Continued From previous page.
Timothy Muirhead 3:54
the original trilogy melted everyone senses with the concept of “bullet time”, no one before they walked into the theater for the first matrix had ever seen anything like it really, it used the idea of slowing down. But the sounds that we heard weren’t like pitch shifted down. We were used to hearing like when things got slowed down. But there was full frequency sound going on, which was something that I’d never really heard before. But the big help of designing those I’m sure for you Dane was that they were super short, and there was no dialogue. But in this new film, Bullet Time hits an evolution. And it lasts, there’s like a scene that’s like five minutes long of bullet time. To get into the technical. I’m sure it was shot at a million different frame rates. So I don’t know how sync sound would have worked for the dialogue. How did you even conceptualize what you’re going to do when you saw that scene for the first time or maybe read it in the script? Because it would have been a daunting task. I imagine.
Steph Flack 4:48
It’s a great scene. And obviously, you picked up on a lot of the elements and the challenges with that scene. We were just actually talking about this and it was shot at a multitude of different cameras speeds. And as you say the difference between this and the earlier bullet times is this has dialogue woven through it. So it’s a much more intricate and delicate dance between the dialogue and the effects, and the music to be able to have all that information coming through. And it’s a very subtle scene. It’s not a bombastic scene, it’s not a bombastic action scene. So it’s very subtle. And we have to allow the room that all space for the viewer to kind of be led through the scene without them feeling that they’re being led, that there’s not the background sounds clashing with the dialogue. So it was an intricate dance for Dane and I and I would cut it and give him many different bounces of it during the evolution of the scene for him to kind of place the background sounds which of course that the arcing and all that which were there was great experimentation with that between you know, Lana’s vision and Dane working it. But it was it was a challenging scene, some of the angles had the production sound of the arcing on them, which, you know, rendered them totally useless. We cleaned them up as much as possible. We there was cheated dialogue, even just on the normal 24 FPS takes, because Lana doesn’t always it’s not a given that she will, she will use the sink sound she goes, she scours all the material that she has. And she will choose the best visual and the best sound take. And they’re not all always married. So she’s she’s very thorough and very precise. And it’s extremely important to her about the intent and the emotion of the delivery each time. So everything is chosen perfectly. So you can’t very easily always just go to an alternate take or just say I’m going to loop this because there’s so many nuances in that original performance. And what ends up happening is that, you know, I have to scrape away the egregious elements of original performance. And then I kind of structurally engineer and supplement that original performance with alternate takes little pieces, it could just be a consonant or a vowel, or ADR. But you know, it’s never really throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and just putting a whole new performance in, that’s not going to cut it for her. And it doesn’t cut it for me. I mean, you know, none of us really like ADR, and we just use it as a tool to harvest from, you know, it’s just an arsenal of abstract vocals to pull from to reconstruct and support her original vision of of the performance.
Dane Davis 7:50
And you can’t trick Lana she has a kind of total recall of performances.
Steph Flack 7:55
Yeah, she’s got amazing ears!
Dane Davis 7:57
Her memory! Yeah, it’s like she’ll pick out no, that sound. That’s isn’t that take five, that half of a syllable that’s thrown in there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s take five yeah, there’s something you know, whatever. She described what we can, but I think you did hit it on the head challenge, you know, bullet time was the very first sound design that I did, because they did a visual effects people, John Gaeta and his team did a seven second proof of concept in 1996. I was just talking with John at the wrap party about this. And, you know, seven seconds, very expensive seven seconds. And they didn’t want to show it to the studio without sound. So I had like, two days to come up with a sound but one of the key principles is that it’s real time. Right? It’s subjective real time, when we go into bullet time, nothing’s slowing down. It’s just that Neo’s real time, right? His perception real time is relative to you know, what would be our real time. And so it seems very slow, but there’s nothing slow about bullet time. So that was the trick to not ever make things sound pitch down, they’re all expanded, but I had to find key sounds that had that feeling of real time. You know, that sound turbulent, and