Benton’s screenplay and eight years of exposure to the French Nouvelle Vague — took it upon herself to infuse new techniques into mainstream American movies.

From the opening montage of sepia-toned snapshots, a distinct difference from other movies of the time is obvious. Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie is first seen in front of a mirror, turning toward her bed as Allen jump-cuts to her lying down on the bed. Looking up at the brass headboard, Bonnie raises her fist in frustration and the shot jump-cuts to her fist striking it. Later, as we watch a police car chase Bonnie and Clyde’s car fleeing from a bank robbery, Allen cuts in short takes of people back at the bank responding to reporters and being photographed.

The impressionistic montage of brief segments of moments during the fugitive gang’s picnic with Bonnie’s family and the violent finale inter-cutting slow-motion and normal-speed shots also display elements of the new approach to editing that Allen helped bring to Hollywood.

In 1974, Walter Murch, ACE, CAS, MPSE, virtually revolutionized the nature of sound on film with his work on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Credited on the film for sound montage and re-recording mixing, Murch was nominated for Best Sound, along with recordist Art Rochester, but the Oscar was awarded to the very loud Earthquake (Ronald Pierce and Melvin M. Metcalfe, Sr.).

At the time of The Conversation’s release, its elaborate arrangement of sounds must have seemed as rich and complex as that of a major symphonic work of musical orchestration. With the audio surveillance work of the film’s Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) as a central focus, Murch reflects and orchestrates the process of reconstructing the titled “conversation.”  He melds, modulates and interweaves electronic noise, mechanical noise, live dialogue, TV sound, recorded music and sounds, and ambient music and sound down to specific and clearly defined noises like the crinkle of paper and the clinking of ice in a glass. But more than simply arranging the sounds as dramatically appropriate for each scene, Murch uses them as thematic and emotional motifs.

Since 1974, the sound editing work on two other films — both nominated for Oscars yet being passed over for others — should also be singled out for expanding on the innovations of The Conversation, each in their own fresh directions.

Randy Thom. Photo: Gregory Schwartz

Nominated for Sound Effects Editing for 1999, David Fincher’s Fight Club lost to a film that was equally skillful in creating a carefully modulated soundscape, The Matrix (Dane A. Davis). But Fight Club’s sound designer Ren Klyce and supervising sound editor Richard Hymns pay extraordinarily precise attention to the particular nuances of how Edward Norton’s narrator hears things. This works dramatically and thematically to heighten the schizophrenic world he shares with Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden.

Radical shifts in tone from layered depths (whether the sounds of men crying or the sounds of office machines) to minimal or no background noise at all often seem to echo the narrator’s thought processes. Correspondences of sounds from vastly different sources (the lighting of a cigarette lighter fading into a dull explosion) often help to suggest the main character’s continual jumps of logic.

For 2007, the Oscar for what had now come to be designated Sound Editing went to The Bourne Ultimatum (Karen M. Baker and Per Hallberg, MPSE) but Pixar’s nominated feature Ratatouille should have gotten the nod for bringing sound editing in animation to its fullest potential. Sound designer Randy Thom and supervising sound editor Michael Silvers consistently achieve a seamless amalgamation of real-world sounds within the full range of imaginative animation.

Whether shifting from rats speaking to one another in English to humans hearing them squeaking, or incorporating the exaggerated sound effects of over-the-top cartoon antics with the real sounds of a restaurant’s work environment, the sound editing envelops the viewer in the experience. And when Remy, the rat born to be a chef, explains the blending of two different flavors, the sound wondrously creates the cinematic illusion of synesthesia — experiencing the sense of taste as music and color.

But the Academy continued to overlook innovations in picture editing, as well. In 1983, The Right Stuff demonstrated a complex and deservedly acclaimed job of piecing together the epic story of America’s first astronauts and won the Film Editing Oscar for its editing team (Glenn Farr, Lisa Fruchtman, Stephen A. Rotter, Douglas Stewart and Tom Rolf). But Richard Chew, ACE, was not nominated for his work in Paul Brickman’s biting coming-of-age story, Risky Business, in which he devised a fresh style of personal narrative.

Building on how film editing mimics the way the mind pieces together our perceptions, he evokes a consistent and fluid sense of identity with Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen. From the opening dream sequence, Chew’s steady rhythm of visuals reveals the issues concerning this upper-middle-class high school senior: getting into a good college and getting laid.

Chew maintains a subtle, rhythmic drive throughout the film, most overtly when Joel dances to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” in his living room after being left home alone by his vacationing parents — and more suggestively when he seeks out prostitutes for sex. As Joel’s situation spirals into crisis with an impending Princeton interview, the editing style eases back into the dream-like cutting of the opening, but not for dream sequences. Sometimes using quirky cut-ins to comment on the action, Chew’s work in Risky Business powerfully brings out how the weight of real-life issues are realized as we mature — and are perhaps denied.

Richard Chew. Photo: Gregory Schwartz

Christopher Nolan’s Memento, made in 2001 and edited by Dody Dorn, A.C.E., was at least nominated for Film Editing, but lost to Black Hawk Down (Pietro Scalia, ACE). Maybe it is easier to relate to the graphic horror of war than it is to accept a movie that tells its story backwards as something other than a clever gimmick. But the psychological horror of lying to oneself (the core of Memento) is harder to convey. Exploring the nature of memory itself, Dorn’s editing leads to the ending revelation that conveys that horror.

What begins as an intellectual puzzle builds into startling revelations of characters’ real motivations. The process is highlighted by color sequences moving backward in time that alternate progressively with black-and-white sequences moving forward in time that gradually lengthen. In the end, Memento is a unique cinematic story absolutely dependent on its editing. An Oscar would have been appropriate recognition of that.

For 2004, the Film Editing award went to The Aviator (Thelma Schoonmaker, A.C.E.), a biographical film that effectively laid out the progress of an eccentric man’s erratic career. But, for editing evoking the emotional resonance linking imagination and experience, the Oscar should have gone to Matt Chessé, ACE., rightly nominated for his work on Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland.

The film’s story of how James Barrie (played by Johnny Depp) came to write Peter Pan revolves around the author’s imagination and his relationship with the four young sons of the infirm Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet). The film’s editing strategy occupies the same revolution.

Early on, Chessé establishes a bond between reality and imagination as he smoothly cuts — often on movements — between Barrie in the park dancing with his huge dog, Porthos, for the boys’ entertainment and Barrie as a ringmaster dancing with a bear in the circus. The cutting between reality and imagination sharpens and diminishes as personal complications and Barrie’s writing progress.

The emotional resolution, foreshadowed and enhanced by the editing, comes near the end when Barrie brings the stage company of the now successful play Peter Pan to the boys’ home. They perform the play in full costume for the dying mother in her parlor that opens out to the real — and imaginary — Neverland in her garden.

As long as Oscars are awarded, the Academy will give us all ample cause to imagine our own Oscar “Should Have Beens.” But, with the clarity of hindsight that allows a better perspective with which to judge often subtle, aesthetic breakthroughs in editing and sound, perhaps the organization can find a way to single out those films of past years that may have been unjustly overlooked.

Whether the Academy recognizes them or not, those (and future) breakthroughs will continue to have their impact on movie storytelling.

 

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Union Made

UNION MADE: Straight Outta Detroit

by uncredited
written by uncredited 4 minutes read

by Michael Olman, CAS

I am “imported from Detroit,” as the catchphrase now says. I’m proud of my hometown, Motown. It has always been filled with music, film and television and, most of all, good, honest, hard-working people. We were all in the same boat, but we weren’t about to let that city fade. People work their asses off in that city and they are proud of what they do.

I grew up in a union family. For a period in the 1930s, my grandfather and great uncle “worked the line.”  My mother, father, aunt and uncles were all in the teachers union. I learned from an early age how unions can help us make our lives better.

Starting at age five, I took music lessons. I learned to play piano and saxophone fluently (all four saxes — Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone) and I somehow learned a little guitar along the way. Music and, more importantly, sound were a big part of my life.

