Audio for feature films: whether it's big-budget or independent, filmmakers have a thirst for quality sound

Post, Sept, 2004 by Christine Bunish

Demme favored a quite adventurous use of sound. "He wasn't hung up on the minutia of the right gun cock," Urmson notes. "He wanted a door sound to be bigger than a gun or to go from a quiet scene to huge loud truck going by--dynamic but not necessarily logical. They help to make the film interesting."

Urmson developed certain high-frequency sounds that are first heard as Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) recalls the ambush during Desert Storm, which led to Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) being called a hero. He reprised the same sounds later in connection with the brainwashing that occurred when the soldiers were captured. He also created a tapestry of sirens, radios, police and military presence, which "add a layer of tension to the film." The story takes place in post-9/11 Washington, DC, and New York City.

Urmson relied on subtle, surreal sounds to chart Marco's descent into what he feels is madness, as recurring nightmares suggest there was more to the ambush and capture than he can remember. The dreams culminate in a sequence featuring the soldiers' mantra that Shaw was the "kindest, bravest" guy they've ever known. "Blake Leyh and I did a lot of processing in Logic Audio on many different ADR reads and panning in surrounds to give the mantra a very bizarre quality as it builds to a peak," he explains.

For the shocking lake and kayaking scene, Urmson used both location sound effects, recorded by Eric Potter on a secluded lake near Eugene, OR, and Foley from the water pit in C5's huge Foley stage in Northvale, NJ. "The location sound effects were very violent and dramatic, but the Foley was beautiful in its detail and clarity," he observes. "It was nice to mesh the two departments." Urmson also tapped Cycling 74's Pluggo series of plug-ins for Logic and Pro Tools to process underwater vocals.

George Lara was Foley mixer, Marko Costanzo was Foley artist and Steve Visscher was supervising Foley editor in Northvale. Tom Fleischman did the mix at New York City's Soundtrack.

CELLULAR

In New Line Cinema's Cellular, the actionpacked suspense feature which hits big screens this month, a random cell phone call by a kidnapped woman (Kim Basinger) enlists a young man (Chris Evans) in her plight as he tries to find her and warn the other members of her family who are in danger.

Dave McMoyler, supervising sound editor at Soundelux Hollywood (www.soundelux.com), talked with film editor Eric Sears early on about the approach they'd use for the telephone conversations, which play a central role in the story. This is not your basic cell phone call: one of the villains smashes a telephone to intimidate his hostage, science teacher Basinger. She's able to kluge the components together and send out a signal which reaches Evans's freewheeling surfer character, who thinks the call is a prank.

"The principal challenge was to find a way to maintain an emotional connection between Kim and Chris in the midst of a lot of action: a car chase, a shootout, a standoff at the end," explains McMoyler. "I talked with director David Ellis and Eric about some recent films that have had almost no futz treatment with the phones so it sounds like the person is almost in the same room with you. To just play Kim's voice totally nonprocessed while Chris spends so much time in his car wasn't the right way to go. Neither was dialing in one standard futz treatment. So we decided to vary the amount of processing, backing it down where we needed more intimacy and racheting it up to create more distance and tension."