Tag: sound design

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

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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.

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

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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.

 

RESEARCH – Dialogue Editing For Motion Picture – J. Purcell

13421070 / / Research, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

The original script for George contained a great deal more dialogue than the final piece as it is presented, but I’d already embarked on the excellent Dialogue Editing For Motion Pictures – A Guide To The Invisible Art by John Purcell before these changes took place. Some of the information I gleaned from the book was useful whilst working on George, nonetheless, and I’ve precis’d a couple of things I learnt along with how I used them below.

Dialogue panning + depth

“People interact differently with dialogue than with music, sound effects, backgrounds, or Foley. We’re both more critical and more imaginative with dialogue, and when it’s panned, we’re not the least bit forgiving,” – (Purcell, 2008, 174)

Purcell dangers of panned dialogue above, and admonishes us to resist the temptation of ‘hyper-realism’ in the sense of placing the dialogue where the character is in the shot, simply because it doesn’t work for the audience (accurate, but annoying to be precise). He also points out that panning the dialogue will also pan any room tone on the dialogue, which is incredibly disconcerting, and that it can have seriously effects when mixing for theatre’s where the audience may be sat in a large area where it can alter the experience of the dialogue for different quadrants of the stereo field.

I have stuck to the mono/central rule with the dialogue editing in George except on one occasion when a line is spoken off camera. This line is slightly panned to the position where we presume the speaker would be, and I did this because the line seemed to clash strangely with some very intricate foley work shortly before it that places the emphasis on another characters movements.

His concept of ‘depth’ in dialogue is also useful. He refers to scenes in which every sound is given equal weight as ‘flat’, and applies this to the dialogue specifically. For him,  it is about keeping the tracks around the dialogue clean and uncompromised by stray effects which may remove the breathing room of the voice, and about dulling or brightening the overall tones it is surrounded by at crucial points to bring the nuance to the fore. This can, for example, enable you to focus the audience on one character in a group. He also believes that micromanagement of faders is crucial to achieving this, that compressors and limiters cannot make up for these and that a proper dialogue premix is crucial. I didn’t apply this level of work to the mix on George because there simply wasn’t enough dialogue (or enough problems with the dialogue) to warrant the investment of time by the end of the process.

The telephone split

“…another convention in film language allows us to hear both sides of the conversation, as though we were listening in,” (Purcell, 2008, 180)

Purcell’s step by step guide to editing a telephone split was useful to the answer phone scene in George for one small nugget of information. He points out that it’s necessary to edit the two dialogue-sides of a scene with two sets of room tone, which I’d never considered before.

This came about naturally with this scene in George (which is not strictly a conversation anyway), since the tone at the end of the line is literally recorded in another room and it’s designed to sound as though it’s coming from the phone in George’s hand to an extent.

Production FX (PFX)

Another useful industry concept introduced to me by this book is that of ‘production FX’. These are all the sounds which exist on the dialogue tracks but are not dialogue, and the book goes on to give an overview of the practicalities of using these as distinct from the standard procedure for the effects tracks. It is important, for example, to seperate these if a film is intended to dubbed into another language, as it saves a later mixer having to open the film’s dialogue stem audio. Many of these techniques can also help to wring the best out of any effects the picture editor may have added to the version the dialogue mixer receives, which are also often classed as PFX.

George’s track lay utilised these techniques, with PFX built into a subsection of our SFX section.

– 700 Words

KEY POINTS

Precis of specific points from book on dialogue editing – 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.

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

13421070 / / 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

RESEARCH: Supervising Sound Editor

13421070 / / Audio Production, Individual Reflection, Role - Supervising Sound Editor

“Good sound design enhances the listening experience, but doesn’t get in the way of the story.”  – Eloise Whitmore

My role for the production of George is that of a Supervising Sound Editor. This is a hands-on role with involvement in the cutting and editing of dialogue, ADR, foley and special effects, as well as the oversight of the ‘deliverables’ for the film such as the various mixes required by the director, and making sure the mix meets any stipulated technical specifications. Responsibilities also extend to the sound budget, the work-flow and priorities of the sound team on the mix, and appointing and managing those responsible for each aspect of the post production editing.