I played with several bands in the Detroit area, mostly on weekends while I was in high school. But by my first year in college, we were playing roughly 150 nights a year.

At the same time, I would spend days in a studio that my friend had built. We were writing partners and each day we would meet for a few hours and lay down some tracks, never knowing where it would lead. After realizing that the “live” music business wasn’t for me, I found Michigan State University. Its audio program encompassed radio, live recording, television and film.  My world opened up.

In 1990, I left Detroit for Los Angeles. I knew that film and television was where I felt at home and wanted to build a career. When I moved to LA, I only knew one person in the industry. I had no idea how I would break in, but I wasn’t about to take no for an answer. I took the Mix magazine studio issue and sent my resume to every single post-production studio in town. I followed up with a call to each one. I remember that out of the almost 100 resumes that I sent out, only three were willing to speak with me. Do you want to talk about a humbling moment?

My mother, father, aunt and uncles were all in the teachers union. I learned from an early age how unions can help us make our lives better.

Then I got a call that changed my life. Thank you, Marti Humphrey!

I was offered a job at Modern VideoFilm. It was non-union, but it was a start. I worked my tail off there in laydown/layback and sound transfer and assisted the telecine department.  It was the analogue age, so everything involving sound was done on two-inch analogue tape. There was this new format called DAT. We also had one of the first digital audio multi-tracks in the business, not to mention one of the first D-1 and D-2 machines. It was a great place to learn!  Nine months later, when our lead mixer left for Sony Studios, he asked me to come with him as his recordist in a brand-new studio that Sony was building.

In my first years there, I was a recordist — the guy on the talkback mic who makes sure everything is being recorded correctly and playing it back as it should be heard. Once we started rolling, I was constantly looking over the mixer’s shoulder, learning whatever I could as fast as I could. I learned from some amazing mixers who were willing to share their knowledge with me and I’m forever in their debt. Before long, I was given a shot at mixing and I ran with that opportunity!

After eight years, I left Sony for a smaller post house where I was offered a gig as the lead mixer and given the opportunity to hone my craft. The amazing thing about sound is that it is so subjective. There is no right or wrong answer.  Everyone hears sound differently. I’ve never been afraid to put my best audio thoughts forward. It’s honest and real. It’s my gut reaction. Sound is a collaborative process and some might not agree with my ideas, but if I don’t put my ideas out there in the sound mix, no one will get a chance to consider a different way of telling the story, sonically, that might actually add to the drama on the screen.

Through relationships that I have cultivated within the industry, I have been very lucky to find myself working on many hit television shows and have received 14 Emmy Award nominations and 18 Cinema Audio Society nominations, with a few wins in both. I currently serve as the Sound Peer Group Governor for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

I am thankful for my union membership. It has allowed me to follow my dreams and I have found a way to pay that forward with the many people who have moved here to join our amazing business.

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Features

Score Keepers: Mixers Who Capture Composers’ Cues

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 16 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

They say brevity is the soul of wit, and scoring mixers seem to have a sense of humor about what their job entails. “We get coffee for the composer. End of interview,” Alan Meyerson jokes. Well, not so fast.

In truth, the scoring mixers have one of the most complex, pressure-cooker jobs in post. Officially, their charge is to capture the composer’s original music in the live atmosphere of the scoring stage and, in the process, hopefully make it sound even better than the composer imagined. Part engineer, part recordist, part creative problem-solver, the scoring mixer is the interface between the director, composer, orchestrator/arranger, music editor and the dub stage, helping to determine how best to make a composer’s intent fit the director’s musical vision.

On the engineering side, the scoring mixer reviews the dynamics of the scoring stage. He also helps determine the size and positioning of the orchestra, placement and types of microphones, recording format, sample rates, ProTools rig configurations and turnover/delivery options. The bottom line is always time and money. A scoring stage filled with musicians is one of the most expensive per diems in the industry. The pressure to do it fast and get it right the first time is intense. It is a position of technical excellence and trust, because there’s rarely, if ever, any thought of going back and doing it a second time.

“‘We’ll fix it in the mix’ is not one of my favorite sayings,” says Robert (Bobby) Fernandez, CAS, who has engineered and mixed the scores for over 400 titles during the past 34 years and all of Clint Eastwood’s films since the early 1980s, including the 1988 Best Sound Oscar winner Bird. Fernandez ran the Warner Bros. scoring stage for much of his 24 years at the studio before going independent ten years ago. “If you can capture a score live and properly record it, this job is so much easier,” he claims.

Alan Meyerson. Photo by Dan Goldwasser

The ability to record live is the key to understanding the scoring mixer’s art, and many of the best come from the record industry. Meyerson was a session engineer at New York studios such as A+R and the Hit Factory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a record producer. Along the way, he engineered albums for artists such as Bryan Ferry, New Order, Bronski Beat, Jody Watley, Luther Vandross and the Commodores. “One day I was invited to an overdub session on Hans Zimmer’s score for Renaissance Man and got booked for four months. That was some 150 movies ago.”

Dennis Sands, CAS, began recording live music in the late 1960s, working at MGM Records with artists such as Sammy Davis, Jr. and Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme, as well as numerous jazz, orchestral and soundtrack recordings. “Early on, I was exposed to recording a lot of live orchestral music, as opposed to overdub- bing one instrument at a time, which was more the rock ‘n’ roll style,” Sands recalled. “One night, I helped someone out on a film score; it was incredible, and I realized that was what I wanted to do.” Sands has worked on over 200 films, with recent credits that include A Christmas Carol (scoring and re-recording mixer), Terminator Salvation, Bruno, Milk and Dreamgirls, and was honored with a 2008 career achievement award from the Cinema Audio Society.

Most of the feature work on the West Coast is done at three venerable scoring stages in Los Angeles: Sony, Fox and Warner Bros. The exception is the Skywalker Scoring Stage at Skywalker Sound in Northern California’s Marin County, which is presided over by Leslie Ann Jones, the studio’s director of music recording and scoring since 1997. The daughter of 1940s novelty bandleader Spike Jones and singer Helen Grayco, Jones has engineered albums for Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, Dave Edmunds, Carlos Santana and Cris Williamson, as well as Grammy-winning recordings from the Kronos Quartet and Dianne Reeves. She is a trustee of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Jones had her first taste of film score mixing on Apocalypse Now in 1979, and continues a hybrid careers a score mixer and recording engineer, with recent credits that include Zodiac (2007), The Company (2003) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). “George Lucas’ vision for sound was to have everything happening in the same building,” Jones says. “The LA-based studios have stages on the lot, but the work after the score may be done all over the city. What’s great about Skywalker is the co-mingling of music for film and music for records, which makes for a very creative experience.”

Leslie Ann Jones. Photo courtesy of Skywalker Sound

A typical 50-to-75- minute score usually will take a week to record, then another week to mix, but that time can vary greatly depending on the composer, says Greg Townley, a veteran scoring mixer who recorded his first symphony at age 22. His roster of nearly 100 films includes Reign Over Me, Sideways, Wedding Crashers and Black Hawk Down. “Composer Rolf Kent likes to do one or two cues per hour, but certain scores, such as some of Tom Newman’s, can be more experimental––so you are taking more time and developing the sound a lot more,” says the largely self-taught Townley. “More often, it’s conceived down to the point where we know exactly what we’re going to do.”

“What makes this such a high-pressure job is that there’s a lot that can go wrong,” says Jones, who is currently recording the score for God of War 3, a Sony PlayStation video game, as well as producing and engineering two recording projects for Bay Area artists. “You’re talking about 60 to 100 musicians working in three-hour increments. You can get a mic that goes bad, or you may have a director who’s heard a mock-up of a cue a million times, then gets to the stage and decides he doesn’t like the cue––and the composer may have to rewrite it on the spot. Suddenly, you’re talking about a lot of money; scoring stages are way more expensive than a traditional recording studio.”

