Continued From previous page.
Timothy Muirhead 3:56
Steve, how did you find your way from there?
Steve Fanagan 3:59
Well, I think it’s kind of an interesting one. Because if you think about the way that a production crew is put together, often it would be a group of people who haven’t worked together before. And the sort of common thread would be their relationship with a director. Well, this is slightly different for sound because I think we’re all used to working with regular crews or semi-regular crews, or we have collaborators that we’re used to working with. This didn’t feel alien to me, it just felt like a different, you know, a different challenge. And as soon as myself and David first spoke, which was within days of me been brought onto the film or within hours of me brought onto the film, it just felt like we were going to get on and it felt like we had a similar sensibility for for the film. And we were both equally excited at the prospect of the film. It’s it’s one of those scripts you read and it pulls you emotionally in all sorts of directions. And I’m not afraid to say that I found it incredibly moving to the point of crying the first time I read it, and I suppose seeing the first pieces of the film, and we both had this very personal connection with it. And it was a story we could both relate to. And we felt like sound-wise, we had an idea of what we thought we could do with it. And we, we had a director who had a very strong idea of what he wanted us to achieve with it. And so it just felt like it was going to be a lovely journey. And once the three of us were in contact together, it never felt like we weren’t on the same page. And like, my first time to meet Bernard and David in the flesh was when we were final mixing. You know, that could have been a strange circumstance. But it wasn’t because we had had so much contact in the build-up to it. And I think as well, because we trusted in the process that we were in. And we trusted our director to have made the right choices in who he picked, and also, that he knew what he wanted from the film. So you know, it just it felt like the collaboration was going to work. And it’s one of those gigs where I feel like I learned a lot and actually had a lot of fun, even in the pressure-cooker of deadlines and everything else that was going on.
Timothy Muirhead 6:07
So Bernard, you flew to another country to a room you’d never mixed in before. And you mixed this on your own right? This was a one person mix, correct?
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 6:15
Yes. Actually, I had mixed there already, a couple of years before on another film. But that was the only known aspect of all of this. Like both of them just mentioned, it was kind of a leap of faith kind of thing where we were, we were all in this, we were all moved by this script, we were all really interested in working with Ben. But personally, I didn’t have a lot of contact with Ben prior to the mix. And this made this whole process kind of a, an interesting mystery to go into — not having, not knowing how each of us would react together or not. But we were all drawn by this film and director to bring us together over there. So everybody being outside of their comfort zone made us all equal to the work to be done. And we all had the same goal. It was a lot of work. But it was fun. It was great.
Timothy Muirhead 7:15
So part of the plot of the film involves cloning of humans. And Mahershala Ali, the main character, has a bunch of scenes where he’s acting against himself, a clone of himself. So I’m assuming that, David, that involved a lot of ADR to fill out those scenes. How involved was the director with the ADR process? And how deep did you go down that road?
David McCallum 7:37
Two answers: No, there wasn’t a lot of ADR to address that Mahershala is acting against himself. They did an exceptional job on set with the structure of the way those scenes were shot. And Nathan Nugent, the picture editor, navigated most of the overlaps. I did have some to sort out, but we didn’t require ADR to fix them, which was really interesting — to be able to kind of go through the dialogue tracks and not have to turn to ADR as a solution. The second part of the question: Ben was extremely involved in the ADR from crafting the scripts… he was at every session, and we had to review all of the recorded ADR together as well. So there was no letup, from his perspective, in terms of his involvement in shaping the performances. He and Nathan obviously spent many, many months working on that in their picture edit, and the ADR was a continued extension of it.
David McCallum 7:37
I heard a story about how when the film was being mixed by Bernard, you are in the next room over working on ADR cuts, is that correct?