 “On the average A-picture the first post production sound person brought onto the film is the supervising sound editor, who not only directs and coordinates the creative contributions of the post-production sound staff but also must handle all the related administrative duties like scheduling mixes. The tendency is to bring the supervising editor on earlier and earlier. The main reason is the changing demands for sound in early screenings. This practice has engendered the greatest changes in the logistics of post-production sound in the last two decades,” – (FilmSound.org)

Liasing with the artistic leads on the film (usually the director) is critical to the role, and supervising sound editors often double as sound-designers, directing the overall artistic audio tone of the picture to a greater or lesser extent. Again, this aspect of the role is relevant to ‘George’, as I am partially responsible alongside my colleagues in translating the wishes of the director into a functional sound-script and ultimately into a working soundtrack.

This makes the role very variable based on the scale of the film in question, and in the case of ‘George’ – a zero budget student-film – I felt the creative liason, sound design and the hands-on editing would likely be the most relevant aspects. ADR, for example, was unlikely to be required for a script which has ended up containing very little dialogue yet had engaged the services of a full location audio team, and the audio team personnel and roles were largely dictated by our modules requirements.It also became clear during preproduction (based on the original institutional deadlines for the work, at least) that the audio work on this film would need to be directed carefully and, as the evident lack of concept and storyboarding came to light, the liason with the director particularly would need to begin as any possible headstart on the more complicated aspects of the sound design would be necessary in order to be able to condense relatively large requirements for a piece into a short period of time.

This is somewhat at odds with some conceptions of the role in the wider industry as it tends to begin at picture lock and the beginning of post production for films with little budget, but this is usually due to the constraints of said budget. Larger budgets enable longer contracts and more responsibilities and involvement for a supervising sound editor, and whilst ‘George’ has no budget it was possible to begin work on it early due to the institutional context.

Forward planning and preparation is absolutely critical in audio work of all stripes and especially in the relatively complex world of moving image with it’s many interlocking roles working in a production line sense towards the end product. In the context of my post production role, this is important when considering the necessity for ample source material to work with in the edit phase, and I wanted to participate in the location recording of this project partially to make sure we collected plenty of useful wild-track audio for later use in our atmospheres. This documentary on the film Australia opens with the Supervising Sound Editor / Designer Wayne Pashley discussing his work on the film, the set of which he was able to visit in order to capture the location sounds because ‘…there’s nothing like it’, referring to the unique nature of the sounds of the landscape in Australia. Whilst the locations for ‘George’ are not in anyway similar to that production, I think it would be useful to collect ambience for later use in a similar way.

I’ve examined some of the work of a couple of well known supervising sound editors, one that is relevant to George and another who concentrates mainly on sci-fi and the fantastic, which is my preferred own specialism, in the form of Richard King. The work he directed on Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a personal favourite, and I would love to try to weave some of the nuance of his work on that film into this one in some small way, specifically the discussion of ‘transitioning’ the audience into a dream sequence from this interview –

‘…we also altered the pitch of all the real-world sounds when we transition from level to level (much like the watch ticks change speed in the first sequence). So all the sounds slow and change and become a different sound in the next sequence – interior jet roar becomes traffic when we transition to the first dream level, for instance.’ – http://designingsound.org/

This interview also supports the notion above of recording as much as possible on set, though not at the cost to the impact of the audio, as King points out:

‘…It’s so important to get the sounds which you feel and imagine could be there. There’s always a lot of manipulation afterward of course, but recording new raw material is so important. I’d love to record everything every time, but the most important thing is to find the sound which provides that feeling you’re looking for regardless of where it comes from.’ – http://designingsound.org/

Richard King is soon to receive an MPSE career award for his contribution to cinema audio.

Mark Mangini’s work is discussed in this post covering the influence of Green Mile on the sound design of ‘George’.

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 – 1000 words

KEY POINTS –

Overview of supervising sound editor role – Research, Individual reflection on learning and team role.

  • Assess the technical requirements of a production to inform the selection of appropriate tools, techniques and processes.
  • Examine and implement professional practices in their production work in relation to professional contexts, clearances, ownership, copyright and commissioning.