Meeting Topic: Completing The PIcture: Sound For The Film: Honeydripper
Moderator Name: David Prentice
Speaker Name: Mason Daring, Music Composer; Phil Stockton, Supervising Sound Editor; Robert Ferndandez, Lead Mixer
Other business or activities at the meeting: Upcoming meetings announced - Patents in January, Archiving in February, AES 60th Anniversary in March. Also requested all members log into AES.org and double-check that their address and email are correct, as some members complain about not receiving emails or snail mail from us.
Meeting Location: Dolby Screening Room, NY, NY
Three key members of the audio team for John Sayles' new feature film explained in detail the technical and artistic considerations which guided them on this journey. All three men had high praise for Sayles' depth of knowledge and decisiveness as the writer, director and editor of this project.
We screened the final reel of the film, in which a young guitar player brings electrified Rock music to a small rural Juke Joint
and changes the way in which the patrons listen to music. The centerpiece of this reel is an almost entirely live musical performance.
Composer and sound engineer Mason Daring explained that traditionally such performances are completely pre-recorded - except for vocals - and then filmed to playback. The tempos never change from take to take, which facilitates the editing process. In this case, director Sayles wanted the sound and "feel" of an actual performance, so, months before filming, a multitrack recording was made of the entire band, but only the drum and piano parts were played back on the set; all other parts were captured live during each take. ProTools disk-based recording and playback was used, which eliminated tape rewinding between takes and also allowed as many tracks as necessary to be saved during the filming process. Mason described another priceless benefit of on-location ProTools: Once this very complex scene had been blocked for the camera, Sayles realized that he needed an additional thirty seconds of music to be added to the middle of the song. This was done on the spot, which would have been nearly impossible with traditional recording methods. Mason said this was a first for him, and he's been working with Sayles for many years.
Supervising sound editor Phil Stockton told us that Sayles knows exactly what he wants on the soundtrack, with the maximum amount of production (on-set) dialog being paramount, then music and lastly sound effects. Phil described another significant use of ProTools on this show: Because one of the actors had to wear "invisible" braces on his teeth he tended to produce "whistling 's' sounds." Phil found "clean 's' sounds" from other words and replaced the troublesome ones throughout the actor's performance. This would have taken forever with traditional magnetic film sound editing.
Lead mixer Robert Fernandez described the final mixing schedule of three weeks as "a very short time" for a feature film.
He first mixed all of the musical numbers for a good overall balance, as though they were cues, and then remixed them to match the cut picture's perspective and performer closeups. The ambience of the club space was a combination of ProTools plug-ins and actual on-the-set ambience microphone recordings.
A diverse Q&A period covered problems in post-production, delivery requirements and dialog integrity in listening rooms.