Analogue score recording is a thing of the past, but no one is lamenting the loss. “Digital has changed the process quite a bit,” says Jones. “It used to be that the roles of the recordist and the music editor were fairly well delineated. Today, the recordist is more of a ProTools operator and editor, and the music editor puts the takes together after the music-mixing process is completed. Also, we now have the ability to record so much more and make all the recordings seamless. We can have more than one composer working on a project, as I’ve done on video game scoring mixes, and that’s only been made possible by the ability we have today to easily move files back and forth.”

Adds Sands, “ProTools is in some ways similar to multi-track recording, so I didn’t have much of a problem making the change, though the learning curve was substantial, and the difference in functionality is startling in terms of how fast you can access cues. On multi-track, there would be cues recorded on 24-track machines, DA-88s, DA-98s, or some other medium, and each one had to be dealt with individually. Changing from one cue to another was extremely time consuming, especially when we only have a ten-minute break each hour and need to play those cues for the director during that break. Before ProTools, we’d be lucky to have time to play one; now we can show him three or four. And if a given cue is a combination of three or more takes, we can quickly make edits and create what is essentially a finished cue.”

Dennis Sands. Photo by Brian Leatart

In setting up the scoring stage, most scoring mixers tend to use a standard orchestra left-to-right “wrap”––violins and violas next to each other on the left, French horns behind the violins and woods behind the violas, celli to the right with the double basses behind them, the brass behind the corner of the celli, and the percussion behind that. This arrangement traditionally provides the best overall stereo balance. However, says Meyerson, “More and more clients are being experimental and are willing to try all kinds of arrangements, especially when there is time to plan ahead. For example, on Black Hawk Down, we lined up the orchestra so that the brass and strings were playing at each other and it worked great!”

Mic placement with properly adjusted levels is a key to effective orchestra record- ing for film, and everyone has his or her own technique. Explains Meyerson, “I tend to rely on certain mics, but even then, I tend to change things up a lot. On Pirates of the Caribbean and Pearl Harbor, I used a lot more ribbon mics than I normally do, because I knew how aggressive the mix was going to be and wanted to have a very tactile sound. With ribbon mics, I was able to lower the levels so that the score could be heard better when put up against all the sound effects.”

Says Sands, “I don’t use an abundance of mics, about 12 to 15 for most of the sound. It’s all very specific: a lot of omni-directionals, three Neumann M-50s that I use for overall room ambience, and some cardioids that I use for spot mics, as well as some ribbons. The variety depends on the purpose or the section I am recording. I like it to sound big; if you’re going to have a lot of players, you want to hear a lot of players. That sweeping dramatic effect helps sell the emotional component of the music.”

Townley says that he records with a unique orchestral placement. “I like a very wide perspective to the orchestra, one that is pushed back inordinately to the far left and far right,” he says. I don’t like things clustered around the middle because that will affect the dialogue and sound effects. I’ve also developed a technique which I call ‘imagery micing,’ which gives 20 percent more depth of field to the orchestra.”

The advent of the DAW has changed the roles of the scoring mixer, composer and orchestrator. Composers are beginning to work more and more with electronic temp mock-ups, which serve roughly the same function for a score mixer as a temp dub does for re-recording mixers. “There are many composers today, such as Zimmer and Steve Jablonsky, who do almost all of the conventional orchestration in the computer and create a complete orchestral mock-up, which provides the orchestrator with the interesting job of duplicating the mock-up with the live orchestra,” Meyerson adds.

Greg Townley. Photo by Dan Goldwasser

“A lot of the orchestrators I work with are masters of suggesting, for example, that a theme might sound better going back and forth between celli and violas, where it might have been written originally for one instrument,” he continues. “The composer will then take that a step further, and before you know it, you’ve created this beautiful mosaic. Modern orchestras are getting better and better at adding those additional textures that we wouldn’t be able to realize in just a synth mock-up.”

Fernandez, who recently finished work on director and composer Eastwood’s Invictus, as well as Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman with composer Danny Elfman, agrees that the job is changing. “It’s happened more than once that I’ve walked into a composer’s studio to talk about a film; they play me the mock-ups, and I say, ‘Why do they want me to mix this? It sounds great already.’ So it is getting to the point where we are at the mercy of this sonic road map. Instead of looking at the score, then recording and mixing it until we think it sounds right, it now becomes our job to make the final score sound like the mock-up or better. But mock-up or not, the last word on what the score needs to sound right still belongs to the guy who wrote it, and the director who is visualizing it.”

Many composers today are “writing smaller,” using fewer instruments and more sparse arrangements. Scoring mixers are then faced with the task of retooling both their orchestra setups and record- ing techniques. “On a smaller score, your job is to provide support for the dialogue mix. The more you let the music overpower things, the more they will pull it back in the dub,” Meyerson explains. “It’s easy today to make everything sound huge; the trick is to know that you can do that, but not take advantage of it fully. I did a movie this year called Inhale that had a magnificent score by James Newton Howard. But the score had to stay small because of the film’s indie feel. If you make the score sound too shiny, it won’t fit that style. It’s like putting a massive orchestra on stage behind a tiny lead singer; it just won’t add up.”

“On a smaller score, such as David Shire’s for Zodiac––which was mostly strings and a little bit of trumpet––I tend to go with mics that are quieter, such as condensers, which I will use as section mics, and only use a single mic per section to avoid the inherent noise of multiple micro- phones,” explains Jones. “The Skywalker Scoring Stage has an extremely low noise floor––it is a very quiet recording space––so it is important to work with equipment that won’t add noise, especially when working with a quiet score. With larger orchestras and bigger dynamics, I tend to go with large diaphragm micro- phones to get wider coverage and more space. I’m trying to capture the orchestra as a whole, not as individual pieces.”

Robert Fernandez. Photo by Dan Goldwasser

After the cues are recorded, the score is delivered to the dub stage for the final mix, usually in the high-resolution (up to 96K) WAV format. Says Meyerson, “Usually, I will give the mixers separate orchestra, percussion, guitars, synths, solo instruments and bass, so that they have broad, brush-stroke control and can pull one element down if it gets too big. On a lot of films today, they want everything separated and with today’s technology, you can’t deny them that, so I try and build in as much flexibility as possible. Within reason, of course.”

According to Sands, a score can be delivered to the dub stage in several ways; sometimes in a single 5.1 stem, but more often in a series of separate elements to provide the mixers at the final with a greater degree of control. “If the orchestra is split up, we will record strings and woodwinds on one pass and brass and percussion on another, and deliver those as separate stems,” he says. “Electronic material is much more complicated to divide up, and you have to approach that material very logically—perhaps big drums on one stem and high metallic percussion and synth pads on others. This becomes important on the stage because if there is a lot of dialogue to clear and a high-end percussion element is getting in the way, you can reduce that one element down without having to bring down all the remaining music. Dialogue is always king.”

Where will the next generation of scoring mixers come from? At a time when scoring stages are closing, live television score recording is disappearing, and the nature of scores themselves are changing, Fernandez offers a bit of positive wisdom. “I teach a class in ProTools mixing for film surround sound, and I always encourage young engineers to listen to as much live music as they can,” he asserts. “You can’t mix out of a box and understand what’s going on out there. If you can get it together recording alive group on stage, you can do it in the control room––but not before. This is a great art, and I believe in passing on what I’ve learned. There are new people out there; they just need the opportunity to learn.”

“The job a scoring mixer performs is a lot more than just recording an orchestra and mixing a score,” Townley says. “You need an amazing set of ears, and be able to remain cool under pressure. The score is the last new thing to be created at the end of this multi-year process of getting a film made. The amount of money being spent every hour can be quite large; the list of technical aspects you need to over- see is extensive.

“You’re the person in charge, standing at the console in front of the orchestra with the composer, the producer and the director all relying on you to bring their musical visions to fruition,” Townley concludes. “To survive in this environment, we all have to be bulletproof.”

