Audio for film: for film mixers, its all about getting big sound onto the big screen - Audio

Post, Sept, 2003 by Christine Bunish

Hoskins could move to New York for a six-month period but couldn't bring his own team for such a lengthy stay and didn't know anyone in the city. "That's what's important ... having people around you can work with and trust," Hoskins emphasizes.

So Reel Sound set about melting boundaries of time and location. Hoskins settled in at Sync Sound where he was linked to three sound effects editors at Reel Sound's Pinewood branch, four Foley artists at Berlin's The Sound Company and composer Paul Grabowsky in Australia. "I was working with personalities I knew, and it was as if all of them were in my room," Hoskins declares.

Although he delegated portions of the audio post outside New York, Hoskins maintained control at Sync Sound where the dialogue edit and four temp mixes were done, and where the final five-week mix was performed by re-recording mixer Howard Bargroff, who came over from England, and Sync Sound's Grant Maxwell and Ken Hahn (who mixed The Hours and Empire). "Bringing it back to one central base where you have the joy of finishing is what it's all about," Hoskins declares. "Fred and Michael gave us total trust to achieve the desired results, and I've never had a film go so smoothly and easily."

Hoskins was tied to England, Germany and Australia by high-speed Internet connections. For near realtime communication during the entire mix, the European teams began work five hours later than customary to align themselves with Hoskin's sessions in Sync Sound's Digital Cinema mixing theater, which is outfitted with an AMS Neve DFC desk and full-size film screen. "It's quite important for a director to have that big image," says Hoskins. "They need to see and hear what it will be like on the final day."

Grant Maxwell met Howard Bargroff just a day before they started mixing, but Bargroff's familiarity with the console meant "the two of us were able to jump on it and start mixing," Maxwell recalls. "Usually you spend at least half a day setting up, but Howard was ready to go."

Hoskins was extremely impressed with Sync Sound. And Maxwell echos, "It was an amazingly smooth-running operation. It's quite remarkable that the technology could bring together all of us in different places."

FEATURE-LENGTH DOC

At Warner Bros. Studio Facilities (www.wbpostproduction.com), re-recording mixer Ken Polk has been talking sound with director Terry Benedict for almost two years. Benedict's The Conscientious Objector is the first feature-length documentary lensed with Panasonic's VariCam HD camera. It's the story of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector serving as an unarmed Army medic in World War II, whose extraordinary heroism on Okinawa--he saved 75 fellow soldiers in a single battle in 1945--earned him a Congressional Medal of Honor.

"We're treating the film as if it were a normal feature," says supervising sound editor Gregory M. Gerlich, who is concerned with dialogue, sound effects, backgrounds, Foley and narration for the project which integrates new footage with archival clips. "We're trying to have the audience re-live the experience with Desmond--the danger on a daily basis, the feel of the war itself."