I've had the good fortune to work with Gavin O'Connor on four films. Our most recent is the Ben Affleck basketball film "The Way Back". As always, we did things slightly less traditionally and with great results. This is a function of working with a director that understands the value of sound and goes out of his way to support it from Pre to Post. Here's a few of the ways we do things differently.
● I am engaged while the script is being written, giving feedback on how sound might tell the story in ways that words cannot.
● I am engaged during pre-production, bringing my post experience to optimizing sound capture during filming. This can be as simple as running down a checklist of technical needs with the production sound mixer, identifying wild tracks to be coordinated with the AD or devising new ways to record and capture production sound that best suit the production.
● I am engaged during filming, reviewing dailies for quality control and to advising on trouble spots for dialog and potential ADR. I also begin feeding the film editor early designs to flesh out the rough cut as well as create kits of sounds for the AE to edit where needed.
● I am engaged during the edit, helping build the the editors tracks with fresh sound as the first cut is taking place, creating sound and picture that have a symbiosis that is organic and deliberate. The playbook says that post sound comes after the edit, in response to it, rather than informing it. Which do you think is the more valuable approach?
● I am engaged during the sound mix as the FX mixer, with an understanding that no person has a deeper knowledge of the hows and whys of the sounds recorded, edited and prepared than I and the best way to tell the story sonically with them.
Admittedly, I am not called on that often during the writing but I savor the times when sound does have an influence in those early stages. Given sound is 50% of of the movie going experience, why shouldn't it be a screenwriting tool? Rather than the gun rang out with a deafening BANG! or she SLAMMED the door on her way out, why shouldn't writing and directing allow for sound to be much more than diegetic.
During pre-production on The Way Back, Gavin brought in Composer Rob Simonsen and I to collaborate on a sound approach to the basketball sequences. Why is it so rare that music and sound might work together this way and, for that matter, before shooting has even begun? Rob and I hit it off and began texting furiously with crazy ideas for the texture of the track.
As Rob and I discussed how to go about this shared rhythmic and timbral responsibility, Rob had the idea to incorporate basketball sounds and body percussion into the score. We believed the secret sauce would come by capturing these sounds authentically, documentary style, in an actual basketball court, creating a verisimilitude that could not be gotten in a traditional scoring stage setting. However, we found that high school gymnasiums proved too noisy and prone to interruptions. Ultimately, we recorded at Henson Studios Room A in Hollywood, a huge scoring stage with great natural reverb. I recorded this session with my sound effects field rig as if I were on location. Rob hired a troupe of dancers skilled in Body Percussion for the hits and footsteps and the USC bucket brigade for some inspired bucket percussion. We would stage individual cues wit the troupe performing them rhythmically , often to a click-track that Rob would use as a sync reference later.
You can see here a video snippet of a small excerpt from that recording session:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGddWblphKQ
If you want to hear the final result, as used in the film, download the score for The Way Back or have a listen to the cue "Finding the Way Back" or "Training" or "Rematch part 1" to hear the body percussion and basketball sounds we recorded built into his score.
Another unique sound approach of Gavin's is the use of mood music for playback on set. Before the shoot, he will develop playlists for important scenes in the film. While shooting, he will play these curated selections during setup to create the mood for the cast and crew. What great way to create a vibe and put the cast AND the crew in the appropriate mood.
After three films together, we had struggled to get production tracks that really shined (through no fault our production sound team). I had a meeting with our Production sound mixer to find out what we could do on this film. Turns out, sound is not given much priority on set and often the crew didn't heed the requests from sound to fix things that sullied the track. I asked Gavin in pre-production if we could make sound a priority on this one and he agreed to take action. The following week during the first HODs meeting , he told the crew that they had to listen to production sound or answer to him. Suddenly grips were moving generators and lights for sound, Costume was paying attention to rustle and many other accommodations, all because the director told them it was important. Why did anyone, much less the director, have to say this for the sake of good sound?
One of my early goals was to have the basketball games sound authentic. (admittedly, that's a common goal). The movies energy and drive comes in the form of 6 big basketball games; set-pieces that track the teams rise to success. I knew I could build these scenes with library sound but I wasn't convinced this would be satisfactory. I also knew I could record fresh high-school basketball and crowd sounds to create even greater verisimilitude, but it was not basketball season when the movie was made and we had lost the opportunity. I pitched production on giving me time during filming to capture accurate wild tracks of crowds between takes. However production, as often is the case, was not comfortable with any kind of fixed schedule of crowd recording that could impede the progress of a low-budget film on a tight schedule. I was stuck.
The solution was to re-think the paradigm. If we were going to have real crowds in real gyms doing real crowd reactions, why not capture them in-situ...and in sync rather than wild? I opened discussions with Steve Morrow, our production sound mixer, and found an unusual enthusiasm for trying this new approach. The plan was to record every game, every shot, with an Ambisonic microphone, backing up the traditional boom and lavs. We weren't throwing out the old, only adding the new! Having spent the year before experimenting with Ambisonics, I understood the huge post potential of 1OA recordings being decoded to 7.1.2 in the mix, creating immersive and compelling sound environments for all the basketball games. Little did I know how successful this would be. My co-supervisor, Byron Wilson, managed to not only cut the sync dialog from boom and lavalier that gave the film its intimate dialog, he built a separate set of sync Ambisonic Crowd tracks for every game and handed them over to me. These were the real sounds of a real high-school basketball games and in sync with production dialog. If you saw a fan scream, or a crowd roar you heard them, and not a faked Group Walla version of them, on screen and all around you. I found I needed little to no sweetening from the library to augment the crowds or game play. They just came to life.
Extending the progress we had made in pre-production, Rob Simonsen and I would go on to meet at his studio during post to talk about the direction of the music and sound design and find smart ways to improve our contributions to the track. These were useful sessions where we talked more in the abstract about what we wanted to achieve narratively than the actual sound or instrumentation itself. In these sessions we shared sounds and textures with each other as well as spotting sync shifts for score and sound that allowed important downbeats to land perfectly (or not), without a flam or doubling. We had anticipated this in pre-production knowing much in the sound design; basketballs dribbling, slam dunking even the sounds of feet on the court would prove to be rhythmic challenges with score. Rob and I worked carefully to adjust our respective elements to land pleasingly on beats without sacrificing too much visual sync or dramatic impact and, when that was not possible, asking David Rosenbloom, our editor, to adjust a few frames on a shot to achieve it for us.
It's really valuable to mix your own material at the final. I've spent most of my career working with others to mix the sound I've been designing for months. Those collaborations have always been rewarding. Yet Gavin understands that, having spent 6 months together building the sonic narrative to his films, it makes the most sense for me to "bring it home" by mixing the material he and I have been building together and have a history of understanding behind. You might hear it said that it's not smart to have a sound designer mix their own material. The logic being that, if you made the sounds, you can't be objective about their place in the mix. I reject this idea. First, it would be career suicide to behave accordingly. Who would hire you again, or for that matter, allow you to even finish a mix? It would be patently obvious your unsuitability for the gig. Secondly, it would be in direct violation of the sound designer hippocratic oath: "Do no harm.. to the story" After having spent months with my director, from writing the scrip to post, how could or would I undermine my commitment tot he story by losing that objectivity at the mix?