David McCallum 8:55
Yeah, I mean, our schedule was so tight and Ben’s desire to kind of participate in the ADR meant that we were still actively editing all of it while the mix was happening. So we worked out a strategy where I would get a bit of time with Ben, I’d craft ADR options for him and I’d send them to him at night. So Stephen and Ben stayed on the stage and stayed very focused on what they had. Very little went to the stage that Ben had not already reviewed, and given an okay to. And if he didn’t, okay, something we just moved forward with what we had. It was hairy to navigate all of that but we tried to keep it simple, by simply only delivering to the stage something that we knew we could mix.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 9:49
That’s something I heard a lot: “A new one is coming.”
Steve Fanagan 9:55
I think the important thing as well, just for a bit of background on that, is part of that process was because the picture edit went late in the process, and we were still conforming, right up to premix. And also, Ben’s time was very precious, because there’s a lot of VFX in this film, there’s a lot of music in this film, you know, he was being pulled in a lot of directions, creatively. And so this was the first time we were all on on the same island together. And it was the best opportunity that he and David had to collaborate one to one.
David McCallum 10:27
When we were mixing, for the first two weeks, we really got about an hour of Ben’s time a day, because he was focused on so many other things. So we had to be pretty structured in how we used his time. Yeah,
Steve Fanagan 10:40
Yeah, so what we tended to do was, we would, we would try to mix a certain amount of time each day, and then we would review with Ben the following morning, and then we would, you know, we would sort of take notes, but we would continue with the mix. We wouldn’t go back and do those notes immediately. We’d continue with the mix to try to complete a first pass on the film that felt like it was solid. And then we went back and did revisions. And it felt like a really good use of his time, but also a good way for us all to feel like we were getting to the essence of what the film needed to be.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 11:13
And since it was all our first time with Ben, getting this review, time was getting to know him and getting to know his tastes and where he wanted things to go. So those were the very precious moments to, to see what he liked or not. And as we went on just trying to to implement what we have learned.
Steve Fanagan 11:35
And I think like in the editorial process, I was probably the person in most regular contact with Ben, sort of, as the picture at it was progressing and as we were developing the sound design, I was trying to work on and send him as much material as was possible. Because we felt like, you know, we had sound that was not obvious that we needed to figure out. And that’s always a kind of an iterative process and an experimental process. And you’re trying to find something that feels unique and truthful and honest to the story that’s in front of you. When Ben could take a break from edit or VFX, that’s when we would get to talk. Sometimes I would get calls from him, sometimes I’d get these lovely voice messages responding to work I’d sent him. sometimes I get these emails, and we just had a back and forth that way. And it felt like a really lovely way to collaborate. The geography between us being countries apart didn’t get in the way of tha t. I don’t think. He was never dictating what the sound should be, but rather talking to me and to the rest of us about what it should feel like, and then allowing us to go off and experiment with sound to try to evoke and represent and underscore those feelings and those ideas. And the script was full of hints like that as well, which just felt like a real gift actually, for the work,
David McCallum 12:56
We should establish too, that there was no sound window for us. The picture edit continued right through our normal sound edit window. I think we received what would be considered a locked picture a few days before we were to begin final mixing. The visual effects though continued to come in all through our mix. And in in some cases, they were quite significant and played a big role in what we needed to be doing. So the idea of having a kind of window where: “Okay, now we’re focused on sound” — it didn’t happen. So this was part of the reason why we had these overlapping processes while we were mixing. Ben was still working with the composer and still working on the visual effects. And we were still working on ADR, and because the picture had changed and the visual effects weren’t done, Steve’s sound design wasn’t done. And Bernard is trying to mix all of that…by himself. A few years ago, I started color-coding my clips, and I have a little legend about my color coding, and it was really important in this movie. Because anything that we had done, Ben may ask us a question about, and my color coding would direct us towards: “Well, that’s a change that Nathan made from the sync sound” or “that’s a change that I made from the sync sound,” or “that’s something that I used some noise reduction on.” “That’s something that I de-clicked.” “That’s something that I changed the sync position on.” All of these things have a different color, but it meant that Bernard had the ability to also see exactly what kind of change had been made. And Ben’s meticulousness with sound meant that we kind of always had that information on hand. So it really did pay off on this movie, and on my next show. If I make any kind of edit or change, I am slapping my color code on immediately… different director, but the lesson has been learned
Timothy Muirhead 15:00
You’re only in Dublin for three weeks?
