« My Zombie Parents | Main | Week 99 Is Carried by Its Brother and Is Less Than Heavy »

February 28, 2007

Ignore The Deluxe Soundstage Behind the Curtain

Bob Massey

So my friend Cate is the assistant editor on this feature film. And they're mixing the sound on a stage at Warner Bros. in Burbank. Cate invited me to come check it out because it's a pretty nifty process.

So I show up in my big unsexy Ford van, get my temporary pass from the guard, and park in the visitors' lot next to a bunch of fancy sports cars. Eventually I find the room they're mixing in (it's a big place, that Warner Bros.). And I swear to you it's like they're on the bridge of the USS Enterprise.

picture is of an older stage but you get the idea

It's basically a multiplex-sized screen, a mixing board with somewhere around a hundred automated channels, six ProTools stations, and a bunch of other shit that goes "ping!" (The actual Macs are in a server room next door. Very quiet, very sexy.) Behind the board is an expanse of hardwood floor. Then on a small deck is a (auto-reclining) leather couch and some overstuffed chairs. Behind that is a table with snacks and stuff.

So the director of the film sits in the Captain Kirk position, with editors and such around him. Down in the Mister Sulu position at the board are between three and nine sound mixers. In various seats are the dialogue editor, the assistant to the composer, the film editor and assistant editor, and so on. I'm not clear on all the different jobs, but this is the kind of thing that makes movies cost millions and millions of dollars. The room itself, with mixers, is something like $1,500/hour.

Anyway, what's really crazy is when they kill the dialogue from the mix because suddenly you see the scene with all the background sounds -- wind, footsteps, water dripping, the creak of doors -- but no speaking. It's hard to describe how eerie it is. It's like God himself just reached down and wiped out whatever you were saying. And as a moviegoer, you don't really realize that every sound element in a scene was put there on purpose. It's not all just coming from the microphone on the set. These Foley (aka sound effects) artists have huge libraries of sounds and they build each scene's audio from the ground up. It's nuts.

Behind this room, by the way, is the Director's Suite, which is like a deluxe hotel room. Kitchen, shower, veranda, desk, enormous HD TV, and so on. And it's not just about luxury. These dudes (Hollywood directors are still predominantly dudes) spend crazy hours on the mix stage.

So here's the best moment of my visit. These guys who do the mixing have all worked there for years and years. Another guy rolls in who they haven't seen in ages, literally. So they're trying to remember when they last worked together. Finally, they were like, "Oh yeah, it was for Redux, right? You remember how we stored all those sound elements over at [wherever]? Well, somehow they lost them. The only reason that film got re-cut and re-mastered was because [someone] found copies of the sound elements in a trash can in a warehouse in London." What they were talking about, I learned, was Apocalypse Now. They had last worked together on the director's cut, but they had also worked on the original. And someone in the studio system just LOST all the sound effects somehow.

In. Sane.

After I left the Warner Bros. lot I drove over to the valley to help a pal pick up gear for a short film he's shooting. It was like the yin and yang of Hollywood. From upper-crusty white collar to hungover blue collar. Tatts, ironic t-shirts, and heavy boxes. We loaded my van up with light stands and clamps and crates and whatnot. But all those people at the rental warehouse are the people who make big directors look smart. The director’s name might go above the line, but it's their expertise that puts him there.
 
 
<< Previously from Bob Massey
 
 

Posted by Rock Heals at February 28, 2007 07:00 AM