Bibliography

13421070 / / Supporting Material

Books –

Kenny, T. (2000) Sound For Picture. Film Sound Through the 1990s. Artistpro.

Kerins, M. (2010) Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Purcell, J. (2007) Dialogue Editing For Motion Pictures. A Guide To The Invisible Art. Oxford: Elsevier.

Shepherd, A. (2008) Pro Tools for video, film, and multimedia 2nd edition. Boston: Course.

Watson, G. (2004) The cinema of Mike Leigh, a sense of the real. London: Wallflower.

 

Online sources – (Not exhaustive)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/production/television/sound – Role

http://creativeskillset.org/job_roles_and_stories/job_roles/3814_supervising_sound_editor – Role

http://filmsound.org/terminology/svseditor.htm – Role

http://designingsound.org/2010/08/inception-exclusive-interview-with-richard-king/ – Richard King

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/dark-knight-sound-editor-designer-850224 – Richard King

http://filmsound.org/terminology/svseditor.htm – Role

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/18/how-we-made-naked – Naked, Mike Leigh

http://www.popmatters.com/review/145055-naked/ – Naked, Mike Leigh

http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/535 – Green Mile Review

http://markmangini.com/Mark_Mangini/Blog/Entries/2001/5/24_The_Green_Mile.html – The Green Mile Sound Design

http://www.stevenbenedict.ie/2014/06/shawshank-redemption/ – Shawshank Redemption

https://auditorydimensions.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/sound-image-relational-analysis-the-shawshank/ – Shawshank Redemption

http://designingsound.org/2011/03/exclusive-interview-with-mark-mangini-and-dave-whitehead-of-the-rite/ – Mark Mangini

http://transom.org/2005/walter-murch/

http://trueherostudio.com/producer-blog/use-of-temp-tracks-pros-and-cons – Temp Tracks

http://dvinfo.net/forum/all-things-audio/102523-mixing-levels-dolby-digital-dvd-vs-theatrical.html – Final Mixing

http://nofilmschool.com/2014/04/soundworks-collection-transcendence-wally-pfister-dynamic-range – Final Mixing

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/post-production-forum/229741-standard-mixing-levels-movie-theater-dvd-broadcast-tv-commercials-etc.html – Final Mixing

https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/tech/tech3344.pdf – Final Mixing

http://markmangini.com/Mark_Mangini/Reading_Room_files/Final%20Mix%20Sound%20Tips%20Aug09.pdf – General Tips

 

Video Sources –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMwzvAt84P8 – Trailer, Mike Leigh’s Naked.

http://soundworkscollection.com/news/soundworks-collection-interview-series-mark-mangini-sound-designer-of-mad-max-fury-road-and-black-mass – Mark Mangini : Keynote Speech

http://markmangini.com/Mark_Mangini/Videos/Entries/1999/3/13_Sound_Design_for_%22The_Green_Mile%22.html – Cinema Secrets – The Sound of The Green Mile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDeGA8PL0qE – ‘AUSTRALIA’ – Behind the Scenes – Supervising Sound Editor on location

 

RESEARCH – Mark Mangini’s Green Mile + How it informed ‘George’.

13421070 / / Research

The Green Mile was suggested by George’s original director as a film from which she drew some influence for the piece. Released in 1999 (US), it was produced on a budget of $60 million and returned $290 million, and was a vehicle for a number of big name Hollywood actors including Tom Hanks. It is a supernatural crime drama adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name.

The sound designer for The Green Mile was Mark Mangini, a 3o year veteran of Hollywood film-making and responsible for a broad variety of films from Shark Tale to Mad Max – Fury Road. He has run a post-production sound company in Hollywood for 25 years, and is currently a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“A sound designer is, simply, somebody who uses sound creatively to tell a story,” – Mark Mangini

The audio in Green Mile is grounded in gritty realism of the classic prison setting but also portrays the abstract realm of magic or the brutality of execution, and the writer / director Frank Darabont said that audio played an even more important role than usual as that dimension of his film is ‘…all about special little sounds, or even enormous sounds sometimes…that are given place in the movie,’ – (Cinema Secrets). He asked Mangini to make the ‘Green Mile’ part of the set itself a central character in the film through it’s sound design.