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 15:03
I was there for three and a half. But uh, yeah, I had time prior to go to Dublin to do that dialogue premix and a background premix. But then yeah, in three weeks, we we had it done.
David McCallum 15:17
I think we all knew where we were going pretty early, like months before we knew what the ending was going to be like. So we did a lot of communication with each other, where we would either send full sessions or bounces of material back and forth and give each other feedback. So early on in Bernard’s window on the film I sent him the first reel as I had edited it, because we wouldn’t have had a shorthand. And this is one of the things that we do so often have, like, we all work in crews in a lot of cases. So the mixers that I regularly work with know exactly how I lay things out. They know what my color coding means, when they see that I’ve done an RX, they can tell exactly what I did. And they might even know why. And they know how to undo it if they don’t like it. All of those kinds of little tricks that we build into our workflow. I think Steve and I probably sent two dozen bounces back and forth, over the course of a few months. Bernard got to see the entire dialogue edit at his house in Montreal, and gave me some feedback about the way that I’d laid out my material, how he would like to see it, what he liked about what I had done. I think part of all of this, and Steve’s mentioned this before, this all took us out of our comfort zones. And I think Ben liked that. I think he liked the fact that we were put in positions that we were maybe uncomfortable; that we would need to be creative, we would need to find some unique solution to a problem. I don’t think he wanted us to just feed him a track that was the predictable one. And, you know, that was a challenge. But it was one that actually ended up being kind of fun. I was very excited the day I got an email back from Bernard outlining his reaction to my tracks. And Steve and I had many, many conversations of enthusiasm, looking at each other’s work and how unique it was as we went along. I mean, it kept getting ripped up and torn to shreds as picture edits would change. But we stayed focused on a kind of end game that I think we were all on board with.
David McCallum 15:37
So Bernard, you mentioned earlier that as the film went along, you got more knowledgeable about what the director Ben wanted in the mix. What are some of those things that you learned?
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 17:45
What did we learn? Well, his sensitivity to to the characters and the subjectivity he wanted, and the importance of the… of every single line and comma in then the dialogue. How immersive and how… yeah, subjective, all of the sound had to be, and the freedom that he wanted us to have and feel towards any ideas. And it was it was really interesting. The first playback was really interesting. First 10 minutes or so we showed it to him, and then not a word – he just said, “Can I hear it again,” – I just played it all over again. Absolutely no idea if I was going to get fired after those ten minutes or not. But then, you know, he really takes his time to think about everything that was put in. And that was really impressive: the way the way he analyzed and thought of everything that we tried in every way — dialogue, music effects, and everything — and how it made sense in the movie. And Nathan also was a great picture editor too, in putting every scene to context of the whole film. It’s a different way of working. Every director is different. But he is is very interesting in analyzing and taking the time to think of everything.
David McCallum 19:10
One of the unique things Ben often did was, we’d play a reel and we’d stop. And we’d all turn to him as normally you do. And he would be silent for about a minute. And then his most common response was: “Play it again.” And we’d watch it a second time. And I would say that happened at least 50% of the time when we were in playbacks. He was thinking, contemplating, and then he wanted to review it again. And I think in the second review, he was a little bit more active and kind of writing down things. But in the first review he really just wanted to observe and hear.He is a very, very thoughtful man.
Timothy Muirhead 19:49
I can imagine that would take a little while to get used to though, that minute of silence from him where your heart is just sinking.
David McCallum 19:55
Yeah, yes, nerve-wracking. There were definitely moments of like: “How have we done?!”
Steve Fanagan 20:00
I think they were being so careful in the edit, in the picture edit, that he was always been careful to make sure that they hadn’t lost anything. And then I think there was that question mark of: “Well, is what we’re adding… is it enhancing? Is it underscoring? Is it doing something that’s useful for picture?” And he picked up on the tiniest of details. And, and I think it’s a very detail-oriented film from a sand point of view, but also from a, from a visual point of view. And from a performance point of view. And so it felt like if, if we could have that same attention to detail in what we were doing with the sound, then we were, we were doing something that was in fitting with the vision for the film.