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Features

Left Brain Power: Assistant Editors
Run Efficient Cutting Rooms

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 16 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

If there is one priority assistant editors agree on, it’s the need for organization.  Today’s assistant editor may have dozens of tasks to perform daily, but only one real job—creating an efficient, smooth running environment that will leave his/her editor free to create.

The expansion of digital filmmaking into HD and beyond has seen film become an anachronism, rather than a competitor or adjunct to digital.  Many of the traditional assistant’s duties are being re-shaped or re-tasked.  The traditional codebook, one of the most critical parts of the film editor’s life, is becoming a thing of the past; crews rarely gather to view dailies as a group, and the ratio of assistants to editors has altered considerably from the established one-to-one model.

Today, no matter where an assistant is on the chain of command—the first, who bears the ultimate responsibility for the assistant team’s performance, or the seconds, who are assigned a variety of tasks––the required skill levels are high.  Assistants must walk into an editing room versed in a variety of workflows or be able to quickly master new ones.  Shifting technology now dictates that editorial doesn’t always interface with the lab; in some ways, it has become the lab.  The assistant is the left brain of the editor, but creative opportunities still abound, as assistants are also learning more and practicing cutting temporary music as well as visual and sound effects.  CineMontage spoke with a cross-section of picture, sound and music assistants on both coasts to draw a picture of a thriving position that is ever growing in importance.

As a first assistant on James Cameron’s forthcoming 3-D release of Avatar, Jason Gaudio supervises a crew of six assistants and keeps tabs on thousands of visual effects shots and numerous vendors, while working with editors John Refoua, ACE, Stephen Rivkin, ACE, and producer/director Cameron, ACE––himself a picture editor who heads the editing team.  A Guild member since 1994, Gaudio’s credits as a first include Monster House (2006), Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and Cold Creek Manor (2003).  He’s been working on Avatar for nearly three years.

“In some ways, I’ve taken on the roles of both an assistant and a visual effects editor,” says Gaudio, the one-time assistant visual effects editor on Titanic and Armageddon.  “I’ve designed a FileMaker Pro database that incorporates the codebook, all the effects count sheets and scan orders; I also establish relationships with vendors and work with the editors to organize the workflow of how we’re going to turn shots over and how shots are going to come back to us.  It’s about having a solid system, keeping your organization as simple and focused as possible, so that it can be as flexible as possible, to adapt to deadlines that are constantly shifting and changing.”

Keeping that focus day-to-day is not so simple.  “Avatar is a very editorial-centric production,” Gaudio explains.  “Jim Cameron has an Avid capturing on the stage, so he or another editor can cut footage instantly; this puts me right in the middle of production.  I oversee all the shots coming in from vendors and prepare them by cutting them into the reels and prepping them for Cameron’s reviews.”  In between his routine duties, Gaudio checks with the visual effects editors and assistants to see if they have any difficulties that need to be solved.  “I try to deal with all the miscellaneous issues so that the assistants and effects editors can focus on building dailies, creating and checking count sheets and dealing with turnovers,” he continues.  “Running an efficient room is about time management and keeping the team focused.  If we’re not communicating with each other, we run the risk of duplicating efforts––or letting tasks slip through the cracks.”

“It seems that the editing room is becoming more like a finishing house and the first assistant is becoming more of a management position––they’re wearing so many hats that have little to do with editing… Assistants can get so caught up in the technology, and all the expectations that come with it, they may forget their own goal of becoming an editor… Which is what I want to be.” – Jason Gaudio

Jeremy Weinstein is currently an assistant editor on Syfy’s (formerly Sci-Fi Channel) Eureka, after a stint on Nickelodeon’s iCarly.  He is also, at 27, the youngest member of the Editors Guild Board of Directors, representing assistant editors.  He first became attracted to editing after directing a community cable show in high school.  “When I looked at editing, I said, ‘Why would anyone want to do this?  It’s so tedious,” Weinstein explains.  “Then, in my senior year, I cut a documentary on the local fire department on the Media 100, and I saw what editors loved about making images work a certain way.  I knew that was the path I wanted to follow.”

Eureka is being cut on Final Cut Pro, using Apple Cinema Tools to import the flex files.  “The day before footage comes in, my fellow assistant, Matthew Gilna, and I get lined script notes from the shoot as well as camera and sound reports so we know what scenes will be completed or partial,” says Weinstein.  “The footage then comes in as both ALE and flex files.  We do the batching, group the clips, compile them into scene bins and––working on an XSAN––send the bins to the editors with instructions to refresh their drives so that the new material shows up, which they can then edit.  We line up takes in the order they want and label each bin according to each editor’s wishes.  And when the cut is done, they hand it back to us and we do temp sound effects and maybe some music.  This is stuff you don’t want to mess up with the editors, so it’s important to stay organized.”

Lisa Shaw Phillips is third-generation Hollywood.  Her father, Sam Shaw, a retiree, was a supervising sound editor; her grandfather, Francis Xavier Shaw, was an assistant director and film editor, and her great-uncle, Tom Shaw, was a producer and assistant director for John Huston and Sam Peckinpah.  She has just finished working on Walt Becker’s Old Dogs with editors Ryan Folsey and Tom Lewis. Comparing the assistant’s role today to what it was in the pre-digital era, Phillips says,  “When we were cutting and screening on film, every show was done essentially the same; the crews all had film training with varying years of experience, and all were working their way up to being an editor.  The first had the seniority and the editor, with the creative skills and knowledge, was head of the department and had been at it the longest.  Handing them trims and taking notes was how we all learned.  Now, that’s not the case; the first position isn’t as transitory as it once was and was expected to be.”

The digital era has brought with it some major changes in the assistant’s role.  “I believe that the assistant’s job is being viewed more and more as a permanent position, and not the pathway to becoming an editor that it once was,” says New York-based Rick Derby, who is currently on Roger Michell’s Morning Glory with editor Steven Weisberg.  “As wonderful as the Avid is, there’s an engineering aspect to it, and it’s the editor’s job to edit the movie and the assistant’s job to manage the project and the health of the Avid.  Assistants just aren’t in the room seeing how an editor creates a scene cut by cut.  The editor who trained me once said, ‘Even if you fall asleep in that chair while I am working, you’re still going to learn to edit,’ and there is something to be said for being in the editing room while that process occurs.  Assistants still do become editors, but usually for different reasons.”

Jason Gaudio. Photo by Deverill Weekes

Gaudio, who has assisted editors such as Conrad Buff, ACE, Michael Kahn, ACE, and Dylan Tichenor, ACE, also feels that it’s getting more difficult for assistants to move up to full editor.   “There was a time when an assistant sat in the editing room, watched the editor cut, and the natural progression for the assistant was to one day become an editor himself,” he says.  “Now, it seems that the editing room is becoming more like a finishing house and the first assistant is becoming more of a management position––they’re wearing so many hats that have little to do with editing.”  Gaudio finds that on smaller shows, he has more of a chance to review sequences with the editors and to learn more cutting.  “Assistants can get so caught up in the technology, and all the expectations that come with it, they may forget their own goal of becoming an editor,” he continues.  “Which is what I want to be.”

“The editor remains the head of the department, but technology has turned things around and I would say that our skills, experiences and opinions are more relied upon now,” Phillips adds.  “Editors look to their assistants not only for their computer and equipment savvy, but, at least in my experience, to work as more of a team.  With high-definition preview screenings, much needs to be accomplished in a short time.”  First assistants are getting visual effects cuts approved, as well as supervising and approving the online, titling sessions and sound laybacks, so that the editor can supervise and spend his/her time more efficiently at the mix and/or color correction with the director to make the preview dates, according to Phillips.  “For a first, this is not only added responsibility, but it also brings accountability for one’s decisions and the added pressure that brings,” she adds.