Taking this onboard, I tried to ensure my own approach to designing and editing the atmospheres for ‘George’ involved something similar. The house in which the character lives was designated as his ‘safe space’ by the director, and we discussed making this explicit with the sound dimension, in support of the characters story. We built peaceful atmospheres whenever George was at home and highlighted these with the sounds of the outside world trying to get in as his level of tension and anxiety increased (I discuss the outcome of this component of the sound script in this post).

Elsewhere, I decided to follow Mangini’s lead in Green Mile with my own approach to some of our foley sound design. Some of the foley in the film was recorded at the original sets after shooting had wrapped, which Mangini points out offered them an ‘…identical acoustic space’ to create in, and was recorded and directed via fibre optic link to a local studio. It wasn’t necessary to remotely record our foley, but I did return several times to the house location in George with a portable recording setup when I was unable to satisfactorily recreate perspectives in the edit, most notably the sound of kids running away outside through the walls and door of the building and footsteps on the stone flags and oak floors of the house.

“My goal through that whole sequence was to re-purpose and recycle critical sounds as clues and metaphor.” – Mark Mangini

Here’s a final aspect of Green Mile’s design which we used explicitly throughout George. Our soundtrack is woven with reused references to the characters past in exactly the same way as the flashback sequence in the film, melded with action on screen both subtly and noticably, as well as with the music track to an extent.

Moving away from Green Mile but staying with Mark Mangini and in the context of reflection on George, the following interview quote is useful –

“In other words, it’s all about the context. If a scene is working, is truly scary, just about any sound you use could work. We struggled a great deal with the lecture hall scenes and tried exhaustively to create what became illusory goal: making what was meant to be ‘real’ exorcisms on screen sound frightening. I think this was our sonic “Waterloo”. By that I mean, there is always one sound, one elusive sound, on every film where an inordinate amount of time and resources are spent in trying to achieve a goal that will never be achieved and failure is inescapable, for whatever reasons; the filmmakers don’t know what they want or can’t decide, the action on screen doesn’t carry it’s weight dramatically, etc. As is typical in many post-sound endeavors, we accepted what we had as the best we could do and called it a day.” – Designing Sound

For me, the picture dimension of George does not manage to carry it’s weight dramatically in some key scenes, and reviewing the final product I get the impression of the soundtrack as somewhat ‘out on it’s own’ in trying to convey the themes in the script at times. Our own ‘sonic waterloo’ was probably the graveyard dialogue track, which doesn’t quite work in terms of perspective despite at least three different approaches to try and fix a problem which essentially arose from problems with our location audio and no potential for access to the actor for ADR after the fact. In the end with this, we accepted we’d done our best and moved on as described above.

– 850 words

———————————————

Key Points –

Research of the film ‘Green Mile’ and it’s sound designer Mark Mangini – Planning & Research

  • To expand my knowledge of the theory and audio techniques deployed in the films influencing ‘George’, and in drama as a genre more generally.
    Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes

Reflection on specific aspects of the completed sound design of George informed by reference material and research – Application of skills and conduct in production

  • To judge the initial direction of and maintain the consistency of the overall tone of the audio team’s work on the piece, and liase with the director to ensure this is concurrent with their vision of the piece.
  • To manage the post-production workflow and direct the creative contributions of the audio team as efficiently as possible.
  • Develop creative, original, and innovative strategies within an audio production project.
  • Structure intellectually rigorous and coherent ideas to an advanced level in order to communicate ideas through the integration of form and content.
  • Individual reflection on learning and team role.

PLANNING – Sound Script Elements + Reflection

13421070 / / Audio Production, Individual Reflection, Planning

The sound script we devised and communicated to our client contained a number of ‘key’ audio scenes. This post will discuss a few of these and how they panned out or didn’t, as the case may be, and as such the post will make considerably more sense if tackled after you have watched the piece.

