But now, they have much faster turnarounds and much more capabilities as far as what they can do with the sound design, including playing around with ambience and sound effects. And every pass that you do with an analogue system depletes the quality as well: it's like making a photocopy of a photocopy. Since it was so cost-intensive and labor-intensive, they wanted to make sure that the story got across first and emotion gets sort of directed with music, and that's about it. Everything had to be a very conscious choice and a very intentional soundscape that they create. Part of the reason with that is because when everything was shot on film and edited with tape, it was a much more laborious process and it was much more technically challenging to do a whole lot with sound design. "A lot of it has probably happened more recently because of the almost ubiquitous use of digital audio and digital cinema now. Thomas Curley concurs with that assessment: But on the other side, sometimes there are a lot of production sound guys that do not feel empowered or have had a bad experience about speaking up in the past, or whatever the reason is, and the material gets back to the cutting room and it's a mess, and, 'Well, we thought everything was fine!'" "The production sound guy is the tip of the spear in terms of our first line of defense, and oftentimes if there are problems, the good ones will approach the director or the AD or the DP and say, 'Hey, this isn't working, you're going to miss this.' Oftentimes it gets handled. "There's more demand on crews to do many setups a day, and that could be a contributing factor," he says. It's because we have to."Īnother "Whiplash" Oscar winner, Craig Mann, acknowledges that less time on set can have a negative effect on the sound crews. 'I just need to get this.' 'Yeah, we'll fix it later.' And we do, unfortunately. So they go, 'We'll fix it in post.' That's literally their go-to answer. We've gotta move on to another setup.' It's because pictures are the most important thing, and we do a good job fixing sound at the end of the day. "If the sound guy goes, 'Can you get one more take for me?' they go, 'Nope, we're wrapping. I understand his point, although I take issue with using "The Revenant" as an example of pristine dialogue because that film features Tom Hardy in a supporting role, and Hardy is one of the most notoriously difficult-to-understand actors working today. I told him, 'Yes, I think the audience got depressed because they couldn't understand anything!' But when did 'The Revenant,' the dialogue was pristine and perfect." When I asked his sound designer about this issue, he told me the reason they wanted to keep the dirty dialogue was because the situation was so awful in the life of the character that it helped the feeling of depression. They were in Spanish, but you weren't able to understand much. "In the case of Alejandro González Iñárritu, he did a movie where all the dialogue was really dirty. Although, as this anecdote illustrates, its effectiveness remains debatable: Thomas Curley, who won an Oscar as a production sound mixer on "Whiplash" and previously worked on "The Spectacular Now," has also seen this type of mentality at work. "Not everything really has a very crisp, cinematic sound to it in real life, and I think some of these people are trying to replicate that," he tells me.īaksht says that type of creative aesthetic does not need to permeate an entire movie - it can sometimes change from scene to scene depending on the director's goals in telling the story.
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