There’s another perspective to this that might be more related to the economy, according to Derby.  “Who used to cut lower-budget films?” he asks.  “Less experienced people eager for an opportunity.  Before the days of agents, if you went to a top editor for your smaller-budgeted project, that editor might say, ‘I’m too busy’ or ‘I can’t work for this fee, but my current or former assistant is ready to cut a film of this size.’ So often, established editors acted as agents for their assistants.  While assistants do go on to cut, there is less and less of that lineage.  Personally, I continue to work as both a first and a second because I still enjoy the thrill of the job, and the editors I work with respect my experience and wisdom.”

“Today, all picture arrives on QuickTimes and does not need to be manually digitized… All that evolution has brought us to the point where it’s quite rare today to have two or more assistants––or even one who stays on through the entire show.  I don’t see how things can get much more efficient.” – David Stanke

Julie Carr, another veteran New York assistant, is currently first assistant to editor Chris Tellefsen, ACE, on Doug Liman’s Fair Game, based on the memoirs of outed CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.  Fair Game is also one of the first major features shot with the RED camera.  “I get a drive every morning with media and a bin, so all I have to do is copy my MXF media over, open my bin and I’m ready to go,” she explains.  “It’s pretty phenomenal.”

Carr, who has worked on five films for editor Lee Percy, ACE, including Murder by Numbers, The Believer and The Ice Harvest, feels that assistants should come aboard a big feature several weeks before principal photography starts.  “When the post plan is being set up, it’s really helpful to have the editorial team be part of those discussions,” she says.  “I prefer to be here a couple of days before the editor starts––to make sure the systems work and the computers are talking to each other.  If I can get hair, makeup or camera tests to test the system out, then by the first day of production I’m ready to roll.”

In an exception to what is becoming the rule, Carr says that dailies are screened every day on Fair Game.  “We have a projector and screen set up in the editing room and Doug Liman and others in the crew come in every night and view dailies till midnight or later.  I work a split shift with Peter Frelik, the other assistant, and the cutting room stays open 16 hours a day.  This is very helpful because we do print out screening notes that contain everything the director says at those dailies.  It’s a lot more than just knowing what the circled takes are––and it’s something that’s really missing from filmmaking today.”

Rick Derby and Julie Carr in an editing suite overlooking Times Square.
Photo by John Clifford

First assistant sound editor David Stanke has been at Soundelux in Hollywood for 17 years.  He reports that the sound assistant’s duties are broader than ever.  They load DAWs with audio, dialogue and ADR, prepare sync dialogue from the original production track, receive turnovers from the picture department for every version of every reel, and prep that material for the sound editors.  Ultimately, the assistant prepares hundreds of tracks of effects, dialogue, Foley and backgrounds––efficiently organized into ProTools sessions and delivered to the stage to be mixed and made into stems.

“As a first, I strategize with the supervising sound editor to track and manage the budget, figure out how many editors we need to hire and divide up materials for the mix stage; in short, the entire management of the show,” says Stanke, whose recent credits include the upcoming Hoodwinked 2 with supervising sound editor Michael D. Wilhoit, MPSE, and Gamer with Scott Martin Gershin, MPSE.  “I frequently attend the mix, to make sure it kicks off well, and talk a great deal with the first assistant picture editor,” he continues.  “Because the biggest problem at the beginning of a show is always sync, it’s important to make sure we know what frame rate the picture department is cutting at, what speed the dailies were shot at and what codecs and frame rates are being used in exports.  There’s a lot of variety in this job.”

“My musical training, though not a prerequisite to do this job, definitely helps on the creative side… The decisions are ultimately [the editor’s], but he involves me in the process and will often ask for my input, so it helps to have an ear for music.” – Jeannie Lee Marks

Stanke reports that in the “old days,” the job was a lot more manual, sometimes requiring up to half a dozen assistants.  “Editors would cut all day and we would spend all night backing up the material and loading in new material,” he recalls.  “I used to load an OMF or guide track into the sound editor’s computer at night for him to cut the next day; now, I just upload it to the server, he pulls it down and I don’t have to touch his machine.  Today, all picture arrives on QuickTimes and does not need to be manually digitized.  We used to have to load dailies in real time from Nagras or DAT; now they are recorded on a hard disc and we get a broadcast WAV file.  All that evolution has brought us to the point where it’s quite rare today to have two or more assistants––or even one who stays on through the entire show.  I don’t see how things can get much more efficient.”

Assistant music editor Jeannie Lee Marks has been a Guild member for just two years, but has already worked on such releases as Enchanted (2007), Milk (2008) and the new G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, working at Modern Music with veteran music editor Kenneth Karman, a frequent collaborator of composer Alan Silvestri.  “My job is to make the music editor’s job easier, by keeping everything organized, setting up editing, scoring, temp and dubbing sessions including the I/O, create track layout cue sheets, spotting notes and other documentation, as well as backing up drives and helping out with editing and conforming,” she says.

On G.I. Joe, Marks, a former classical pianist, interfaces with the assistant picture editors by keeping up on the latest version of picture and supplying any requested music; she also provides cue sheets, change notes and dub-ready sessions to music re-recording mixers Scott Millan, CAS; David Parker and Leslie Shatz, and works with the score coordinator, recordists and techs.  “My musical training, though not a prerequisite to do this job, definitely helps on the creative side,” adds Marks, who will next begin work with Karman on Disney’s A Christmas Carol.  “The decisions are ultimately Ken’s, but he involves me in the process and will often ask for my input, so it helps to have an ear for music.”

What are the tools an assistant needs to succeed?

“A good assistant must have patience, organization and the ability to admit when he’s wrong,” Weinstein points out.  “If someone’s upset with you and it’s your fault, you absorb the shock, take the hit and move on.  You also need to be able to anticipate the needs of others in the editing room.”

“You have to have a really strong work ethic, be flexible and be able to handle pressure,” says Gaudio.  “Most of all, it’s about teamwork.  There’s nothing more gratifying than being a part of a team that pulls together to make a tough deadline.”

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Recording Artists: One of the Oldest Sound Classifications Faces Uncertainty

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 11 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

Not long ago, the job of recordist conjured up an image of a technician wearing a pair of headphones, listening with intense concentration before a reel-to-reel recorder or wiring up a patch bay. Now, in the present day of ProTools, Ethernet and virtual recorders, one of the oldest technical sound crew positions in the history of production is being severely cut back. Perhaps no other classification in the Guild is so caught in the middle between yesterday and tomorrow, with one foot in the analogue past and the other in the digital present, and a future that is still very much to be determined. The picture is not necessarily bleak, however; the same technologies that have led to cutbacks may also be creating opportunities.

While recordists (who became a part of the Editors Guild in 1998 when post-production members of IATSE Local 695 were transferred to Local 700) have been around since the earliest days of film sound, they have filled so many roles over the years—ADR, Foley, machine room and location sound among others––that a perfectly clear definition of the job has at times become difficult to pin down, with a couple of clear exceptions. The role of the recordist of today breaks down into two main categories: those who work on the dub stage, assisting the re-recording mixers with a variety of tasks; and transfer specialists, who mainly work on format interchange.

“Fundamentally, our job function has never changed,” says Eric P. Flickinger, a dub stage recordist at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. “We need to know what medium our clients are going to be supplying and what they need to walk away with. In this ProTools age, we must be able to take the tracks they are supplying us––be they 35mm mag, old optical tracks, quarter–inch tape or World War II wire recordings––and fit them into the machinery on the dub stage to give them exactly what they need, not just what they think they need.”

Joe Bosco at DJ Audio. Photo by Gregory Schwartz

Dub stage recordists have to play a lot of roles today. They must be familiar with the console, be able to set up console automation before a session, deal with non-house mixers who may be unfamiliar with the equipment, set up the desk––even answer phones and keep the hospitality fires burning with coffee and snacks. “We are de facto assistant engineers,” adds Flickinger. “We are the first line of defense if engineering is off putting out a fire somewhere else. We troubleshoot the hardware and pass along any problems we find, but engineers do the repairs. That’s a clear distinction that needs to be made.”