Timothy Muirhead 20:39
So this film takes place — it’s an unspecified year, as far as I can tell, but it’s not too far in the future. So everything has to kind of feel familiar, but also feel futuristic. So the way the characters interact with their screens, or even the screens themselves are different. Cars are driverless, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of combustion engine anywhere in the film. So there’s train sequences and car sequences that are very tonal in how they work. And tonal sounds really cool, except for when music comes in. It can be a problem. Bernard, how did you tackle these tones when the music came in?
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 21:20
Well, like we would with any, any scene: Does it work? Does it not work? What’s in the way? What should be emphasized? And everything questioned every time, to make sure that we get the proper blend. But they were in different tones, they were in different register. Steve’s work was sometimes a lot in the low end. And sometimes he had tuned stuff to what he had as score ,for them to match together. And musicality was always present into his edit. And so, sometimes they blended really well. Sometimes we favored one over the other. Sometimes we were… it’s always like that — everybody’s proposing an idea, then, is one idea better than too many or many ideas at the same time? Can they all chip in together? Or should we emphasize one or the other? So I think that’s the standard process of mixing is just figuring out what’s the best idea to present. And there’s some moments that feel like score, really underscore, but that is actually coming from Steve. Every time is to question what is the best way to present the vision.
Steve Fanagan 22:37
From very early on, in my conversations with Ben about the film, we talked about how sound and music needed to coexist and pass back and forth seamlessly from one another. So that you wouldn’t necessarily know something was design or music, that just one would evolve out of the other and one would envelope back into the other, if that makes sense. Bernard, in his approach to the mix was incredibly meticulous, to ask why it was there, and what the function of it was and how it would serve story and, and how two things could interact with one another in an effective manner. And I think I find that very inspiring as a way to think about the process and had been trying to make those decisions in the sound design and edit. But then also, I think there’s moments where you want the music and the design to be at odds with each other so that there’s a tension or a conflict. And, and again, just working with the demos and the material as it was landing in and trying to figure out how to use different frequencies and different types of pitch bending and different types of, of treatments of my work. So that that handoff, or that sort of disruption could occur felt important.
Timothy Muirhead 23:47
How did you come up with the UI sounds for all of the futuristic tech?
Steve Fanagan 23:52
I had a conversation quite early on with Ben… actually, he left me a great little voice message popped up on my phone one morning. And he had been listening to something the night before. And he had heard, in this thing he had been listening to, he heard a cork pop. So like a cork pop out of a bottle. And he was like, “What can we do with that? You know what it like? There’s something really pleasurable in that sand, right?” We sort of thought about: Okay, so the tech sounds shouldn’t be synthesized. They should be organic acoustic sounds, and we can manipulate and synthesize them on top of them later, or we can we can attempt to design, but we always had to start with raw material that was acoustically driven. And I think there is something characterful and there’s something personal and there’s something that we humanly respond to about organic sound; the idea of a cork pop in a space. Let’s say there’s the physical sound, but there’s also how that reflects on the space it’s happening in. And we felt like if we could use material like that for any of the interfaces that it would feel true to the story. So cork pops and tapping stones together and little taps on glass and, and then any sort of manipulation of that, felt like it was kind of pushing us in the right direction. And I would just go down the rabbit hole where I would play around with some sounds, I’d make a little folder and I’d send it to Ben. And then I would just get reactions from him, and Nathan would begin to cut with some of the material that I had been playing with. And I would, you know, get a cut turned over to me and I would see that side of their tracks. And I would kind of think, well, it must be sort of heading in the right direction. So I’ll keep working on that. In the script, there was a mention of the technology in the film, adhering to the Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. And so I went and I studied what they were, trying to figure out how that in some way could inform what I was trying to do. And then also, Ben had done this research about ‘calm tech’ and this idea that as the world that we live