all that. So, but like you said, there’s no dialogue to those scenes and the music and I, I it was not difficult to make it all work with with the music. But in in Super bullet time, as Lana calls this new scene, it is exactly the opposite. But it’s still that feeling of consistent real time. Right? Even though the relative timescale from the audience’s point of view, makes everything seem super, super stretched. But because the dialogue is always going, I had to find sounds that could establish that feeling of a gigantic relative difference in time that that would play not in the foreground, which was so unbelievably hard to keep that feeling alive. Right. And there are cases where the music was very delicate. And we had to find little pauses in that dialogue to just hear the fwomp, fwomp fwomp fwomp of the bullet breaking the sound barrier, right as this sort of intermittent rhythm, almost That was weird. And we had to sort of take that from how we approach the original bullet stopping because there’s a million tracks in there, of, you know, the the turbulence, you know, that sort of rocket engine sounds and jet sounds, and all these different kinds of bullets and gun sounds. But everything got in the way. So that that was extremely tricky. But and then in the end, right, you get to go into sort of our own perspective, and hear all the bullet sounds. So we got to pay it off, at least. And my favorite moment is that tink of the analysts fingers, grabbing the bullet, an eighth of an inch from Tiffany’s temple. Anyway, it was a fun sequence. But I, we had spoken with Lana early on, and she said this was the most difficult scene in the movie for her to shoot. And, and, and to cut and, you know, make seamless, and I and she said that by way of warning us how difficult it would be. And Steph mentioned in the background, you know, it’s not just a continuous sound, oh, my God, you know, there’s all these different sparks flouring a different frame rate. So we had to sort of find a place to ramp even that stuff, you know, up and down to not be distracting, but still not contradict what we saw
Steph Flack 11:39
kind of to punctuate as well. And but but in a very muted subliminal watercolor way.
Dane Davis 11:46
Absolutely. And unlike Bulletyme, which, like you said, wild everyone, right, it knocked everyone’s socks off when they saw it, this is so subtle, it’s equally amazing. And achievement.
Timothy Muirhead 11:59
Exactly.
Dane Davis 12:00
In Visual Effects. It’s storytelling. But for most people, it’s gonna go right by them. Because it seems so natural, doesn’t it?
Timothy Muirhead 12:06
It’s very interesting, the way that those things work, the hardest things are sometimes the things people don’t even notice.
Dane Davis 12:12
Exactly.
Steph Flack 12:13
It’s such a beautiful scene. And she, she shot it on a real location in a warehouse, and it’s all shot with natural light. And again, the same challenge was with the set with the dialog with all the different frame rates, not slowing it down. Because it’s just gonna sound silly. And so getting the sync, cheating all these bits to kind of make it sound natural, but look believable, you know, so that’s always trying to find that happy medium where the audience just, you know, is in there and doesn’t get arrested in any way,
Dane Davis 12:51
Especially with Neo’s reactions and grunts. I mean, you know, your audience completely gets how tricky that is. You slow human voice down, it’s instantly a monster. Right? So Steph, and I spent a lot of time in her cutting room, trying to find bits and pieces of Neo that could ramp up and ramp down that were breathy. That didn’t sound like a beast, you know, a creature vocal. That was a huge pain, but but in the end, but you had to have it right, you had to have some of NEOs sound to stay subjective. Because the whole scene is his point of view. And yet he’s so silent, right? He’s like, one 900th of real time or something. The frame rates are unthinkably fast.
Timothy Muirhead 13:42
Well, no one can accuse me of not doing my research for this talk with you. Because someone who’s been on this podcast before and is a friend of the podcast is Lars Ginzel, who was one of the mixers for this. Ah, so I reached out to Lars and I asked him to give me his perspective of the film and maybe give me some insights on something I can ask you. And what he wanted me to tell you was that for Steph, it must have been a huge challenge to try and work around the soft performances and weave in and out of bits and pieces of ADR in the dialogue for Lana, who is obsessed with production, sound and original performance. It’s way more difficult. She’s super sensitive to any kind of changes. So it was an amazing amount of work to weave everything together from ADR location, crowd recordings, and all of that work was perfect because if it didn’t work, some of the subtle stuff in the ambiences in the effects tracks wouldn’t be able to cut through. So the clean dialogue track was a precondition to the effects having a chance to cut through without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Steph Flack 14:40
Absolutely.
