2015 – Film Audio Project – SEM A

AUDIO CONSTRUCTION – Final Scene Foley

13421070 / January 27, 2016 / Audio Production

A waterloo moment in George was the sound of the threatening teenagers spray-painting the house and then running away right at the end. I felt the perspective for the design here this should support the camera’s and be heard from inside the house.

There follows a quick, and largely photographic, precis of the various methods we used to try and achieve this.

Location Sound

The scene was shot multiple times, and we collected a considerable amount of location audio from multiple angles and with multiple mics. However, this was blighted by two things. Firstly, it was raining, but the picture doesn’t look as though it is in the final cut. Secondly, it was roughly 5:30pm on a week day, and traffic on the road outside the house was relatively busy at this time meaning we’d collected almost no clean takes of some fairly subtle sounds on review.

The stereo mic position above did collect some unexpectedly excellent stereo fields of the cars passing on the road below, however.

First foley + sfx attempt

Turning to ‘easy’ methods in post, I tried to use a combination of sound effects from the library for the spray and cans and a walled off foley mic in various positions and concrete slab for the footsteps.

Sadly, this didn’t have anything like the desired perspective effect.

Foley on Set

So, we returned to the set approximately three months after the shoot with a portable recorder and reran the action in location foley. Once again, traffic and circumstances conspired against us, as we pitched up during the bell ringing at the Cathedral, which is clearly audible across uphill Lincoln. This, alongside the fact that the set (an uninhabited residential house) is very old and not sound proof in any sense, meant that the audio we captured inside with the front door closed was also of the wrong perspective, as it sounded more like the action was outside and still very close.

Solution

On our return from the above we recorded one more attempt at this foley on campus, through a large, closed double glazed glass door at the back of media loans. This finally furnished usable audio for the scene, once we’d cleaned the internal air conditioning sound out of it with EQ.

KEY POINTS

Problem solving for foley perspective – Application of skills and conduct in production

To manage the post-production workflow and contribute substantially to the sound design, construction and editing of the piece.

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

13421070 / January 27, 2016January 27, 2016 / 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

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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.

AUDIO CONSTRUCTION – The ‘Bread + Butter’ Song

13421070 / January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 / Audio Production, Individual Reflection, Learning Outcomes, Research

The story of the song on the radio in George’s ‘Bread and Butter’ scene is worthy of mention as it’s an audio device demonstrating use of diagetic to non-diagetic audio, an example of which exists in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and which was developed over the course of post-production in a way which better served the story than the original plan for the scene.

This was one of the few music cues that was supplied by George’s original director, requesting the use of Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’ as the trigger for one of the characters fits of weeping, which was initially included as a nod to the movie Green Mile. The song is potentially out of copyright because it was written over 70 years ago in 1935, but as it was written for the film Top Hat there was some question as to whether copyrights could still be active, though research rapidly uncovered that Irving Berlin retained the copyrights for the songs in the film rather than the commissioning employer assuming them, in something of a landmark case. We were in the process of trying to clear this matter up with PRS when the first director departed the project.

As such, and precisely because I didn’t want the production team getting too attached to the inclusion of Fred and Ginger’s Cheek to Cheek (and because our original temp music for this scene was the Star War’s Cantina Band theme), I subsituted a temp track – ‘One More Kiss Dear’ by Vangelis from the soundtrack to the film Blade Runner – in a scratch mix I supplied to the new, incoming director before Christmas. I’d selected this track because I felt the lyric supported the story of ‘George’, it being suggestive of a final seperation between lovers.

The new director became enamoured with it, saying she much preferred this piece or something very like it to replace the original music cue and so we found ourselves trying to license a piece of music which was definitely copyrighted for our film’s use.

Initially the soundtrack used 35 seconds of the piece for quite an important aspect of the film which is very much brought to the audience’s attention. We felt that we were unlikely to get license to use the original piece in that context (and PRS obliquely agreed) and as such the music supervisor felt that constructing a cover of the piece was the best way to go. She made this enquiry to PRS, and received the following –

Our music supervisor deconstructed the track to its piano component to create a guide, and we rerecorded the song’s other instrumentation seperately. I played the bass and we asked a local vocalist to sing the version for us before I recorded and mixed the minute or so of the piece we’d created, of which we ended up using 28 seconds, and which is available in this post. Furthermore, our use of the piece in the transition from diagetic to non-diagetic audio can be construed as a nod to the opening of Shawshank Redemption which uses a very similar device.

I learned three important things from this whole process:

“For many composers, working with a temp track is the creative equivalent of a straightjacket. After weeks or months of cutting the film to that amazing John Williams theme, the director has usually fallen in love with his or her temp score and nothing else will do.” – Trueherostudio.com

First, temporary music tracks are to be used sparingly. We were warned about this phenomenon in Lol Hammond’s guest lecture and this scene proved to be no exception to the rule, but in this case I think the result was worth the effort of recording an entirely new cover of the song and this was likely a simpler process than composing a new song in a similar vein which would then have needed recording anyway.

Secondly, I think it would have been more efficient to pick up the phone and call the PRS with our requests. We were dealing with this particular cue towards the end of a very short period of post production and, whilst fairly prompt, the combination of the email turnaround time and a couple of miscommunications as we tried to clarify the situation was inefficient.

The final thing I’ve taken away from this is that Star Wars Cantina Theme can brighten up ANY scene –

https://youtu.be/boPpfiaUNsw

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Key Points

Research and contact with PRS – 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.
Examine and implement professional practices in their production work in relation to professional contexts, clearances, ownership, copyright and commissioning.
Comply with legal and ethical codes of conduct; health & safety regulations.

