Guest Lecture – Grant Bridgeman – 11/11/15

Grant Bridgeman is a BAFTA nominated location sound recordist and sound designer.

This extra teaching session with him was largely based around the students in attendance asking questions as many of us (including our group) had been recording on location several times over the previous couple of weeks.

In our case this was particularly useful – Grant was able to answer a question which had been raised during our shoot about working with boomed microphones in wet or damp conditions, amongst others, specifically how long this equipment tends to be able to manage in wet weather before performance is effected. Not very long is the answer, and Grant provided several practical options for mitigating issues caused by adverse weather. He also discussed some methods of managing less than professional crews, some tips for handling moving shots, and the critical importance of preparation, reconnaissance and early communication of potential issues when working on location with film crews.

He also covered some of the intricacies of the various microphones often used for location work, and gave several tips for getting better results out of tricky situations.

It was extremely useful to be able to run our recent experiences in the field past a professional with 20+ years experience, and the information we took away from this session has already proven valuable in our planning of the location audio for the remainder of ‘George’.

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KEY POINTS

Professional feedback on technical process for location recording and on process for managing tricky working relationships –
Contribution + Role, Individual reflection on learning and team role, Application of skills and conduct in production.
Learning Outcomes
To contribute extensively to the practicalities of creating and recording music for, and of recording location sound for the piece.
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

 

Guest Lecture – Jez Riley-French – 02/11/15

Jez Riley-French is a field recordist and sound artist who’s audio work stems from an interest in microphone and recording technology and a naturalist and durationalist approach to recording.

He records the sound of “mediums other than air” using contact microphones and hydrophones (amongst others) and likens recording sounds of the natural world as they occur to improvisational music, in that the results are relative to many variables and always surprising. He also notes that little is really known about environmental sounds citing examples he demonstrated of recording orchestra mediated by the buildings they perform in.

The demonstrations of some of his work were quite unusual, and he made the point that some of his work has been picked up for use in films and games with a leaning towards sci-fi. He argues this is because they tend to be otherworldly, but retain a basis in reality. He believes that getting the audio right at source is critical for game and film sound design, and that too much EQ is the addition of an unreal element to the sound, equating this with a ‘loss’ of the natural.

Jez made the point that exhibiting sound art can be difficult and is relatively underdeveloped and misunderstood at the level of institutions, warning that sound artists should be learn to be forceful about the requirements for their pieces. He also commented on the barriers to entry for the sound art audience as being the unskilled curation, and that many artists don’t have a strong artistic voice and are very reactive.

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PLANNING – Location Selection and Recce

Location selection for George was well underway by the time we agreed to get involved but, as a local to Lincoln, I was able to make a couple of suggestions.

We decided to make George’s home a residential house which is currently empty of tenants I’m aware of. This seemed sensible because the original suggestion was a student house of one of the crew and I felt that an empty house would present less obstacles for dressing and less likelihood of interruption to the filming process, and a more controllable environment for us to work in in general. The film crew concurred with this point of view upon seeing the house, as well as feeling it was a stylistic improvement that fitted the script more naturally.

We next performed a preliminary reconnaissance of all the locations bar one, as per Grant Bridgeman’s repeated admonitions in our earlier lectures.

The sound team and I performed a reconnaissance of the house from the perspective of problems for the location audio and the obvious issue, with a reasonably busy road outside and old style, single glazed windows, was traffic noise. This noticeably worsened at different times of day, and led to us advising that the few scenes with dialogue were scheduled in the quieter periods.

The graveyard in the script was also checked over well in advance, and again suffered from traffic noise even though the shoot location itself within the context of a large site was as far from the road as practicable. We also noted the lack of cover from the weather, and the relative distance and inaccessibility of the location if the crew attempt to reach it on foot, which was being mooted at the time. Again the timing of the shoot was clearly to be an issue, as it had an effect on both light levels for working and traffic volume.

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KEY POINTS + LEARNING OUTCOMES

Reconnaissance of locations – Planning, Process ManagementContribution.
Learning Outcome – To contribute extensively to the practicalities of creating and recording music for, and of recording location sound for the piece.

Guest Lecture – Lol Hammond, Music Supervisor – 05/10/15

Lol Hammond is a music supervisor for film based in London and working for Vertigo Films, a production and distribution company responsible for award winning films such as Bronson and Monsters. He began life as a DJ and in events, before moving into film music in 2001.

Fundamentally, Lol’s job is to  commission or select and gain rights for the use of suitable music for pictures and his lecture to the audio production 3rd year covered some of the practicalities of this work, the key relationships he considers most important, and some of the intricacies and problems associated with his position.

Broadly speaking he described three categories of audio with which he has involvement –

Source Music – Previously completed music tracks, often previously released elsewhere.

Composition – Music created specifically for the picture.

Sound Design – Audio work done in post.

Hammond describes his position as a filter or intermediary between various parties and the most important relationships as those he develops with a given film director, editor and composer and to some extent the Performers Rights Society with whom he interfaces regularly to clear source music.

Discussing this use of source music, Lol explained that a lot of his time is spent securing rights to use specific tracks from their publishers and record companies. The average price at the level he works is generally £3 – £4000 per ‘side’, with a side defined as a party requiring payment from the agreement. Generally speaking, the bigger the name of the artist the larger the required fee will be with examples of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles as particularly costly. Cost for licenses is often related to the overall budget of the film, and specific use of the music within the context of the picture also effects the cost to the user – with requests for use in trailers or credits correspondingly more expensive – and fees also differ for short and small budget films as opposed to major features, with the former being more negotiable.

However, Lol pointed out that buying licenses can become complicated when dealing with source music due to variation in rights holders across different territories and that, given the long tail nature of film distribution and income, it is always advisable to negotiate rights ‘in perpetuity’ rather than for a limited period of time. Artists with a higher profile also tend to exercise more control over where their music is used, though this can also be useful if a music supervisor has an existing relationship with the artist or their management directly. He also points out that a well known piece of music can easily shift the audience focus away from the film as a whole if used.

Returning to cost, Lol also suggested that offering rights to release the movies soundtrack can sometimes be used as leverage to reduce initial costs of licensing.

Moving on to music composed specifically for a picture, Hammond refers to himself as ‘hands on’ and as drawing on a varied pool of composers as opposed to sticking with a preferred composer which is sometimes the case with other film companies. He works to guide the composer based on the directors preferences, and stressed that writing music to the picture itself is critically important when composing. Finally, he touched on a complexity of using artists-as-composers in the context of higher profile acts, which can lead to issues when making edits after the fact or requesting stem audio. On the positive side, he pointed out that specifically composed works can also be leveraged for extra revenue via publishing for the production house, citing the soundtrack for Monsters as a specific example.

Practically speaking, Lol’s work usually begins with the receipt of an assembly cut which he then watches and makes preliminary decisions as to what broad ‘type’ of songs may fit the cues before offering up three or four choices for a potential sound to the director, which he refers to as ‘temp tracks’. These choices are then refined down to a specific track or track section. A danger here is that director can easily become accustomed to the temp track and it can become difficult to substitute this for better choices.

For me, the key practical points from this lecture were that a music supervisor should always work for the film, ignoring their personal preferences, and that diplomacy and relationship management are absolutely key skills in Lol’s business.

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