Timothy Muirhead 14:41
Were you feeling that while you were working on it because obviously you’re re recording mixers. Notice the great job you did
Steph Flack 14:47
well, that’s lovely that, that he was able to articulate that and I mean, I’ve worked with Lana lot and you know, I know what to expect and also it’s something that I would offer any director and sound is that you clean up the dialogue as much as possible without eating into it and eroding it. And, you know, making it too artificial or anything like that, because it’s a finite sonic landscape that you have in a way. So I want to just want to present a dialog and not take up any other space, so that the music and the effects can sing. And you know, there’s nothing worse than having a really noisy background, that can just play havoc with how you mix the scene. Neo and Trinity have always talked quite intimately in their intimate scenes, it’s a very low signal to noise. And sometimes it’s like, basement, it’s subterranean, their vocals in on the noise floor. So you have to kind of do a very delicate excavation to get their vocals up. And, and still preserve that beautiful integrity of their delicate performances. Because you know, they’re breathy, they’re so breathy. And so you just go through and you just put, you know, I, when I shoot ADR, at the end of every ADR session, I have this whole list of words that I have all the actors say. And I’ve made this list and it keeps growing. And it has, it’s just different. It’s words, but it allows me different combinations of vowels, diphthongs, and consonants and little phrases. And I had them say them at various levels, various projection, so I can always pull from that too. And so especially with these really breathy things, I can just add little consonants in there, at a very low, nearly imperceptible level. But it gives it the clarity and the diction for the audience to understand because the story is so much the dialogue is so much a part of the story. And if the audience loses that for a nanosecond, then their belief is suspended. They start going, “what did I miss?” Was it an important thing, I mean, it always throws me out when I can’t understand something. And, you know, I tried to kind of rehash it to find that missing jigsaw puzzle, and you don’t want that you, you really want the audience to stay in a moment, stay in the story, follow it through, empathize with the characters and, and ride with them in their arcs through the film. And anytime it’s a dropout, it’s just, you know, it can be catastrophic for their enjoyment, and they may miss something really crucial. So it’s just a matter of doing all this kind of subliminal, surgery. That is imperceptible, you know, like, that’s the thing with dialogue editing, you have no idea what’s happened. And, you know, I always had this idea in the, you know, in old days that, you know, when we had dubbing charts, and I was like, I wanted to have some calculation, that you could put the dollar value in each region on the, on the on the cue sheet, you know, that this line was a $5,000 line, you know, it only took five hours to do something and this line is 20 cents. But you know, because nobody knows what goes into it, unless you look at the session, and you see the 5000 cuts, and the volume, graphing and, and all the little pieces and all the plug-in gizmos that have gone on to fold everything in to make a really beautiful seamless line,
Dane Davis 18:38
Steph sessions are taller than most effects sessions, all the work and the libraries that she maintains and seeing just a massive amount of source material. I have to say it’s sort of finished that I was at the after party the other night, and one of the producers brought up that Seymour bugs speaks very rapidly about the choice of the red blue pills when she’s talking to Morpheus, Lana shot it and cut it and she wanted Bugs to perform that as fast as the human physiology could possibly allow a person to speak all those lines and, and she loved the tonality of it. But no one could understand a word and this producer was saying when I first saw that scene, I didn’t understand one word of it.
Clip 19:26
Honestly, when somebody asked me these things I might have a binary conception of the matter said that there was no way I was solving some symbolic reduction in my life. And the woman with the past laughed because I was missing the point. What point the choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do?
Dane Davis 19:43
And now she completely gets it and it’s still hard. You have to listen carefully. But the amount of surgery that Steph had to do over the months to make that clear without ever seeming seeming Frankensteined or contrived in any way, that one What is it an eight, five second long. That’s a sort of crowning achievement Steph.
Steph Flack 20:05
Yeah, it’s all these kind of Sonic pixels. It’s, it’s just a Photoshop exercise with just all these little tiny pieces of, you know, a consonant from ADR, a vowel from another take. And, and the challenge is, she’s on camera, the whole way. And because she’s speaking so rapidly, she doesn’t articulate all the words, right, so you’ve got the sync, where there’s missing, maybe consonants or vowels run together without with a consonant missing. And so you have to put all that articulation back in. So to do that, obviously, the lines going to run much longer, right, because that’s the problem, there’s missing material, and you’ve got a finite amount of sync, visual sync, to fit all this in. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to cut it in a way that you insert the material up until the point where it becomes visually out of sync. And then you’ve got to tuck it back in, get in sync, and then go out of sync for a little bit of time, just before it becomes visually discernible, again, catch up. So it’s just these little kind of sync hooks that you have to play with beats every now and again. So you hit these things that are visually, you know, that you can’t get away with not hitting that visual mark. You know, because it’s an it’s editing. I mean, the thing with editing is, you keep editing, you know, like editing isn’t, oh, let me just fix this. Because you get ear fatigue, right. And so you you, you do it to a certain point, pat yourself on the back, you know, think you fixed it, and then you come back the next day, and it’s like, holy shit, what did I think I did here? And then you do the next pass. So it’s just pass after pass after pass, as you kind of, you know, mold it into the shape where yourself satisfied. And as a viewer that, you know, it’ll be sold to them.
