Welcome back, class to the twenty-first week of CraveOnline's Free Film School, the only film school with a money-back guarantee. This week's lesson will be another technical exercise, and should, if I do my job correctly, give you something to mull over the next time to sit to watch a movie. Or, more pertinently, listen to it. This week, my dear students, we'll be talking about sound. Sound design, sound recording, ADR, and the fine difference between the Academy Awards for Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing. The world of film sound is just as textured and varied as the visual dynamics, and often has teams of hundreds recording, making up sound effects, combing through sound libraries, and inventing an aural match to the film's visuals. Let's delve into that process a little, shall we?
Sometimes, good sound design can alter your experience of a film to the point where you begin to appreciate it more. You may not be involved in the story of some middling action film, but if the car crashes sound just right, and the explosions are just earthy enough, you may find yourself exhilarated. Think of a noisy action film, say Die Hard, and think of how much less fun the film would be if the guns sounded tinnier, or if the big all-floor explosion was muted and quiet. Or if the falling body landed with a wet thud rather than a spectacular crash. Big sounds ratchet up your heart rate. On the opposite end of things, imagine the sounds of a quiet film, say Terrence Malick's 2005 film The New World. There are no explosions, but the subtle, quiet hum of nature. The light falling of rain, the lullaby swish as people pass through tall reeds. Without these sounds, the film would have lost much of its subtle impact, and would have been a mere series of images (albeit, beautifully shot ones).
Let's start with dialogue, and work our way forward.
ADR
So yeah, you've seen pictures of the Boom Operator, right? The Boom Operator is, as I have iterated in the Free Film School before (and I hope you don't mind a brief refresher here), that poor production assistant, usually a tall guy, who has to hold a microphone on the end of a long stick just barely out of the camera's field of vision in order to capture what the actors are saying. I have known a few boom operators, and they say that it's one of the more physically grueling jobs in the film business. And while capturing the actors' dialogue seems like a naturally central part of moviemaking, you may be surprised to learn that many films' dialogue is actually discarded and re-recorded at a later date.
This is where the ADR team comes in. ADR stands for additional dialogue recording, although some older books point out that it also stands for automated dialogue replacement. This is a team of sound engineers who will gather the actors together after the shooting has finished, and re-record anything that needs brushing up. During the course of a shoot, much of the film's actual recorded dialogue can prove to me unusable. Sometimes ambient sound will intrude. Sometimes a take will look right, but the line will be slightly flubbed. Sometimes a line will need to be changed after the fact (as is the case with filmmakers who are pressured to remove curse words from their films, or simply alter them for airplane or TV broadcasts). The actors will re-record certain line of dialogue, and the result will be spliced into the film. The process is often called “dubbing” or “looping.” And, like editing, you'll know that the ADR people did a good job if you don't notice it at all. I can't find any definite stats on this, but I've heard that, on average, up to 30% of a film's dialogue has to be re-recorded after the fact.
Find a film by Federico Fellini sometime (say, Juliet of the Spirits), and watch the mouths of the actors. You'll find that not only do their lips not quite match the words, but the dialogue is a bit louder than it should be. Fellini had a curious habit of shooting his films with no sound at all, adding all the dialogue after the fact. He appreciated the artifice of this practice. Many European films of decades past, you see, were intended for an international audience, and would have to be re-dubbed into other languages, depending on where it was going to be shipped to. Filming without sound actually helped to streamline the dubbing process. And filmmakers like Fellini, who were raised on foreign films badly dubbed into their native language, became fond of the weird, mismatched ADR. It's a perfect example of ADR in action.
Here's another curious example that I recall from 1997. A big-budget Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick called Eraser was released that year. The central evil corporation in that film was called “Cyrex,” and they were involved in some evil rigmarole about world domination and killing people. Just before the film was set to be released, however, a microprocessor company called Cyrix threatened to sue. As a result, some last minute re-dubbing had to be done, and actors had to rerecord themselves saying “Cyrez” instead. Look at their lips, and you'll be able to tell in a few scenes. There was even some last-minute CGI to cover up the “Cyrex” name.
