Vol I, No.2, April, 1989
SHOOT FIRST-MAKE NOISE LATER
Film directors and editors are concerned with putting the best possible combination of shots together to tell their story. The visual side of the story has the highest priority while a production crew is working. Angles, lighting, the look of the actors on a set, camera moves, stunts... All this film making is about stage craft and photography. Because there is rarely time and money to be spent worrying about the final sonic effect of a scene at this stage, people concentrate on Production as one phase, and Post-Production later. Just like Production, "Post" always invoIves problem-solving! There are plenty of visual concerns in Post-Production, including color-correction and color-timing, simple opticals such as fades and dissolves, and of course the fascinating field of special visual effects. But just as a film might have a unique or stylized "look," it can have its own individual sound.
TALK IS CHEAP
For the most part, dialogue recorded on set or on location will be as clean and clear as the production mixer can make it. S/he is often work ing under trying circumstances: Generators whir away keeping night scenes lit; Airplanes fly over the desert when people shoot westerns; Actors walk around on painted floors that look like marble, but sound like loose plywood. Microphones are pointed and mixed to get the best of dialogue. But even professional mics don't hear footsteps, props, background sounds the way we do, selectively. Also, when shots are edited together, at each splice in the picture natural background sounds change their level and texture radically. So, the sound shot in production may only become a "guide track." It may become integrated with the final, carefully crafted tracks, be completely replaced by them, or it may stand alone, the original "live" sound being the best artistic choice for a scene. The editors and mixers must take a special approach to smoothing out and enhancing everything audible. While even a simple added sound effect (say, opening a door off-screen,) can imply a great deal about character motivations, or affect the drama with more suspense, a soundtrack has to be technically seamless first, so the audience can suspend their disbelief.
THREE PARTS TO THE TRACK
Dialogue, sound effects, and music will all be treated separately by a team of editors and specialists, so they can be carefully mixed into the final stereo track. Dialogue will be handled both as Production Dialogue (recorded on the set) and as ADR (post-recorded in a studio.) Sound effects will be cut and arranged from a library of already recorded effects, and some will be custom-recorded for particular scenes. Foley sound effects will be custom-recorded in sync to picture by a Foley artist, who specializes in performing sounds such as actors' footsteps, cloth movement, or making special sounds for props in the film which the sound editors could never reproduce. Editors then sync and rearrange that performance for further remixing. Music will be composed, recorded with- and without sync picture, and also edited and rearranged for further mixing. All this goes on according to restraints of budgets and scheduling.
CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
Ideally, the film editor and director should complete editing the basic flow of scenes before all the sound people can work. But in reality, reels continue to be re-cut all during the sound work, necessitating expensive re-doing of nearly completed sound tracks. The sound is always enslaved to the editorial continuity of the picture, so each time a scene is trimmed, even by a frame, the equivalent frame has to be taken out of a growing number of sound materials.
Finally, the sound we experience in the theater is a blend of elements crafted to lead us through the movie's story, just as the camera compositions lead our eye. The special contributions of dialogue, effects, and mixing weave a fabric representing a sonic "stage" for the story. These crafts, when at their best under a director with good ears, help any movie to achieve its unique style and quality. As this news letter progresses, we'll follow specific film projects through their sound-work, and see how it all comes together.
PATCHING UP LAWRENCE AGAIN
PART 2
Last ish, award-winning Sound Supervisor Richard Anderson related dialogue and mixing challenges for the re-release of 1962's classic 70mm Lawrence of Arabia .
MSNL: So who was the music editor on this restoration?
RA: "You're talkin' to him! And we had a hell of a time because we didn't have any music masters. So we didn't add any new music to the new sequences, but there was always patching up to do for the new cut. For instance, in the new scene where we reconstructed the dialogue using alternate angles, the British officers are sitting in a tent discussing the upcoming campaign. Well, there was supposed to be a British military band marching by in the background. What does the British Army have that the American Army doesn' t? Drums and Bagpipes! So I had this added footage and only a little of the band, and I had to figure out ways to extend it. The only thing I had was part of a scene from the shortened version that had the music in it. I had to find a piece that was long enough that I could make a loop out of it..."
MSNL: To reprint it over and over to run it under the scene?
