Music of Sound

When we finish the first pass mixing a film soundtrack we have what is known as a double head screening. Its called double head because the picture & sound elements are still seperate entities; the image is often an HD output or if we’re really lucky a work print, while the sound will be coming from a seperate hard drive playback mechanism. The film is screened in a continuous run, so for everyone involved it is the first time the film is seen & heard in a form that is getting close to its final form. Accordingly it is a critical time to make notes, as the screening is usually followed by 2+ days of making mix changes. Usually these changes are not radical but sometimes there are conceptual shifts involved in terms of music, sometimes production audio is reverted to instead of ADR that is not working, and sometimes FX are rebuilt/augmented. But there are ALWAYS a lot of mix balance changes, some subtle (eg I miss the foley at a certain moment) or radical; basically remixing a whole scene from scratch…
So the notes you scribble in these screenings are very important, as the screening is usually followed by an intensive discussion where we talk through the film, scene by scene, and everyone voices their concerns & changes. Firstly the director & producer speak their mind, then the mixers, picture editor, composer, sound supervisors, sound editors & foley team. For sound supervisors it is often a case of listening to the opinions & assessing what is involved. Usually the need for big changes are something everyone notices & some of the small changes are not worth raising in the meeting, as they can be dealt with as each scene is revisited, but again the notes taken are critical – you cannot rely on memory as there may be 20 or 50 or more specific comments and the bigger issues tend to erase the significance or memory of the smaller change requirements. But how do you take notes in the dark? Up until now I have always scribbled incoherently in a notebook & then attempt to decipher them later, but one screening I went to was attended by an american picture editor who pulled out the ultimate screening tool: a light pen!

Of course!!!! I quizzed him where he got his & he mumbled something about it being from the editors guild or something… So we are still 4 weeks away from starting predubs for UNDER THE MOUNTAIN & I suddenly remembered the infamous light pen & went searching around the interweb for an affordable model and found this site. So I ordered a 3 pack & will report back as to how well they worked, but I have a feeling my notes will be a LOT more coherent due to this simple pre-emptive bit of technology! I love making small changes to how you work that have a big impact and for US$8 this is one investment that is guaranteed to pay off. And I’ll have a spare pen to scribble down the crazy/inspired ideas I get at 4am!

Here is some video of a typical ping pong game played during a reel break when mixing….

the guy on the losing end is obviously one of the mixers…

There is a great tradition of ping pong & post production. When I first started working on films we were mixing to/from 24 track reel to reel recorders & when we finished a reel & it was time for a reel change, it was also time for a game of ping pong. Nowadays a reel change usually only involves swapping hard drives on the recorders which takes only a few minutes, but the ping pong served more functions than simply filling in spare time. Mixing is demanding work – the concentration & focus involved in constantly assessing the creative progress/developments & details as well as all the technical requirements… So to turn the lights on & jump around & get some exercise does wonders!
I had a ping pong table at my studio for a while too, and I used to find that whenever I got stuck on a tricky problem if I stopped work for ten minutes & had a game of ping pong, as soon as I sat back down the solution would appear. Its partly the blood flow/exercise and partly the no-mind of playing… Anyway here is a great video thats certainly isn’t recent, but is still great to see again: ping pong matrix style or Japanese Bunraku style:

Playing ping pong on the mix stage can also be an interesting way of revealing peoples personalities – who is competitive and who isn’t… There have definitely been a few directors (& maybe a mixer?) where the mixing definitely goes smoother if they get to win at ping pong!

Rally for service?

ok, i’m in philosophical rant mode so bear with me, but equally feel free to disagree in the comments… I DO realise I am a product of where I’ve been & what I’ve seen & heard… and as with everyone else, its just my unique perspective…. but the crux of this rant is that I ALMOST feel driven to start a new perceptual non-profit organisation with the sole purpose of preserving space. I havent experienced space beyond earths gravity, so I’m not thinking lunar or interstellar – I’m thinking about that seemingly inherent human trait to do more.. and then more.. and then more… until all the space is filled up and there are no longer any empty spaces left.

There is a saying ‘God is in the details’ (no doubt promoted by the Get Things Done/right brain dominant crowd) but I prefer to (re)think it as ‘God is in the empty spaces’ and by ‘God’ I dont mean anything religious…

The empty spaces I refer to are equally metaphorical & real: an empty section in a developed part of the city, a momentary silence in a film soundtrack, a seemingly blank canvas, a totally fulfilled sparse piece of music within beautiful reverbant spaces… All of these empty spaces exist to provide a vehicle in which you as the active participant project yourself & your thoughts/perception….

So what brought on this semi-coherent rant? Well, despite owning a baby grand piano (thats been prepared to within an inch of its life) and a virtual piano (NI) that includes a beautiful multi Gigabyte rendering of a Steinway Concert D grand piano, I recently came to the realisation that while I love to just sit down & play/improvise on the piano (especially since I got an Akai Headrush looper pedal) I can’t actually play a single piece of piano music that I love. In the process of rectifying this situation I began teaching my gnarly old bass players fingers to play at least the start of Satie’s Gymnopedie (sample/MIDI/notation in a previous post here) and in so doing I learned to appreciate the sublime space around those repeating two chords with a whole new respect. Sure that piece of music has been commandered for all sorts of advertising banalities, including more than a few soap commercials, but not only did Satie write that piece back in 1888, he was only 22 years old when he did it! Did I have such an appreciation of space at that age? Sadly hell no! My appreciation for space came much later – I would guess some time in my thirties….
Anyway I was raving to a friend the other night about the space between those two chords, and he pipes up; ‘I have a beautiful version of that piece, but played on guitar!’ My heart shrinks, oh right I think to myself, someone can play guitar & actually leave space around their notes/chords? This I have to hear, it would be a first… Wake up next morning & listen to an mp3 attachment he has sent me & it just reinforced every reason why I very rarely listen to guitar music anymore: the version is note for note ‘correct’ but everywhere there was space in the original, is now filled by goddamn arpeggios!?! I have never taken more pleasure in deleting a file in my life! What is it with (most) guitar players that they feel they must single handedly fill the entire spectrum (in the frequency AND time domain) all by themselves?