Timothy Muirhead 22:13
Yeah, it was at least a 25 to 30 cent line, right?
Steph Flack 22:17
Yeah, I put a couple of zeros on that.
Unknown Speaker 22:19
Yeah, that’s a $10000 bit I think. Think of it, all the ADR time and all the discussion, right, and all the presentations and the re-work. Oh, my God.
Timothy Muirhead 22:32
The other thing Lars said to me, which I thought was kind of funny, was he said that the the swarm scene near the end was the densest sequence he’s ever had to mix and took a lot of time. And I was thinking, who could say that wasn’t the densest sequence they’ve had to mix? Like that was all hell was breaking loose on everything. You got motorcycles, going nuts, glass shattering every possible explosion, guns everything. Dane, do you want to talk about how you even started tackling something like that?
Dane Davis 22:59
Yeah, not to mention, you know, 1000s of zombies.
Timothy Muirhead 23:02
Yes, exactly.
Dane Davis 23:04
Whoo , it’s like a movie unto itself, honestly, that that whole sequence and visually, a big part of the scene, at least for me, it was how the rules were being broken. Right? The Matrix was breaking all of its own rules, because the stakes were so high. And you know, that comes across all this sort of jello. That’s the word that The Wachowskis always used, you know, jello time that the gelatinous-ation of cars and SUVs crashing, that that is in terms of the sound effects, one of the key layers that had to be articulated and had to get through that super dense soundscape. We knew from the beginning that Lana’s intention was to make that almost operatic. You know, there’s other sections of the movie that were full on operatic like Neo’s rescue from, you know, from his pod, we knew that. And you have to approach the scene differently, right when there’s an orchestra at the volume of the conductors level, SPL from conductors position, but we knew in that whole zombie scene that music was going to be dominating. So everything else had to find its sort of space through there. And that was a big trick. And of course, the music was evolving through there. You know, glass is easy, right? Because glass cuts through anything, glass breaks, but we had to figure out how to minimize the amount of glass shattering right and some of it is Doppler and that all up so we knew on the top end, we had that but the whole middle as he starts to discover his electro mental, you know, capabilities, that sound had to pay off about 15 times in that scene, right? He pushes all of the bots away. So on the bottom end, we needed to make room for that to read Even though it’s all not all low end, because I know from the earlier scenes with the electro metal Neo power, that the score would be very full range. So there are mid range things in there. And there’s a whole glass component which I insisted on maintaining, you know, like, the original glass sound of Neo touching the mirror. And, you know, because for me, that’s, that is that membrane between real where his body is, you know, either in the ship or in the pod and in the virtual world. And I just thought it’d be cool to keep that and Lana wanted more of a concussive aspect to it, which eventually figured out in the in the big battle in the factory. So by the time we got to the zombie scene, I had this thunder component, this phasing thunder, you know. And that was the key, mid range sound about we just built the scene and the vehicles were all cut in, in a very realistic way first, and then a very stylized exaggerated way. But then we could see, especially with the motorcycle that Lana was not interested in hearing the sounds of the vehicle engines, right? I mean, there were some key spots, like when the one guy jumps into a bot and accelerates in the car, we had to understand that he was intentionally rammed into a car, he he didn’t let his foot off the accelerator, he’s a bot. Right, the matrix was saying kill them, keep that accelerator to the floor. So there are storytelling beats where we needed to hear the vehicles. But other than that, that wasn’t a key component, not even the motorcycle, she you know, we had to compromise on the motorcycle, because obviously, that’s a thick sound. And that competes with the strings.
Timothy Muirhead 26:43
And it’s a constant sound as well?
Dane Davis 26:44
Exactly! It’s constant. So we know all we could get was the revs. But the music people, as just as John and Tom were evolving the music, it took a long time to take shape. And in the end, we had Tom Tykwer one of the composers, he was on the mixing stage with us. And he’s also a great, very, very experienced director. And in a way he was advocate, he was pushing to make some space for some of the sound effects beats to get through it for a composer to do that.