RA: "Exactly, and so it would sound natural, of course. I was really struggling with extending music through this whole project. In those days, they dubbed everything to one piece of mag film for stereo movies. There were no D.M.&E's (Dialogue, Music, & Effects; separate stems kept as we have now."
MSNL: Perhaps there were for mono films, a 3-stripe mag with mono stripes of Dia, Music, and FX, but not for stereo?
RA: "No, everything was kept on one roll of mag for each reel, so each stripe would represent a speaker position, so the Dia, Music, and FX are all married. Making separate stereo "stems" with multipIe recorders is fairly new. When we did More American Graffiti it was dubbed to one piece of film. I remember because years later Universal called up and said 'We're trying to make a TV version and we don't have the rights to some of these songs.' If you remember, it was a multiple-record type of music track. They had theatrical rights to the records, but not all the TV rights. So they wanted to substitute songs for this version, so they said to me 'Do you have an FX and Dialogue version?' So I said 'No.' And I still don't know what they did. Well, they probably could have remixed it from the pre-dubs they had at Lucasfilm."
MSNL: You're talking about remixing FX and Dialogue just to change some songs and keep the lawyers happy. That might have changed a lot of the mix. Been a different soundtrack. And the director probably would not have been involved in that remix. So on Lawrence , you had the director avallable, and were reconstructing for aesthetic reasons. What differences would come up between sound effects today and twenty five years earlier?
RA: "Winston Ryder, the Grand Old Man of British sound effects, had done a beautiful job on Lawrence in 1962. It's a great achievement in the style of the time. You have to
understand how sound effects style has changed. Today, we tend to cover all the little things in sound effects a lot more thoroughly."
MSNL: Every move is foleyed, the backgrounds are multi-layered, effects are sweetened...
RA: "Yes, and even a great picture like Lawrence is thinner than that. It has a lot of looping, and you see wind and stuff but you hear this real quiet track. There is a good reason why contemporary tracks are denser, busier. We have, with high-tech recording equipment and noise reduction systems, the ability to layer a lot more stuff without building up unpleasant noise and losing clarity. In the old days of optical sound you just couldn't do too much. Even in early magnetic stereo there was no noise reduction, and you had a lot of tape hiss. Also, I think having separate speakers for different sounds tends to make things read more clearly.
MSNL: How did you actually recover existing sound FX from the original tracks?
RA: "Today, we tend to put dialogue all in the center speaker, and effects and music more on the left and right (and center.) So if it had been a modern mix, I could have swiped some FX from the side channels when I needed to extend, say, background FX. But I discovered that the way they mixed dialogue, although louder in the center, all the channels had some dialogue in them. It was quieter in the left-center and right-center positions, quieter still in the extreme left and right, but it was there. So I couldn't get 'fill' material from the sides."
MSNL: An example?
RA: "Well, there was a scene near the beginning where we first see Lawrence. If you see the short version, you wonder who he is, before he goes on this mission. We know he's a lieutenant in Cairo, but what the hell does he do? Well, in the original version we see he's a cartographer. He's drawing a map. That was a scene where we kept going back and forth between the original and the added material. All the added material was part of the mono optical track we had. In the 6-track version, on the sides you hear the hawkers in the bazaar and all that kind of stuff. So this 'Arab Walla' in the six-track is on the left, although it's married to some of the dialogue. So when you're in the original section it's on the left, but when you're in the new section it collapses toward the center. I may be the only one that it bothers. I tried, but I could never find a piece long enough that I could loop and make it work."
MSNL: So no new sound effects were added? No foley?
RA: "The original foley was very light. We did foley the new sequences where there was no track, where we added dialogue from alternate angles. One of the scenes where we added voices, where Allenby is talking to Lawrence on a porch, was an area where 1 lucked out: There was an M&E for that section. I matched it up, and, by God, got it to fit. It was just Cairo traffic and footsteps, but I managed to get it in sync. The interesting thing is that Allenby's wearing these knee-high riding boots. And he gets up and walks around and there's hardly any footsteps. It's there, but it's real low, even though he has these big, clumpy boots. That was the mixing style. One of the things I decided to do, in deference to the original film, is to restore the film, not "improve" it. So whatever sound was in the original, I would go with it. When I did have to add extra sound effects, if I couldn't get them out of scenes in the existing movie, things like camels walking or camels getting up or generic battle effects, if I couldn't do that, then I tried to get library effects that matched that era."
