NOTES FROM HOLLYWOOD: PART 13

Reflections on the Journey to Make a Feature Film

Sound Mixer Sean Higgins works the Grandpa console at Anarchy Post.

​Sound & Color. Yes, it's the title of Alabama Shakes' 2015 Grammy winning album--and if you don't know it, you're in for a treat! But for our purposes, Sound & Color are the essential behind-the-scenes elements of a film. If the screenplay is the skeletal framework, and the performances, cinematography and design form the flesh, then Sound & Color are the blood cells running through the veins that pumps life throughout the film. You can’t see em, but without em, you’d be dead.
 
I just spent four days at Anarchy Post in Burbank mixing sound, and a day at Different By Design (DXD) in Los Angeles setting the color. It was thrilling to sit in the sound stage and watch the film on a big screen with full surround sound while our re-recording mixer, Sean Higgins, worked his magic, finessing dialogue, tweaking sound effects and balancing the score. And when I say magic, I really think this guy is a magician. Seated at the helm of the mixing table he called “Grandpa” because it was over 20 years old (a millennium in tech years,) he spent four days clicking away at his keypad and mouse, manipulating waveforms, opening up the spectrogram, cutting and pasting parts. He went into scenes and made airplane noise disappear, he drilled into the “stems” of  sound effects or music to lower one particular element, horns say, or strings, and raise another one, say wind or birds. He was serving as a digital conductor of an orchestra of sounds inside the hard drive. And by-and-by, the sonic world of the film came to life.

Sean, using the "spectrogram" to manipulate frequencies.

“Now it’s a movie”, Sean said at the end of our first pass. It took two days. We sat back the next morning and watched the film beginning to end. Ronit Kirchman, our composer, came in. We took notes. I was completely engrossed. And I've watched the footage so many times. You can’t underestimate the role that sound has in a film. They say you can have a great movie with shitty picture if you still have good sound. But if you don’t have good sound, you don’t have a film.

It turns out that our production sound mixer, Aaron Kesler, did a terrific job during our 20 day shoot and captured almost entirely clean dialogue. We had a few ADR sessions with actors. (Sean, Aaron and composer Ronit Kirchman, right, at Anarchy.) 

​“Automated Dialogue Replacement”, ADR, is a process where you record selections of actors dialogue in the studio to either fix a problem in the production sound, or to make creative changes. I did both. It was fun to see some of our talent again.

---

Gilbert Owuor in the ADR studio recording dialogue.

Four days in the sound stage and we felt the sound mix was in good shape. Sean created an output of the mix for our editor, Dag, who laid it on the locked picture and now we had a cut ready for festival submission. 

The final day of the week I met up with Hana Kitasei, our cinematographer, at DXD, to look through the film and get a read on "color correction". We shot the film in digital, and they give us an initial output of an approximation of color choices that we like (it's called a "LUT"), so as we're editing the film, we can see, more or less, the film as we want it in terms of color and exposure. But once picture is locked, then the colorist, in this case Luke Cahill, another magician, sits up at his magic table, and we scroll through the film, scene by scene, and call out inconsistencies or looks or lighting issues that need to be addressed.

Luke tweaked things as Hana and I gave notes on what we were seeing on the big screen in front of us. It took about 4 hours to go through every scene in the film. Now Luke is off on his own to color the whole film and we’ll come back in a month for a final review.

These guys spend a LOT of time in dark rooms. Respect. 

Luke Cahill at DXD, wizard of color.

All of this work was set in motion a few months back when we identified the first of a series of film festival application deadlines which we wanted to be ready for. The film doesn’t need to be “final final” to submit, but the farther along the better. I wanted to be sure our score was complete and our sound was mixed to put our best foot forward in the incredibly competitive arena of film festival submissions. While the color mix and visual-effects are still being finalized, I'm pleased with out festival submission cut. And yes, we made our deadline this week, and the first of some 30 or so festival submissions is IN! A milestone.
 
I'm proud of the film. I can finally say it. I was a little concerned going into the sound mix, not sure what surprises lay in wait for me. But it was smooth sailing. The film sounds great and the emotional power that I was hoping to achieve is there. I said it before, but I'd like to say it again, I can't wait for you to see it.

There's more news to share, but I'll leave it for the next post...