Timothy Muirhead 27:18
That’s a pretty rare thing you ever hear the composer doing?
Steph Flack 27:20
It is his film maker side!
Unknown Speaker 27:25
Right!? That’s still make a side coming out. Exactly. Sometimes he would go, “Oh, my God, that sound design. Wait, wait, that sounds so beautiful”. And he was always in the front under the screen with Lana and James, he would walk around to behind the console, give me a big hug. And then he would go back to this position. And it’s like, what’s Sound designer ever dreamed about having, you know, those moments with a composer? but Tom really did appreciate it. You know, on the other hand, he writes really thick orchestral music. Really well. It’s very emotive, beautiful music. So he always knew that he had kind of, you know, he was in the soloist seat, essentially, as an orchestra. And I was just the percussion section, maybe, which is how I want to describe sound effects. Anyway, as you know, as the drummer in the band, but the gunshots, we tried making the gunshots also, more abstract. That didn’t work. So we had to keep the guns crisp. So they had to have their own little transient windows. So we worked that out.
Timothy Muirhead 28:28
So another sound effect moment that I wanted to talk about something that’s new for this version of the matrix is the synthients Is that what’s that called? The creatures made out of balls, the robots made out of like ball bearings kind of thing, or is that?
Dane Davis 28:40
Exo-morphs.
Timothy Muirhead 28:40
Yes, the Exo-morphs. So how did you go about building the Exo-morphs?
Dane Davis 28:46
Well, that was a another giant challenge. Because, you know, all I had was drawings, basically, in the beginning, which the VFX department was graciously sending over to me or posting stuff for me. So I can at least get a feeling for the texture, but very much like, super bullet time, as opposed to bullet time. People are talking through all the Exo-morphic moments, even when we’re in you know, the plan scene where where Sati is describing what’s going to happen in the future, right. And we’re back in the, you know, where the where the pods are the anomalyum. There’s moments where the Exo-morphs full screen, and she starts talking against it, Sati talking on top of it. But I knew even in the introduction of EXO-Morpheus, that the sounds would have to be descriptive of what they eventually look like, and not get in the way and not be intrusive. And I constructed quite a few layers on the way to that and you know, there’s a whole lot of electromagnetic, you know, I’ve built all these crazy electromagnetic things, you know, and use dynamic mics going in and out of all these overlaping magnetic fields to get, you know, different kinds of feeling of Doppler and Hetrodyning and, you know, the harmonics and all that stuff. So, I played around with a lot of that. But again, a lot of that is in the vocal range. Right, some of its very deep, and I knew we wouldn’t have the volume to make the really deep frequencies work. So I didn’t have that. And I do the ultimately, you would see these individual little balls, we didn’t know what color they’d be, because that was always changing different kind of metallic silvery-ness versus black. And as we’re going through the temps, I was building this and the Foley people at some point came in and they started experimenting with the contact, you know, when he would touch stuff and the balls and they recorded a bunch of really cool things with I don’t remember your ball bearings and all these other things and BBs. And then I started integrating some of that into what I was building using some external programs and various plugins. But the trick was to keep out of the way and still suspend your disbelief, you know, so it had to be that having a million little metal balls, vibrating, oscillating, you know, could not make that much sound. Even when he’s in the animalium, and he’s jumping and doing all this crazy stuff. It had to stay within that not very loud, dynamic range. You know, in the end, I think it was some of the foley artists work that sells it, right, like when they shake hands. You can hear all of my little sound sort of going into it, but the dominant sound is some of that Foley of little balls and my favorite sound in the whole movie is when the Exomorph is on the Repunzle tower right? With Neo and he just walks over puts his hands off screen on the metal you know, Bannister, it is here that shink she didn’t sound to me that is cinematic aural story telling. Right at its best, because you heard all this:
Dane Davis 32:25
as he gets up, and that all came out really cool, right? As he forms out of that pile puddle of ball bearings, but when he puts his hands, it all just seems completely real to me. So I’m very grateful to that beautiful Foley that they did for all of that and for the whole movie.
Timothy Muirhead 32:43
Did the Exomorphs get any special dialog treatment?
Steph Flack 32:46
Yeah, they did. That was done by Matthias Lempert. Well, he was out dialogue and music mixer in Berlin. Dane can probably explain a little clearer.