John B. Trask, the son of the late production mixer Burdick (Brad) Trask, is a recordist at Universal BluWave Audio in the Digital Mastering Group. According to Trask, the job began to change around 1980, when motion picture and television technologies first began to merge. “Prior to that, it was all 35mm, big-purpose dubbing machines, inter-electrical synchronizers and big analogue recorders,” he says. “Then, audio post for video began to take place in a mixing room environment instead of an online editing bay, and time code and audiotape came together to form the NTSC 59.9 Hz standard, rather than the film world’s 60 Hz. Five years later, the personal computer came along, and people started to explore how they could adapt it for post audio applications. At that point, the rate of change began to accelerate.”

Those changes are still evolving today, as Trask explains. “Everything is gradually being changed over to the digital world, but about 75 percent of what we have is still analogue: 35mm mag, quarter–inch tape, half-inch video and others––called ‘legacy formats.’ It’s amazing how often we go back to the old analogue material, especially when working on foreign titles. We might go through the same show 20 times––for Flemish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Viet-namese, French, Latin Spanish and whatever else is needed. It never stays the same.”

Unsun Song in the Hitchcock Theater at Universal Studios Sound. Photo by Gary Krueger

Joe Bosco, another veteran recordist, started out as a loader at Hanna-Barbera in 1977, became a recordist in 1980, and worked at MGM, Universal and Meridien before moving to Disney. When he started on the dub stage, everything was on 35mm soundtracks, he explained, and there were usually three people backing up the mixers—two recordists (one, the “room chief,” in charge of the patch bay, and the other working the recorder) and a loader.

On the looping (now called ADR) stage in those days, there would also be a recordist and a loader, whose job was to run film loops. “It was much tougher back then,” Bosco says. “The ADR recordist start marked and logged every take to 35mm film, reloaded quarter–inch tape every half hour for backup and kept a log, monitored the mix to listen for and report any pops or other anomalies, EQ all the machines and check all the equipment. It would literally take 20 to 30 minutes to set up a two-inch recorder properly. The present is ProTools, and you can set up a 24-track session in two minutes.”

Bosco has a passion for preservation, which continues in his freelance work at DJ Audio in Studio City, California, where he is engaged in a meticulous––and proprietary–– manual process of preserving and digitizing old and deteriorating 35mm film and tape audio masters from major studio clients. According to him, there is a lot less work today for recordists––in part because of changes in the way studios view quality control and technological change.

“Today, management feels that client playback on the stage is QC as far as they’re concerned,” he adds. “They don’t care about making copies and monitoring them today the way they used to with film. Digital is a nice catchword, but unless tracks are converted properly when dropped onto MOs [Magneto Optical drives, such as Sony MiniDiscs], you will get ‘snivets and snats’––little electronic sounds that don’t belong there. It’s just something that sometimes happens in the digital world.”

“The nature of the job makes the recordist a liaison for the physical space,” adds Flickinger, who mainly works with Oscar-winning mixer Doug Hemphill and co-mixer Ron Bartlett on Warner’s Stage 9. “It’s more efficient to keep a person tied to a room and working with one mix team. Even though certain idiosyncrasies of dub stages will be slightly different, studios have designed their facilities to keep things very similar so that we can easily move from room to room.”

Unsun Song is on staff at Universal Studios Sound, working on Mixing Stage 6 with the mix team of Jon Taylor and Christian P. Minkler on recent movies such as Gone Baby Gone, Scary Movie 4 and Babel. Over her career as an ADR, Foley and stage recordist, she has seen a parade of formats—35mm, 24-track analogue, slews of DA-88 machines chained together, and Tascam MMR-8’s, a fixture on most dub stages until just the last year or so—have their day.

Marlon Saunders in the Sony Studios Archive Transfer Room. Photo by Gregory Schwartz

“While audio has boiled down to mainly recording and numerous file formats (primarily ProTools in 24-bit .wav), the number of picture formats continue to spiral,” Song says. “As recordists, we’ve had to become a lot more picture-savvy than ever. Picture has become a huge issue with this position in terms of all the different formats that come in and the quality we can achieve once they get digitized. We have to deal with the picture specs in addition to all the audio playback and recording for the stage. Humans are forgiving, but computers are not.”

Trask agrees. “The film world is about sync; if it looks right, it’s fine,” he says. “But with computers, the tolerances are much tighter. I’ll get a six-track dubbed show, and the sync pops will be out of sync by 1/25 of a frame. That’s fine for the dub stage, but not close enough for digital camera standards, so I have to go back and make sure all these elements conform to the standard that’s required for the format, without affecting the actual picture down the line.

“Recordists can troubleshoot and report problems, but they are not supposed to make value judgments and change anything on the audio,” he adds. “A recordist’s concern is that the audio––no matter what the format––conforms to the standard of that format with respect to levels, signal quality and sync. That insures that he passes on the best possible product to the next user, be it editor, mixer or client.”

The recordists interviewed for this story agree that their job has changed radically. Tape machines and patch bays have disappeared entirely from dub stages, and machine room racks now are filled with computers, storage media and routers, not recorders. How has it changed? “That depends on what your perspective on the job was,” responds Flickinger. “If your job was to monitor the tape machine and the repro head, that job’s not there anymore.

Perhaps no other classification in the Guild is so caught in the middle between yesterday and tomorrow, with one foot in the analogue past and the other in the digital present, and a future that is still very much to be determined.

If your job is to make sure the process on the stage is flowing and the clients walk away with what they need, it’s the same job. The tools are just different. You’ve got to deal with the fact that there is no longer any physical media in front of you. You have to be able to understand, organize and distribute data you can’t put your hands on, as well as staying current with technology. In this day and age, there is no room for error as far as losing data goes.”

Marlon Saunders also works as an archival recordist at Sony and, like Trask, is second-generation Hollywood, thanks to his dad, Jim Saunders, a re-recording mixer at Warner Bros. for 30 years, and now a Guild Field Representative. Saunders, who began his career as a Foley recordist, works with a variety of audio––“sometimes even cassette tapes”––and records them into ProTools before placing them on Sony’s server for later repurposing.

“Advancements in technology have caused a lot of the manpower that was once required to become not so necessary,” says Saunders. “In the old days, we’d have to physically place audio mag reels on a cart and wheel them around the lot from destination to destination; now, we are taking ProTools digital files and e-mailing them all over the world. Yes, things have changed.”

“It’s becoming more and more obvious that whoever becomes a recordist will need to have a good working knowledge of ProTools, consoles and signal flow––and also be very organized,” Song explains. “But ultimately, so much of it is about proper communication with the client. It’s not the QC job it used to be, when recordists would sit with their headphones and listen to the mix. Today, we have to deal with so many aspects of the stage operation. The job has grown quite a bit.”

Flickinger feels that at least on the dub stage, the employment picture for recordists is stabilizing. “True, there are no more projectionists, loaders or room chiefs in the machine room,” he concedes. “But at this point, the process fully involves everyone who is still here.”

“It would behoove all of us to not only keep up with, but get ahead of, the technology,” Saunders concludes. “I hope and pray that several of the current recordist positions survive, but if some of them are not around in ten or even five years, I will not be shocked. I’m always looking for opportunities to upgrade my current skills as well as add new skills, so that in the event my current position goes away, I don’t go away with it. That should be the mindset of everyone in this business.”

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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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Robert Altman: The Sound Crew’s Best Companion

by uncredited
written by uncredited 16 minutes read

by Kevin Lewis

From the beginning of his film career in the early 1950s, filmmaker Robert Altman has utilized sound in unorthodox and spontaneous ways. He has acknowledged being influenced by the films of Howard Hawks, which he would have seen growing up in Kansas City.

Making waves early on as a young director in the 1950s, Altman began overlapping dialogue while directing advertisements and documentaries for the Calvin Company in Kansas City, according to Patrick McGilligan in his book Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff. Altman also reportedly attempted this sound technique on such episodic television series as Combat, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Bonanza in the 1960s. But it seldom went over well with producers. In fact, “Moving up to his first studio feature, Countdown [1968], Altman was fired for letting his actors overlap their dialogue,” wrote Connie Byrne and William O. Lopez in Film Quarterly in 1975.