The ADR people also deal with what is called non-synchronized dialogue. i.e. the background chatter in a room, for instance, or the song playing at a school prom. These things will not be recorded live on site. They will be added later. Background babble is sometimes called “wallah,” as it sounds like people saying “wallahawallahwallah.” Often the ADR team will record background chatter originally for the given scene (a team of hardworking voice actors will spend hours murmuring into microphones), although it's not uncommon to simply reach into a backlog of already recorded background noises and insert them.
SOUND EDITING
Anything that is not dialogue is put in the hands of the sound editor. A sound editor will watch an incomplete version of the film, and do a job called “spotting,” where he will look for instances where he will have to mix in sound effects. Everything from noisy explosions to quiet footsteps are needed. The sound editor will then delegate to various sound teams to record various kinds of specialist sounds. One team may be working on a computer to mix together a monster's roar or a gigantic explosion, while others may be in a studio with a microphone trying to record original sounds for themselves.
The Foley Artists seem to have the most fun in this regard. The Foley Artists are the ones who are assigned various small, brief, quiet sound effects, and have to be innovative in the way they record them. If, for instance, they need the sound of high-heeled shoes on a hardwood floor, they'll actually get a hardwood panel (Foley artists usually have sample floors to work with, no kidding), and actually walk on it. They try to time it right, but can re-edit as they need. I imagine the joys they must get if a director assigns them the task of creating a sound for a human head being crushed underneath a car tire. They are the ones who have to smash melons with hammers, or stir cans of dog food in order to get the right squishy sounds.
Sometimes sound effects are assigned to special sound mixers who tap into a vast resource of pre-recorded sounds, only to alter them in an appropriate way. If you can find the stories, you'll find that some of the most unearthly noises from movies are actually commonplace sound being processed are altered in creative ways. I've heard that the dinosaur's approaching footsteps in Jurassic Park were just a re-processed heartbeat. That the T-Rex’s roar was a mix of several animals overlapped. Here's a good example although it's from TV: the famous “chung chung” you hear throughout an episode of Law & Order is a mixture of public stomping, and orchestral stings.
MIXING
Once all of the ADR and extra sound effects have been recorded, it's up to another team to actually blend them all together. In the days of magnetic tape, this was an arduous physical process. Digital sound has streamlined the practice somewhat, but it's still a hugely long and involved process. The sound mixing team will have to take all the dialogue, all the ambient sound, and all the small and large sound effects and push them into a single usable soundtrack for the film. You know in rock 'n' roll movies how you see a producer sitting at a huge panel of moving knobs, constantly making adjustments to volume levels? Same thing with film sound, only with a lot more recorded tracks. The mixer will have to choose good levels for dialogue, for sound effects, and for background noises. Again, it takes a lot of skill, and will only be noticed if it's done poorly. Have you ever watched a DVD or a movie, and noticed that the dialogue is particularly quiet, and the action scenes are particularly loud? This is due to bad mixing. At home, though, this usually is the result of having a 5.1-channel mix coming through a mere two speakers. Many DVDs will allow for an alternate 2-channel stereo mix for people who don't have 5.1 speakers in their homes (and this is, let's face it, most people). Turn it to the right channel, will you? It will sound better.
A good example of sound mixing might be this year's action blockbuster Fast Five. The film has a scene at the beginning where our heroes have to steal some expensive sport cars by pulling them out of the side of a moving train onto the flatbed of a speeding truck. Consider what we need to hear in that scene. There is a noisy train. The truck's engine. The truck's tires on the uneven dirt next to the train track. The cars sliding off of the train and also onto the dirt. The cars' engines. The dialogue in the train. The dialogue outside the train. And, of course, the music. And they all need to be done from different distances and volumes, making for an aural spatial continuity. If all of these things were equally loud, it would be a noisy, mushy cacophony of nothingness. The sound mixer needs to subtly push sound effects into the scene so we'll notice them, but not be overwhelmed by them. They need to choose the volume needed when the camera cuts to a different angle; if the camera is further away from something it should be quieter, right? They need things to be somewhat quiet when the actors are speaking, and sometimes let the music take the scene. This is an immensely complicated process. Watch that scene in Fast Five again, and see how the sound effects work. It's actually amazing to behold.