The funny thing is, I grew up playing bass in guitar bands – back then the Velvet Underground & Sonic Youth were our role models, but eventually I had an epiphany: Guitars are evil, un-necessary & unwanted, UNLESS & this is the caveat, the person playing that guitar instantly illustrates that they understand space & time. And in the decades since I have found only a few. So feel free to educate me if you are more informed than I, but if I check my music library the only guitar players I find that I have actually listened to in the last decade include:

- Fred Frith
- Keiichi Sugimoto (Minamo/Fourcolour)
- Christopher Willits
- John Lee Hooker (in acoustic mode)
- Gustavo Santaolalla

Philosophically its not just about guitars though – many of the best composers & musicians that i respect & listen to repeatedly share a common factor: minimalism. I dont mean this in an extreme way, but they do share an ability to produce music involving what is needed, rather than simply what is possible. And in this time of ecological & financial near-crisis, I do often wonder if these accute problems arent just a simple illustration that the core belief that ‘MORE IS MORE’ is fundamentally flawed… and a more sane approach, if ‘LESS IS MORE’ is too hard to digest, then at least ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH’ is heading down the right road? Is rampant capitalism & endless expansion sustainable? No, didnt think so either… but what does it take to curb it? It seems a crisis is the only answer….

It was our first week of predubs last week & we finished Ambience predub in 2.5 days & then did 5 reels of Foley predubs by the end of the week…. Foley predub finished by Monday lunchtime, now we’re into FX Predubs & it seems I am out to set some kind of personal record for the number of FX stems required; we’re out to ten 5.1 stems already & suspect by the time we finish we’ll need another two or three… Each FX source session is a 32 output PT session per stem, so we dont have to keep repatching the outputs to the Euphonix desk. So this week we’re predubbing:
- FX A,B,C (misc FX) will be predubbed down to 3 x 5.1 stems
- FX D,E,F (movement, swords, violence) to 3 x 5.1 stems

Then I have a week off from mixing while the Dialogue/Crowds/Music predubs happen (on two mix stages) which gives me a chance to do my final pass on sound design elements plus VFX updates….

Then we’ll do another week of FX predubs:
- FX G,H, I (guns, background guns, impacts)
- FX J, K, L (fires, misc x 2 for VFX updates)
- Sound Design – virtual predub via automation (so material that might conflict with music is easy to manipulate/pitch/move)

Then the final mix!!!!!

Some statistics so far:
- Ambience PT Session = 12.89 GB (19,362 fades)
- Foley PT Session = 5,38 GB (8,601fades)
- FX ABC PT Session = 6.04 GB (4236 fades)
- FX DEF PT Session = 6.53 GB (4798 fades)

Obviously each of these sessions has come from far bigger libraries of material, since the sessions we take to the mix contain ONLY what was used. I noted the number of fades as it really helps illustrate how much work is done over the many weeks (this is my week 19) of development & editing, prior to the final predubs.

And god bless Conformalizer! Without it we would still be trying to update to the last picture cut!!! But the one aspect of conforming that people like to forget is that while the conforming might be quick & painless, there is still a lot of careful work involved patching & updating the sessions after the conform! My worst reel was reel 5, where there is a lot of action both on adn offscreen & it took my a day and a half to get it patched after the last conform. Patching onscreen action is not so bad since it is tied to the picture cut but offscreen can be very time consuming, as its relationship to the onscreen image (& conform) can be far more abstract, and there are times when I still resort to a manual conform of moments and/or whole scenes…

Onwards!

Phew what a monster!!! This has been the biggest temp mix I have ever done, just check out the two PT sessions we were running live – I’ll explain the whys & wherefores below…

Temp Mix FX and Foley Session (click image for fullsize)

Temp Mix Atmos and Fixes Session (click image for fullsize)

So we ran all six reels in one session – I prefer working this way when editing as well as mixing as it makes it so much easier to refer to moments elsewhere in the film… Its only since getting PT HD and an Intel Mac (with 4GB of RAM) that this has been possible… but it makes for a BIG PT session; the PT session file above is 22MB and my editing session back at the studio is even larger as it has all the source material for the film in it (on library tracks etc) whereas the session I bring to the mix stage has only the material we are using…
The FX session is organised into sets of tracks/predubs which I am busing to 5.1 auxiliarys, which are then fed to the Euphonix desk… Because this temp is so complex, there is too much material to go through panning every source track on the mix stage so I spent a lot of time panning in 5.1 beforehand. I was a little worried as to how this would translate from my edit room to the mix stage but we did some tests the week before the temp mix & it sounded great so I went ahead & did as much panning as I had time to do…. and I am so glad I did – theres nothing better than doing a first play down of the tracks on the mix stage and sounds are placed and/or moving as they should…
I had originally thought I might print 5.1 stems instead of run it all live via auxiliarys but it became apparent we would be getting VFX/picture updates through out the mix & accordingly I would need to be updating the source material for the mix… In the end I was happy about that too as it meant I could keep editing rather than stop and spend a day or two printing stems before the temp mix….
Ok, I’m almost ready for some time out…. and archiving…. and checking the print… and checking the stitch & layback to HD… and checking the blu ray disks… and then having a rest… and THEN starting the next stage in developing the sound design for this movie – YEHAR!