Involvement with production of cover version for the soundtrack – Application of skills and conduct in production

To contribute extensively to the practicalities of creating and recording music for, and of recording location sound for the piece.
To have a good degree of creative involvement in the conception and direction of the soundtrack for the piece.
Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes

Reflection on the process – Individual reflection on learning and team role.

Critically reflect and evaluate individual learning outcomes

RESEARCH – Mix Requirements + Final Mix

13421070 / January 24, 2016January 26, 2016 / Audio Production, Contribution, Learning Outcomes, Research, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

“Mix Stems are used to create the final print masters for film and high-end TV productions…If done correctly, mix stems will combine at unity gain without any adjustment.” – (Shepherd, Pro Tools for Video, Film and multimedia)

Our client did not specify any particular requirements for their files or mastering levels, so I suggested we deliver a single stereo mix and component mixes of dialogue, sfx and music tracks, to which they agreed. We also agreed with them to mix these using the BBC technical guidelines for audio which seemed appropriate for a drama of this type. An alternative would be to mix for theatre’s, given the intention to potentially show the piece at film festivals,or to the technical specifications of an average film festival. However, few of the major festivals I researched (including BFI’s and Canne) offer any specific technical guidance on audio mix levels, and it is difficult to mix for a large room without calibrating your mix environment to do so, and I’m unsure of the calibration in the LSM Sound Theatre.

Though my colleagues were still dealing with some of the specifics of the construction of our audio later in the piece, I spent much of our final two days on the project master-mixing each scene up to these standards and finessing the transitions. Again, this is not an ideal situation but we’d set ourselves the personal deadline of end of play on Saturday 23rd January to have completed the construction and mix of our hand-in version of ‘George’.

The BBC guidelines above informed the mix of ‘George’, along with a passing reference to the EBU R128 recommendations, also mentioned above. Each master auxiliary – music / dialogue / sfx / foley – had it’s own set of automated processing, which was generally lightly compressed and / or limited in some cases. This fed another gently compressed master bus compressor. I’ve tried to be careful with the compressors as George’s audio is very dynamic – some scenes have little in the way of loud action, others are much more heavily layered – creating a ‘blocky’ mix visually. I wanted to retain this dynamic artistically, because backed off atmospheres and near-silence helps maintain a sense of stillness in some scenes, but balance this with the technical requirements above, specifically that nothing peaks above 6 PPM, and that the focus points of the mix remain roughly within the levels above.

Here’s a visual representation of the music mix structure in protools, blue tracks are the music components, orange the aux subs, leading to the burgundy master fader –

The final point in this process came after mixdown, with a thorough mono / stereo check of the final stereo wav before the audio was delivered to the director.

– Circa 400 Words

Key Points –

Interaction with the director to discover delivery requirements – Process Management

To successfully manage the audio team’s interaction with film’s director, editor and producer on a practical and creative level, and ensure the audio team’s work is delivered on time and to a good standard.
Application of skills and conduct in production

Research and application of delivery standards in the mix – Contribution, Research

Comply with legal and ethical codes of conduct; health & safety regulations.
Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes.
Application of skills and conduct in production

Conducting the mix – Contribution

To manage the delivery of the soundtrack at various stages of the production along with relevant paperwork, to the director and producer.

RESEARCH – Naked by Mike Leigh + How This Informed ‘George’

13421070 / January 22, 2016January 28, 2016 / Individual Reflection, Research, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

Mike Leigh’s Naked is a British, semi improvised drama starring David Thewlis. It is a favourite of mine in the drama genre, and I thought it could be useful to study it’s audio dimension with reference to ‘George’.

Most aspects of the piece are very realistically constructed, and the audio as no exception to this rule. I felt this would give us some useful pointers for the sound design of George’s static sections.

Graham Fuller, interviewing Mike Leigh, pointed out that he is ‘economical with the camera movements in his films,’, and watching the scene below we can see how audio is used to enhance the power of the actor’s performance where the camerawork simply allows it to happen. The audio however tells a different story, walking the line between enhancing the mise en scene without compromising the realism of the environments, with the objects that are active (the postcard, for example) in any shot are given a sound focus to draw attention to the actors interactions with them. The postcard signifies an aspect of the two character’s shared history in the story, and the audio is used to draw attention to this, but without compromising realism of the scene.

We attempted a similar thing with the radio in the second scene (post titles) of George. The report being broadcast from the radio (cleared for use from the BBC’s The Report on Radio 4) pertains directly to the story of our character, and slips in and out of the audio ‘shot’ throughout the scene as well as remaining tied to camera perspective.

As for further observations on Naked, dialogue is a massive part of the audio and in most cases the rest of the scene is very much subordinated to it, and it is here that it digresses most substantially from our project. What is useful however, is the way the people’s bodies are put into the scenes even when they’re not speaking through the sound of mouth movements, breathing and the general sound of the physical. Considering the fact that, as post production of ‘George’ advanced we realised that the main character’s lack of dialogue (and corresponding lack of bodily movements etc in our location takes) meant the character often doesn’t seem ‘present’ in the film, I decided we should pass over the entire film and record an extra track of these. Most of the sounds the character makes in the film are additional if they are not dialogue.

The film had no specific supervising sound editor, but it’s dubbing mixer – the person who would have handled the final mix of the various audio aspects – was Sue Baker, who apparently worked in sound design for film fairly sporadically from the 1980’s to 2000, but worked as a supervising sound editor on both Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral. The scene from the former below is interesting from a props / dialogue mix perspective (ignoring the music) – A sense of threat and claustrophobia is suggested by the close perspective of the moves and breathing of the characters.

– 461 Words

Key Points –

Research of the film ‘Naked’ by Mike Leigh – 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