David Sterritt, who was the longtime film critic for The Christian Science Monitor and has interviewed the director many times––including for his book Robert Altman: Interviews––claims there is a reason and a rationale why Altman uses overlapping dialogue and sound. “I think his main reason for using dialogue the way he does is very closely related to the way he uses so much camera movement and zoom lensing,” Sterritt says. “A typical Altman film is less a movie to watch than a kind of a place to be in; I think that as a director he likes to be a visitor to the place where his characters are interacting.

“That’s why the camera has this wandering way––its always looking here and there––and why, in at least a handful of his movies, he has attempted to have the camera not looking in the right place,” Sterritt continues. “He did that in Images [1972]. He certainly set out to do that in The Long Goodbye [1973]. Again, in that wandering quality, you are surrounded by a lot of sounds, and it is not all neat and clear or cut and dry.” Sterritt believes that Altman’s rationale for using overlapping dialogue may be that “it makes it harder for producers to interfere.”

Whatever the reasons, Altman’s pioneering use of sound continues to this day, including his latest film, the imminent A Prairie Home Companion. The director has worked with an incredible array of sound editors and re-recording mixers throughout his 50-plus-year career as a filmmaker, never shying away from collaborating with a new crew, which tends to quickly bond with him. CineMontage interviewed several sound people about their working relationship with Altman and how he has enriched and transformed their lives.

Richard Portman, CAS.

Richard Portman

Richard Portman, CAS, who is now teaching sound as the Gordon Sawyer Professor of the Recording Arts at Florida State University, worked as a mixer for Altman from California Split in 1974 through Health in 1980. Impressed with Portman’s previous work, the now late sound editor for California Split, Kay Rose, asked him to mix the film in a then novel multi-track mix.

“Kay Rose was the finest dialogue editor in the business and she was unmatchable in cutting this innovative dialogue editing,” Portman recalls. “She would cut it into three parts: the main dialogue, the background dialogue and the atmosphere. I kept the same separation in my dialogue pre-dub, assigning them to channels one, two and three. It was slow, time-consuming work and I would be lucky if I averaged one reel a day.”

Dialogue clarity was achieved, he explains, by substituting a line or two from an outtake that was not the director’s choice. But Altman didn’t even comment on the substitution, according to Portman, who adds, “There was never any replaced dialogue on his films. Everything was production sound. We’d steal lines from other takes, but that was difficult too.” If the mixer discovered that one track of dialogue had conflicting noise but another track didn’t, the better recording would be used instead. “All I had to do was cross from the A track to the B track and then back again––so the job became looking for the best track at any given moment and making good crosses,” Portman explains. “That hasn’t changed; most of the production recordings are now done on multitrack recorders.”

Portman credits fellow mixer James Webb, now retired, for the sterling coordination of sound on location, especially among the large speaking cast of Altman’s Nashville (1975). Four-track stereo sound was used in Nashville––for the public address announcer in the film and for sound effects––to accommodate the theatres that were equipped with stereo sound, according to Portman. Although it received no nominations for sound editing or mixing in this country, Nashville was honored by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts with its BAFTA Award for Sound.

“During production, I would ask Altman, ‘What do you want to hear in this scene?’” recalls Webb. “And he knew immediately what he wanted, so he would give me a list of actors’ names that he wanted to hear, and that meant that they would all get radio mics. Of course, when everyone is saying something different, and I’m trying to listen over a pair of headphones, it becomes a Tower of Babel.” Webb also explained that Altman accepted the unavoidable extraneous sounds that the body mics picked up. He recalls in particular the noises created when Elliott Gould and George Segal embraced in California Split and when Michael Murphy moved in his drip-dry suit in Nashville. They could not be fixed in post-production, he said.

Richard King.

Altman was not a micro-manager, according to Portman, and never objected or interfered with the mixing: “He never came to the stage; he knew that we would do the best job we possibly could.” Instead, the mixers would preview the material for Altman at a rented theatre. “We would play back reels for him,” he says. “I asked him once why he didn’t come to the stage, and he said that he just wanted to hear what we had done.”

Richard King

Portman’s friend and colleague Richard King, who is a sound editor and designer, enjoyed his two-film association with Altman as a supervising sound editor on Kansas City (1996) and The Gingerbread Man (1998)––the latter with Randy Akerson as co-supervisor. Both films were sound edited using ProTools. Altman has a “great way of getting you on his wavelength and doesn’t have any interest in telling you exactly what to do,” says King. “Somehow, he makes you understand what it is he is going for, but quite frankly, he often doesn’t know himself. It’s all an exploration for him. The outcome is not a fixed goal. He’s looking for input from other people.”

Kansas City was a straight forward period piece with jazz as a thread, according to King. “The body of the film we tried to make as detailed and accurate as possible,” says King, “While the other film, Gingerbread Man, was a straight-ahead thriller.”

Altman, however, wanted the unexpected on the latter project. “The first thing he told me was, ‘I don’t want any music in this movie––I don’t want any score, I don’t want any source music; I want to create the music from the environment,’” King reveals. Because it was about a hurricane moving toward Savannah, he wanted King to design sound around the wind and the objects displaced by the wind.

“He wanted all natural sounds, and to create a score from that,” explains King. We did a temp dub with that in mind. The opening of the film is a tracking shot of Savannah and its environment from a helicopter, so you are hearing radio static of various kinds and voices filtering in and out. Occasionally, I’d put in a little bit of music that would beep on the radio, and he didn’t want that. I had a guy whistling a tune in an alley, and he didn’t want that. He set that as his challenge that he would do a movie without music.”

Matthew Iadarola.

In the end, the producers wanted music. And they convinced the director to go with a score––by Mark Isham. “But, even with the score, many of Altman’s original sound ideas were retained,” acknowledges King.

Matthew Iadarola

Re-recording mixer and recordist Matthew Iadarola worked with King on both Kansas City and The Gingerbread Man, as well as on an earlier Altman film, The Player (1992). Describing his role in the post-production process, he says, “I was the re-recording mixer for music and dialogue, the guy at the end of the process. On all three Altman films, I worked closely with the late Geraldine Peroni, the picture editor [and a longtime colleague of Altman’s]. We would put things together, and she knew Altman well enough that she would guide me.”

On The Player, Iadarola knew right away that Altman was not obsessive about having things done his way in the mixing process. “He gave me one note,” the mixer recalls. “We would get notes, but they were more about keeping things natural. I remember in Kansas City there was actually some ADR. Even though we looped it, it was not so much for clarity, as it was for feel.”

The Player astonished critics and audiences at the time because of its sweeping, nearly eight-minute-long tracking shot across a studio lot that included a large cast of actors and extras. Many of the characters had body mics, so that casual but crucial dialogue could be picked up by the recording equipment when the camera swept by. “On The Player, there was only one looped line in the whole movie––and that’s because a radio mic on one of the actors went out during that opening tracking shot,” Iadarola reveals.

The Player recorded sound on three band 35mm magnetic tape. “At that time, everything was single-stripe mag, and you could not have three mics that were recorded at the same time on three separate machines because they would phase and cancel each other,” Iadarola explains. “So they were transferred together to the three bands of full-coat magnetic tape––and that way, they were locked into registration and the sound didn’t phase. But because it was three bands, you could get in there and do the fades and the adjustments by manually editing the soundtrack––things we are now able to do with ProTools. I enjoyed those days, but I don’t miss them.”

Robert Altman has worked with an incredible array of sound editors and re-recording mixers throughout his 50-plus-year career as a filmmaker, never shying away from collaborating with a new crew.

The production dialogue for Kansas City was recorded on a Tascam DA-88, a digital eight-track audio recorder. “This means that up to eight microphones were used for each take on location,” says Iadarola. “Boom and radio mics were hidden in plants and other places.” The film used only a few ADR lines. “For the first time, we used some looped group lines,” he continues. “It’s not that Bob would not use ADR as a rule, it’s just that the need for it was greatly reduced by the amount of microphones that were used for each take on location.”