SOUND EDITING VS. SOUND MIXING AT THE OSCARS
You may have noticed during the Academy Awards that there are two separate sound categories; one for sound editing and one for sound mixing. I'll invariably be watching the telecast with a friend who chimes in with their ignorance of their differentiation. I'll offer the following simple adage to clear things up: Sound editing is making up the explosion, sound mixing is choosing the right explosion.
Sound mixing has been an Academy Award category since 1930, as it’s been a vital science ever since films moved to sound. Consider, for instance, the sound design needed for a good old musical. Sound editing, however (also just called “sound effects” from time to time) was only first introduced in 1963, and was often awarded sporadically under the aegis of a “Special Achievement” Oscar. This category was awarded until 1967, and then didn't come back until the late '70s for a few special awards here and there. It wasn't until 1981 that it became a category in earnest. The Oscars (well, at least the non-technical ones) can sometimes take a while to acknowledge a new science. Someday, perhaps, we will have a special category for “adapted performance” to award actors like Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, whose faces are erased from the film, and replaced with elaborate animations based on their facial movements. Sort of a combination of acting and special effects.
SOME EXAMPLES:
Any big-budget action blockbuster will have many fine examples of good sound. As much as I hate to do it, I recommend you watch any film directed by Michael Bay. Say what you will about his clunky storytelling or bad spatial continuity, Bay hires some of the best sound guys in the business. You'll find that when his gigantic robots are clanging into one another, it actually sounds like two upright cars falling down. Choose any random action sequence, and pay attention to how the sound in handled. How many levels of action are there? How does the sound play out in the scene?
Watch the 1968 cop classic Bullitt. Specifically, the famous car chase. Car chases are an ideal place to look for good sound design and mixing, as not only does there have to be two different-sounding engines for the two different cars, but they constantly have to rise in pitch to imply that the chase is getting faster. Then watch the car chase from The French Connection, where Gene Hackman bolts through the city underneath a train track. Then watch the car chase at the end of Death Proof from Grindhouse. Try not to be distracted by the excellent editing in these scenes, and just listen. How do the rising and falling engine noises dictate the scene? How do the engine sounds change when two cars hit one another?
For some quieter examples: Watch Jacques Tati's 1953 comedy classic M. Hulot's Holiday. How natural is the sound? How does the quiet music and repetitive comic sound effects drive the mood of the film? Can a simple sound effect be funny? By that same token, watch some of the old 1950s Warner Bros. Cartoon shorts, most notably, the dialogue-free roadrunner cartoons. The soundman on those films, Treg Brown, created some of the most famous stock sound effects in cinema history. How do you think those effects were created? When an anvil hits someone on the head, how did they make the clanging sound? How about when a running character comes to a screeching halt? What noise is that? How did they create the falling whistle noise for a plummeting coyote?
For good ambient noises: I hate to keep hammering on it, as I've mentioned the film in the Free Film School before, but Eraserhead has some superb sound design. David Lynch himself helped to create the mechanical humming noises you hear in the background. This year I saw a contemplative Thai film called Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. That film took place largely in darkened spaces, with only the ever-so-quiet sounds of the woods to ring in our ears, and yet it was rich and atmospheric. Watch some of the films of Terrence Malick (not only The New World, but also The Thin Red Line, and Days of Heaven), and you'll find a similar contemplative effect; here are some natural sounds, mixed specially, that add to the silence and solitude of a place.
The sound, after all, can do a lot of the heavy lifting.
HOMEWORK FOR THE WEEK: Listen to a film without looking at the screen. How does the mere use of sound change the mood of the film? How many layers of audio are you listening to? Is there dialogue? Music? Background noise? Ambient noise? Loud noises? See if you can hear the various audio tracks at play. Can you tell if the dialogue has been re-recorded in a scene? Try some homemade foley in your own kitchen. Create an explosion. Rainfall. A fistfight. A small dog being pulled in half by two tigers. (Remember, you’re faking it.) A goose taking flight. How could you make those sounds yourself? Try something even simpler: use a sound recorder to record two people talking in a public place. How many sounds are really at play? How loud are the two people? The background noises? How would that play in a film? Would you mix it differently?