Dane Davis 32:57
Well, like everything else, right when you when you’re doing voice processing. Clarity is the fence that you can’t go through. I’ve done a lot of creature vocals, and I think I did all the voice processing in the movie, except that because I knew I just couldn’t take the time doing it beforehand, it would always be decisions that would be made on the dubbing stage, with music in place with the effects in place. And that worked out great and Matthias was experimenting with different things. In the end, I think it came out magnificently because it had to have a metallic resonance. It had to have a particularization to it. Right. But it also had to sound like it wasn’t a mouth made out of flesh. You know, that was opening and closing to articulate. It was it was hard. But first and foremost, he had to be completely understandable
Clip 33:53
Not all seek to control just not always to be free. What is That? An exomorphic Particle Codex, it’s pretty new, I gives programs access to this world, within limits. Limits are the domain of the limited. Morpheus Thank you. It was my honor.
Dane Davis 34:15
It’s essentially harmonically shifting his track and then texturizing it so that you feel a sort of a harmonization and they’re a thickness right from those in-harmonic frequencies overlapping and then a little bit of delay on it that gave it some size. That’s what I love about that. Yeah, especially with the other exomorph, Quillion, you feel the volume that is described or, you know, outlined by all those little balls, you feel it when Quillion speaks. And you know, and it’s very metallic, I think that’s a amazing achievement and is perfectly clear. So that came up with Morpheus, he had, you know, we had to also be very masculine and strong and deep, right. Morpheus, whether he’s EXO or not, has to have the sort of embodied Animalness to it. Matthias was able to keep the, the power of that body even though it was didn’t exist, you know, but what when I was developing the sound, something that I had to keep thinking of, and I think on the stage remind is, you know, my hands and my finger is everything when I touch my laptop that’s almost completely empty space, the universe is virtually to a gigantic degree, empty space. So what’s the same thing as the Exomorphs, right? It’s just that every atom has this shell of electrons, that bumped up up against the shell of electrons from some other atoms giving us the illusion of solidity. But there is no solidity in the universe, really. So for the exomorphs, it’s just a more visible, obvious version of being all empty space. So when he talks, you have to imagine the breath coming through some lungs. Yeah, obviously, the whole thing is, doesn’t make any sense. Because he has no vocal cords, there’s no trachea that you can see… \
Timothy Muirhead 36:21
But it works. It totally works. You don’t think that while watching the movie, of course,
Steph Flack 36:25
as Dan was saying, we couldn’t go too far because we had to retain the clarity. But on top of that, you had visuals with not really a super clear mouth, because it was all the little ball bearings and everything. It was vaguely defined, greater than vaguely but so it’s not like you’re watching a hard sync on a mouth. And so if it’s a little bit, a morphus, sound wise, you can still put it together. So that was just another factor in how far we could take it in terms of intelligibility and discern-ability.
Timothy Muirhead 37:02
So what you’re saying is the mouth of Morpheus was a morphus.
Unknown Speaker 37:09
What’s a plosive? Without lips?
Steph Flack 37:11
Yeah,
Dane Davis 37:11
I mean, really? What’s there to plote?