in gets noisier and noisier and more noise polluted, actually, what human beings want is sound that is calmer, and more reassuring. And so there’s all these sound designers who are working on appliances and cars and anything that makes us sound in the world around us. And so by reading up on some of that, listening to some interviews with those people, and just getting generally inspired by Ben’s research, I started to just think about those signs in those terms. So everything from the OS, to the messaging to the car sounds had their grounding in that and their inspiration in that. And then it was just a matter of playing around with things and sending Ben folders of sounds and going: “Hey, what do you think?” Or sending them a scene with, with the Steed, which is the self driving car. I just got a sequence very early on to work on for a screening that we were doing and you know, tried something. And when that wasn’t rejected, I developed it further and tried something else. And you know, it’s that beautiful process, you get to be in as a sound designer, when you’re brought onto a film early. And you’re getting to send stuff back and forth, and develop it with the cutting room as they’re working on the picture edit. And Ben’s reaction, if he likes something, I really knew it. I would get a lovely message from him. And it would then give me inspiration to go digging deeper and to try to find other things. You know, we always had this question of: “That feels like it’s working. That sounds good. But is it the best thing? Can we do better? Okay, well, let’s try. Let’s see.” And, and I think where we could come up with better things, we always kept evolving the sound and trying to figure it out.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 27:38
And mix-wise those, those elements were to be part of the reality of the characters and not be a feature of the film. So they had to be… had just to be there but not attract any attention to it, in order to be featured in any specific way. And I wish my phone would do all of Steve sounds. They were really great. I love those tiling kind of sounds that were moving stuff around. And often I would have played them maybe a bit louder sometimes. But you know, it was really a question of not being a feature. You know, it was just part of the of the world they were in.
Steve Fanagan 28:20
Yeah, I think I think that’s such an important point, sorry. Just that idea. So, you know, the guiding principle with that material was that it should never be showy. It should never… we weren’t going: “Hey, look how cool this can be!” Or, all of that technology, both visually, and soundwise had to just feel like it was appropriate to this time in the near future. There’s lots of stuff that doesn’t have a sound on it that happens in those interactions. And then we figured out well, there should be a feedback point there for the user. So let’s put a sound on that. But let’s make sure that it just feels appropriate rather than: “Tada, check out my cool sound!” You know, that that felt like a really important thing. And Ben was very clear in that from the get go.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 29:01
Same thing also went for futz, as we would imagine the future to have real good sound out of the elements specially that’s some of them comes from from ear buds and stuff like that. But then we still had to have this understanding that people are going through a communication system. So we had a few back and forth there, trying to figure out what would be the proper level of futz and not being in the way of communication, as to try to make it as transparent as possible, but yet still feel like this is not coming from the same room. We should not be bothered by by the distances between where people are and and how they are talking to each other.
Timothy Muirhead 29:48
You mentioned when we were setting this up, that there was one particular scene that you wanted to talk about, that presented a big technical challenge that had an unexpected resolution. Can we talk about that a bit?
David McCallum 29:57
Yeah, the sequence that you’re talking about is a conversation between Poppy and Jack that camera and watches from the control room at the lab. And when they shot the scene, they are sitting on a porch. And it starts… it rains. It’s literally raining. They did two takes, I think, before it started raining. And then it just kept getting more and more and more rain. And it’s a big long confession of Poppy’s to Jack, although she thinks it’s Cameron, where she’s describing fear of loss. And she’s basically explaining her depression to Cameron, and commenting on what it would mean to her if she lost Cameron. And while she’s talking to Jack, Cameron is actually watching this conversation. We see Poppy through Jack’s eye lenses essentially, and that Cameron’s watching. So the challenge of the scene is the rain is not visually there, there’s no visual rain at all. And essentially, the dialogue occurs as voiceover for the most part. So there’s no logical reason to have rain. But it’s an extremely —
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 29:58
And it’s there!