MSNL: How would they be different?
RA: "Recording of effects in that era, say, gunshots or winds, was much narrower range. It would have been sacrilege to use a Raiders gunshot, even though I think they're very dynamic gunshots, so I stuck with FX from the studio libraries of that period. New recordings would have stuck out like a sore thumb. To me it would have been the sound effects equivalent of colorizing."
MSNL: I assume the rerecording mixers felt the same way.
RA: "You bet. Lawrence was remixed by Gregg Landaker, at Goldwyn Sound, with Steve Maslow mixing on some days. Gregg made two versions: A six-track Dolby "spread" version (unlike the original six-track discrete) for most big-market theaters, and a four-track Dolby optical version for all others in 35mm. Of course that's the "4-2-4" encoding to two matrixed tracks, so when the video releases of this 220 minute version comes out, you'll be able to decode the center and surrounds if you have a decoder."
MSNL: So this was a pleasant job?
RA: "Oh. Sir David Lean was wonderful! The man is wonderful! There are so many powerful directors who want to control everything, and relate really badly to people they need to share creativity with. But he was such a gentleman, and always interested and open to our ideas. You would make a suggestion and he would respect you as the expert in your field. That's rare these days. We made this whole new version, and then Sir David wanted to make a few further changes. Some of the new/old/new material we put back in, he wanted to trim a little. They had very little time to do this show originally. They finished shooting in something like October of 1962 and they had to show the movie in December to the Queen, or something. This is a 26-reel show! Apparently, they had all the dubbing editors in England tied up for this and told them 'Now for the duration, this is where you're going to be living, in this hotel across from the studio.' It's a wonder the show got done. My guess is that they were under such pressure to finish the film, there wasn't time for Lean to play with it editorially as much as he would have liked to do. So now he's made his version."
Columbia Pictures' Lawrence of Arabia was directed by David Lean from a screenplay by Robert Bolt and produced by Sam Spiegel. The restoration was produced by Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten.
IT'S NOT ALL HIGH-TECH
Cracker jack first assistant Destiny Borden's workbench illustrates organization of tracks is hard work, key to following pix changes before final mix.
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CONGRATULATIONS
to Oscar nominees for Best Sound. ( Bird, Die Hard, Gorillas in the Mist, Mississippi Burning, Roger Rabbit, ) and Best Sound Effects Editing ( Die Hard, Willow, and Roger Rabbit. ) More later .....
Next issue,
looking forward to a speculative glance at movies slated for release in '89. Join us in a wild guess test about which will have great sound, which won't.
NOMENCLATURE DEP'T.
We're fed up to here reading in consumer hardware mags the awkward phrases VIDEO/AUDIO, VID/AUDIO, and the dreaded "VAUDIO." Come on, fellahs! When you pushed the old Kodak Pageant projector around your grammer school in 1957, it was "Audio-Visual" gear. It still is, rotating heads, digital memories and all, and we think "A/V" is the perfect shorthand phrase!
SCOREBOARD
GOOD EVENING
REET! REET! REET! REET! Flashes of curtain and knife. Blood-stained water racing down a shower drain. Bernard Herrmann's chilling music for Hitchcock's Psycho was as much a revelation in 1960 as it would be today. It has become as much a part of our language as the DEEDLE DEEDLE of The Twilight Zone , Why? First, Herrman used only strings. No woodwinds. No brass. No percussion. Just strings. In a 1971 interview, he revealed that this ingenious strategy was to "complement the black and white photography ...with a black and white sound." But he used them in a way that was new to film music - - by cleverly exploiting their cold and piercing qualities and by avoiding the traditional romantic Hollywood sound. Subtle filmic techniques also abet the cause. Celli slowly go up a scale against violins descending a scale as we watch Martin Balsam walk up the stairs. The almost keyless main theme is as unsettling as the Bates Motel itself. But, here's the real shocker. That now-famous musical moment in the shower was an afterthought. Hitchcock originally told Herrmann to leave the stabbing scenes without music. Then, after seeing the finished film, the disappointed director ordered them to be scored. Good thinking, Hitch.
---Rich
Richard Stone is a composer of TV and feature film scores
What are your favorite movie scores? Do you collect recordings of film music? Is music too loud in today's films? Why do you think that is? Write and throw a few curves at Rich at the SCOREBOARD c/o MSNL.