Timothy Muirhead 37:15
I have lots more questions for you. But I we’re running out of time. So maybe if I can kind of merge a few questions into one for both of you, can you try and describe how different it was in terms of either tools, or your approach between the last Matrix film you worked on and starting on this one,
Steph Flack 37:32
Night and day. Obviously, what Reloaded and Revolutions were 2003. And now this is 2021. So that’s 18 years of evolution of plugins, and all the tools available to clean up dialogue. One of the great things I think, is Auto Align Post to be able to phase both mics together. And in the old days, sometimes I would hand phase and invert and all that kind of stuff where necessary, but you didn’t really have the time that has just been at night and day for the starting board, to be able to have have those mics phase to start with a really rich, robust sound. And then then from there, you can quickly isolate the problem areas and work on them. On the other films. I was only the supervisor Julia Evershade. She was the ADR supervisor. So we worked in conjunction together, but still it was separate. And now because I’m doing both, I can I can easily do the microsurgery and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And just I know what I want to loop. I know what I want to achieve. I can cut to the chase kind of thing on an ADR stage and I know what pieces I want. I don’t care if it doesn’t necessarily sync, I just am trying to find the tonal compatibility. The textual compatibility, sync is not crucial for me because mostly I can sync it. They’re the greatest tools. The other one is being able to clean up backgrounds and to do all the microsurgery that you can do with RX. I mean, you know, I love going into the spectral spectrogram and I have it set on a 5 million colors. You know, I love visuals. And so I just love the colors. I don’t want the blue and the orange I just want everything so I can see the temperature of everything and I can just go in and you can get lost in there. It’s a rabbit hole. And so in terms of that, you can make it so much better than you could be for you can present it to the stage where they have more time to do their job instead of cleaning it up like in the olden days. Also one of the developments is in group ADR recording, because of COVID is that we, I recorded a place in Burbank and they have 11 isolated rooms. And so I can have all these actors in these rooms, and I can even have actors at home. So I can record everybody on a combined track, which is fine, but I don’t necessarily use the combined track. And then I have everybody isolated. So if somebody is too proud, too loud, too annoying, they can either be cut out of volume graph, nothing is married. So there’s so much freedom, it means a hell of a lot more work in terms of cutting, but you have so much material. And so for the fight scenes, I can have everybody just doing a fight scene. And, you know, “here you be this character, and just make noises all through the scene, I don’t care about sync”, you know, sure be motivated by the sync, but use that as a springboard to try different things, you know, different types of, you know, whether it’s offensive or, or a defensive thing, whether it’s a long yell. And so I just end up with all this fabulous material, which then takes a million years to cut, but it makes it so much better, the quality is so much better, the mix will be so much better, because it can be so precise and so detailed and so beautiful, may take a little longer to mix as well. But there’s a greater freedom in the mixing. Because like in the Similatte Cafe scenes, we have so much beautiful control over the people in the room in the cafe, which starts out quite busy. But we can bring it down in a very subliminal way. That’s not just a big fader move, or it’s not the whole group coming down. You know, so things have can have natural entries and natural exits and and we can pare things down in such a way that it’s just it’s subliminal, because it’s so natural. So all my styles and techniques are constantly evolving. You know, I’m always looking for a way to do something different, something better, really. And different. I’m open to all ideas. So So yeah, over that 18 years, things have changed a lot in terms of the dialogue and the ADR.
Timothy Muirhead 42:31
Okay, Dane, your turn over the last 18 years. How did your approach evolve?
Dane Davis 42:36
I’m always into analog emulators. I was on the first movie. I tried to do everything as digital is possible. But everything had to sound very analog. Right. So the analog emulators, like overload, emulators were super crude of days. Oh, my God, everything was crude. But right, by today’s day ever, all the software I use was hopelessly crude. But now, it’s an amazing array of very natural sounding tool. So I went back to the original recordings that were never used for the whooshes, and add some that were used and completely remastered them. And for the hits. I use all of these amazing new tools that we have today. I basically made all new hits and punches and thuds, body falls and impacts of all kinds with these new tools, so it has a degree of energy, a degree of dangerousness that I really couldn’t even get right before.
Timothy Muirhead 43:33
Sorry, can I just stop you for one second? Are you you’re saying you took the original recordings you made for the first movies and then remastered them with today’s tools. So that the same base sounds just kind of with modern processing,
Dane Davis 43:46
right.
Timothy Muirhead 43:46
That’s super cool. Oh, that’s awesome.
Dane Davis 43:48
Yeah, right. For a storytelling logic. It couldn’t sound like a completely new kind of head. I was there’s a bunch of new stuff that’s used in there, but the basic skeleton of it, it had to sound related to those fights. It’s The Matrix it had to sound familiar, you know, nothing like a little nostalgia, right. Like Morpheus says, so they are really very different sounds. In the movie, the way we mix them are to some extent different but it connects back to them. Lars and I and and, you know, Jeremy Peirson and Laurent and all other people that cut in those effects scenes and Albert Gasser cut in a lot of that stuff. You know, we had fun trying to balance between sounding familiar and sounding “Wow”, new. Again, it had to connect to what people were familiar with, and what the character is familiar with.
Timothy Muirhead 44:44
I can’t thank you enough for talking to me about all the great work you did on this film today. Congratulations and hopefully we can talk again soon. Thanks a lot.
Dane Davis 44:52
Thank you Tim. That’s been fun.
Steph Flack 44:54
Thanks, Tim. It was an absolute pleasure.
Narrator 44:57
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 tonebenderspodcast.com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.
Timothy Muirhead 45:27
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