David McCallum 29:59
And it’s there, it’s very loud. It’s it’s an extremely emotional sequence. And in its first incarnation, it was really long, and it’s still long. But it was really long when it first came. So the idea of re-recording it in ADR was just off the table or never on the table. We would never have asked Naomi Harris to record this to get clean sound. We did look and explore ways of rebuilding the sequence to get rid of the rain, essentially reduce the impact of the rain. But it ultimately didn’t matter to Ben or Nathan; the rain didn’t matter to them at all. And so while we struggled with it as sound people to kind of find our way: What do we do with this rain? Eventually, the decision was just: we do nothing with the rain, it’s just gonna be there. And we did our — Bernard did his best, obviously to make it as smooth as he could. But Steve put more rain in that gave it a kind of natural character. So it feels like the rain is now all around us, rather than just attached to the mono dialogue channel. So you know, in a kind of circular way, we eventually just got back to the simplest solution, which is just essentially to say: Fuck it, there’s rain.
Steve Fanagan 32:37
Yeah, actually, they, you know, they had done this lovely thing as well in the picture edit, where you’re sort of tracking down the hallway, and you begin to hear this scene before you get into the viewing room with Cameron. And so we had this opportunity to sort of begin the pre-lap on the rain. The way I’d sort of began to think about it was, you know, the feeling you have if you’re lying in bed in the morning where you don’t have to go outside, and it is lashing rain. And the world outside sounds cold. But where you are feels pretty warm. I kind of felt like maybe that warmth, and that sort of intimacy was in this moment between Poppy and Jack. And what Cameron was observing was this moment. And so they had captured this totally incredible moment, like this spellbinding moment from her. And so it just felt like we had to figure out a way to, to finesse and nurture it. And, and part of that was to embrace the rain and try and allow it to just feel like part of the warmth of the scene, I think Again, with the way that Ben thought about the film and the way that he considered the cut and the way that he considered sound, it felt like just a really confident choice. You know, we’ve got a director who knows what they want to do, isn’t getting bogged down in something technical, but is reacting to something emotional and honest and truthful.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 34:01
Yeah, that was a nice challenge from all of us, I think to, to figure out how to, how to keep the emotion through all of those technical situations in film that was not to be part of the film or our interpretation, or how we noticed things there, so… We would talk for hours after leaving the stage at night, just figuring out how this film, how deep this film went.
Steve Fanagan 34:28
It’s not every day that you get to work on something that affects you and affects your colleagues in that way.
David McCallum 34:35
I think it’s…one of the things that influenced us is no one on the sound team was local to Dublin. Although Steve’s Irish from Dublin, he was living in London at the time. And so there was no one local, there was no one that took off to pick up their kids, or that didn’t have this experience of needing to be living out of place and out of time, that we’d all left our lives behind in the middle of a COVID pandemic, that travel in itself was strange. And so to get there and then start working together in unique ways with unique people… I’d do it again, but I’m just not sure that the opportunities to do something as unique as this will come up again, because it’s just so rare.
Timothy Muirhead 35:26
Camp swan song.
David McCallum 35:27
Yeah.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 35:29
Yeah, I felt like that. Exactly.
Steve Fanagan 35:33
You know, you add to that the fact that we were sort of a COVID bubble. You know, it really was.
Timothy Muirhead 35:38
Thank you very much for talking to me today. This was really great. I really enjoyed the film, and it was great to hear your insights on how it came together. Thanks a lot.
David McCallum 35:46
Thank you very much.
Bernard Gariépy Strobl 35:48
Thank-you! It’s a pleasure.
Steve Fanagan 35:49
I really appreciate it.
Narrator 35:56
Tonebenders is produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. Theme music is by Mark Straight. Send your emails to info at tonebenderspodcast.com. Follow us on Twitter via @thetonebenders and join Tonebenders Podcast on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop at Amazon or b&h or leave us a tip. Just go to tonebenders podcast dot com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.
Timothy Muirhead 36:28
Are you looking for more audio related podcasts to listen to? Tonebenders is part of the Audio Podcast Alliance featuring a handpicked selection of the very best podcasts about sound. Be sure to hear the latest episodes from our friends in the community at audio podcast dot org
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