One of the main motifs of the sound design in ‘George’ was intended to be the sound of the outside world encroaching on the protaganist’s home as a metaphor for his level of anxiety or distress at any given point in the film. However, we rapidly discovered it is very easy for audio devices such as the sound of people passing by outside the walls of the kitchen to be distracting when there has been no visual suggestion of their source. In the end, we attempted to turn the constant traffic noise which plagued our location recordings (and which is, coincidentally, perfectly setup visually in the opening scene of the film and reinforced repeatedly throughout by fortuitous edits) to our advantage by using it to signify the threatening outside world encroaching on George’s anxious existence. In reflection, I think we convinced ourselves that this worked better than it did because we didn’t do enough detail work to the films atmosphere layers – whilst the outside does very much burst in on occasion, for me the question is ‘on what?’. That suggests I didn’t do enough to bring out the sound design of the base atmospheres, such as incorporating small details ala Green Mile. This is in line with Mangini’s idea of –

“…the sonic equivalent of LIGHT and SHADOW. I learned from Joe Dante how painters use a touch of blue to make white seem “whiter”. An old visual trick to give texture to something that is textureless. I extrapolated this idea to the silence of the MILE. To create silence I needed to “define” the space with little sounds that highlight the emptiness.” – (Mark Mangini).

George’s textures have plenty of shadow but not quite enough light, in my estimation.

The bread and butter scene is the most infamous of the project, and was initially supposed to be a chance for the film to hint at the dark past of it’s main character. We’d planned to refer to his previous, violent crime with the audio landscape around the slicing of a bread loaf by making the sounds associated with this action a little more visceral than realistic, and by subtly weaving the scene with screechs, yelps and whimpers in a process often referred to as ‘sweetening’. Unfortunately, this scene was axed due to health and safety evangelism on set and replaced with a shot of George buttering pre-sliced bread. We felt it would be inappropriate and off-putting to attempt to apply the same audio components to the new scene, feeling that no amount of audio work can add an undercurrent of menace to Kingsmill, and opted for the music cue becoming the focus of the scene.

Upon George’s final return to his home in the evening after the graveyard scene, we were asked to provide the sound of music being played at high volume through the walls of the house from next door (ostensibly by the teenagers who are introduced earlier in the film). We had developed a complex system of audio segues from one scene to another rooted in the idea of having ever-present music pumping through the walls, including morphing the bass thump of the beat into a heartbeat and then into a variation of our main score and a variety of interesting perspective shifts depending on George’s location in the house, as well as weaving further references into the music choices themselves, if possible. The entire plan proved unworkable as the directors failed to film any visual reference to a source for the music, and we collectively abandoned the idea in concord with the second director during post.

Finally, the BBC report playing on the radio after the opening credits was a late addition because we felt the scene was just too devoid of activity and needed something to invigorate it and give it a focus which didn’t overwhelm or detract from the very stilted visuals. Talk radio makes great audible wallpaper, and we requested and were granted use of the Radio 4 piece in the context of this film by it’s producer at the eleventh hour (though not before recording our own re-scripted version in a similar style to get around the potential copyright problem). The dialogue in the R4 piece encapsulates some of the premise of the film right at it’s outset, and very much supports the story and character development of the piece.

In reflection on these points, I think it can safely be said that no battleplan survives contact with the vicissitudes of filming and I found it necessary to be extremely flexible as some of the plans were forced to change, without compromising the overall audio arcs and themes of the piece.

– 800 words

—————————————

KEY POINTS

Planned aspects of the sound script – Planning, Application of skills and conduct in production

  • To judge the initial direction of and maintain the consistency of the overall tone of the audio team’s work on the piece, and liase with the director to ensure this is concurrent with their vision of the piece.
  • Develop creative, original, and innovative strategies within an audio production project.
  • Structure intellectually rigorous and coherent ideas to an advanced level in order to communicate ideas through the integration of form and content.