Iadarola learned many valuable life lessons from Altman, but one particularly stands out for him. “He told me not to be afraid to be on the nose––when I was overly concerned about being too obvious,” the mixer admits. “Coming from him, who is certainly not a director who specializes in clichés, it was ironic because of his subtlety and nuance. It’s a great concept that sometimes it is necessary in storytelling to underline things.”

Iadarola finds authenticity in Altman’s decision to replicate the natural rhythms of everyday life through overlapping dialogue and music. “Working with him changed my whole career because I specialize in dialogue and music––and he is a master storyteller with both of these,” he confesses.

Eliza Paley

Eliza Paley, who has been a supervising sound editor for Altman for over a decade, also agrees with and appreciates the filmmaker’s quest for authenticity in sound.

Eliza Paley.

She began her association with him on the masterwork Short Cuts (1993) and has worked on every Altman film that has posted in New York since then, including A Prairie Home Companion. “I feel very privileged because, not only do I love his work, but Altman is a director who thoroughly appreciates sound and uses it to its fullest for overlapping dialogue and interesting transitional moments.” She characterizes the final mix sessions on his films as “very relaxing, collaborative and creative” and is quick to add, “He understands the process and respects the fact that it takes time to weave all the elements together––especially since he records so many tracks in production.”

Short Cuts contained some scenes where there were a great deal of overlapping conversations going on at once, Paley recalls, but Pret a Porter (1994), on which she was the dialogue editor, proved to be an extreme case, with “groups of four or five people overlapping with other groups of three to five people.” The scenes in public spaces, such as an auditorium or the lobby of a hotel, which involved up to 17 people, were especially challenging for Paley as dialogue editor.

The film’s supervising sound editor Skip Lievsay, she recalls, mixed down 16 tracks to six or eight tracks for one group, and four or five for another. “Then we dialogue editors would piece them together according to location and characters in such a way that the mixer, Lee Dichter, could make sense of it,” she says. “It was more like putting together a puzzle than traditional dialogue editing; it was challenging in a completely new way and lots of fun.” Paley used a similar approach on subsequent Altman films on which she was supervising sound editor.

For Altman’s penultimate feature, The Company (2003), the director was very concerned about recreating the sound of the dancers’ feet on the dance floor. “This was something they could not record well during filming, with multiple cameras and audiences present,” Paley explains. An inaccurate sound would break the organic quality of dance. “Altman said, ‘This is a very specific sound. We have to have that sound,’” she recalls. “The only way to achieve that was to record the Foley on location––that is, on a real dance floor with the actual dancers who had performed during filming. I was thrilled with the outcome.

“The Foley just blended right into the production track,” Paley continues. “You can’t have one Foley artist do that the same way the actual dancers do it. They don’t have to be taught the dance because they know it, and it is in sync to the music. So once they hit it in the beginning––once you get the first one in––everything else falls in. The quality of the dance is so unique that it would be really hard to recreate it in any other way.”

“[Robert Altman has] a great way of getting you on his wavelength and doesn’t have any interest in telling you exactly what to do,” – Richard King

Eric McAllister

Eric McAllister, who served as supervising assistant sound editor on A Prairie Home Companion, also applauds the search for genuine sound by Altman. He first worked with the director on The Company, on which he was supervising sound assistant, and then on the miniseries Tanner on Tanner (2004), where he was sound effects editor.

Praire has overlapping dialogue backstage mixed in with a performance onstage. The stage performances at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota were recorded using a 32-track machine. Sixteen tracks were used for the mics on the stage because of the stage band. When the performers walked onto the stage, they would be wearing lavalier microphones, representing the other 16 tracks. On all of the Altman films on which he worked, McAllister says that the performers would be fitted with lavalier mics.

“When the Prairie dailies came in, assistant editor Jane Rizzo had to go through and name every track with the person’s mic and character name on it,” before it was handed to the mixers and sound editors, according to McAllister. The mix on Prairie took five weeks.

McAllister, who prepared the sessions for the dialogue editor and mixer, is impressed that Altman resisted the urge to use ADR on the vocals because he wanted to preserve their fresh, naturalistic stylizations. “Altman doesn’t want a lot of sound manipulation,” McAllister says. Then, after a pause, he adds, “He doesn’t really want any.” In fact, the charm of the movie, which is based on the long-running radio show conceived and hosted by Garrison Keillor, is that we believe the actors are the vocalists on the radio.

“Altman is very singular in his style,” McAllister offers. “He lets his movies just kind of happen, which is great. The rarest thing is someone who just makes his movie by letting it come together like an organic process.” At one point during the mixing of Tanner, McAllister queried Altman on the motivation behind overlapping sound, music and dialogue. “He told me that he doesn’t mind making the audience work––just like in the real world,” he says.

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OP / EDIT

The Outsourcerer’s Apprentice?

by F. Hudson Miller
written by F. Hudson Miller 4 minutes read

by F. Hudson Miller, MPSE

Not long ago I was asked to supervise the soundtrack of a feature film that was going to have its sound editing completed in Los Angeles and then be dubbed in London. On the surface, the offer seemed to be a tantalizing one. The opportunity to work on a film with great sound potential, combined with travel to my favorite European city, seemed too good to be true. It looked like a good deal for everyone concerned––the producer would save a bundle, my sound crew would work, and I would get an adventure. Being a rather pragmatic fellow, I figured I’d better take a look at the negatives as well––two airports, three roundtrip transatlantic flights, hotels, endless taxis, very different working conventions and, lastly, leaving home, family and friends for the better part of three months. This was an interesting equation.

On further reflection, I found there were many more serious issues involved. What about my fellow union members who were going to lose work? Sure, the sound editors were going to get their regular jobs, but what about the other post people who would be denied work on the show? At least two, and possibly three, re-recording mixers would lose weeks of work and one or two recordists would certainly be out of a job. Sound and video transfer would not be making audio and video copies and even that increasingly rare bird, the projectionist, could be losing out. What about the teamster couriers who shuttle the drives to and from the stage? They too would have less work. All of these people would suffer both monetarily and professionally so the producer could save a few bucks. Maybe this wasn’t such a great deal after all.

As we all know, there are many variations on this scenario being played out across Hollywood and New York. We all know sound/music editors and re-recording mixers who have been offered very nice financial packages to travel out of town/country to edit and/or mix films. Except for a couple of key players, this almost always involves the use of completely indigenous crews.

I don’t believe that Hollywood and New York have a monopoly on film talent; yet I don’t see the beneficial side of actively training our direct competition.

So why are producers so eager to make these offers? The answer is not all that complicated: They get a “Hollywood” job without the “Hollywood” price. So why are our fellow members willing to accept this work? As you might imagine, it is quite flattering to be asked to tackle this type of project. Suddenly, I’m so important to the project that the producer is willing to fly me half way around the world, and pay me handsomely––all to insure that my professional taste and expertise is part of the project. All in all, this is quite a step up for folks who, more often than not, are treated as an unfortunate expense, rather than as creative contributors to the film.

When we accept these offers, our self-esteem may be boosted and pocketbook enriched for the present, but what of the future? We are being asked to work on “location” because our out-of-town/country competitors are not up to the program. But every time we “help out,” we are training an ever-increasing pool of competition. I don’t believe that Hollywood and New York have a monopoly on film talent; yet I don’t see the beneficial side of actively training our direct competition. Eventually they will probably be able to do it without us…but why should we help? Remember, the job you lose just may be your own!

As for the picture I was offered with the London dub, in the end we did both the sound editing and the re-recording in Los Angeles. The producers and director decided to stay in Hollywood and received the quality of work they desired without the hassle of going overseas. The gods smiled and things just worked out this time. I missed an adventure, but my friends and colleagues didn’t lose a job. As for me, I’m looking forward to a great and guilt-free vacation in London.

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