197 – Loop Group Roundtable Talk

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The following is a lightly edited and repaired, A.I. generated transcript of Tonebenders episode 197 – Loop Group Roundtable Talk. Please excuse any typos or translation mistakes made by the algorithm. It is not meant to be read like a polished blog post.

Tim Muirhead/Host

Bobby Johanson – ADR/Loop Group Recording Engineer

Tim Atkins – Game Dialog Designer

Nina Hartstone – Supervising Sound Editor

Brian Bowles – Dialog Supervisor

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Timothy Muirhead 6:07
So Brian, you have gone through the script, you figured out kind of where you need the loop group?

Brian Bowles 6:13
Yeah.

Timothy Muirhead 6:13
What’s your next step on preparing for the actual session?

Brian Bowles 6:16
Well, preparing for the actual session is, you know, I go through and I cue based on what I’m seeing, and what I’m thinking about from the scene and what may have come from the spotting sessions with the director, you know, but I’m thinking about how I want voices to fill up a given space. You know, are we in a busy cafe? Or are we in a small quiet, ou know, candlelit, you know, restaurant? Are we in the subway? Are we in a, you know, protest? Are we just on the streets of New York? What neighborhood? So I’m thinking about how I want voices to interact, as we’re moving through with our characters. And so I’m cueing based not only on where I think I could get a voice to, you know, attach, if you will, to a person on screen, but also, what are the… what’s the effects team going to need out of actual crafted pseudo sync dialog for the scenes? Because sound effects libraries, as vast as they are, don’t give you the, the real tactile sound of what loop group can do. And you know, and then I’m thinking about: is the scene a happy scene? Should we be hearing happier voices? Should we be juxtaposing a happy loop group to a sad scene? Should we be, you know, how can we be coloring the frame as I’m thinking about queuing this stuff, so that ultimately, when we get on stage, you know, I’ve got some directing thoughts on what to get the actors to work on. The other thing I’m thinking about is: how many people I want to bring into the studio and how many days I want to record versus how many their production wants to pay for? Creatively and comfortably get into that conversation from a creative, beneficial perspective. And not necessarily from just a brass tacks, budgetarily, you know, budget perspective, if possible, I like to bring in a loop group early in the movie so that we can get some sounds in and attached and working. So that the rest of the show can start to see” “Oh, no, we can do more of this, we can get more in, and it gives us a chance to like craft it and fine tune it as we get through to the end.” Doesn’t always work that way. But that’s, that’s, you know, that’s always a goal of mine to get in as many possible days of loop group on a job.

Timothy Muirhead 8:33
So are you actually writing script for the actors?

Brian Bowles 8:37
What I do is I jot down sort of, you know… I think about it… it is improv, for the most part. And so I’m sort of jotting down like, just bullet points. Like: think about this, think about this, so that I can plant those ideas in the actors heads, so that they can then do what they do, which is act and perform. They can take that and come up with something that then hopefully feels organic and natural. But you know, some jobs need a very specific script. I may write it, but it may also get punched up by the director, they may put it in the hands of the actual writer who’s getting the credit. It comes and goes. Sometimes we’re just coming up with things live on the day in the room. You know, if you have to do like, like an EMT worker, or an ambulance driver or something like that, the loop group actors have books of cheat sheet stuff, that is some nomenclature codes, language that’s used. But you prep your loop group. You know, as you’re coordinating and dealing with your your casting agents, you’re coordinating with them and saying: “Hey, we have a scene that’s here. We have a scene that’s like this, we have a scene that’s like that” so that they can be interfacing with their actors and getting that stuff put together so that everybody is showing up as best prepared as possible. Lots of people wear the writing hat.

Timothy Muirhead 9:54
So Bobby, when you have a session booked with you, what do you demand… maybe… “demand” is not the right word. What are you expecting to get ahead of time?

Brian Bowles 9:58
Demand is the right word.

Timothy Muirhead 9:59
Demand is the right word? What do you need to get ahead of time? And how much ahead of time I guess?

Bobby Johansson 10:08
Well, this is… are we talking COVID? Or are we talking pre and post COVID? That’s a whole different story. So are you talking about in the studio, if everybody was in the, on the stage here?

Timothy Muirhead 10:19
Sure, let’s start with that.

Bobby Johansson 10:20
Okay, let’s start with that. You know, the studios were a lot bigger back in the day, and we used to have bigger rooms here in New York. I still have a very big size room, one of the biggest, if not the biggest in New York, but it’s definitely scaled down space wise. So when you’re fitting 15 people, 15 group actors in this room, it does get tight. So I usually need to take the podium out and get everything set up. The majority of loop groups are recorded mono because you don’t want to overthink it. There’s no reason to record in stereo unless it’s for something, you know, some sound design that you need it for. So what I’ll do is I’ll hang a mic, and I’ll put lines on the floor. And then I’ll hang a far mic, one in the ceiling. And then you know, I’ve had my mics all kind of over and around the room, I’ll put them… again, I’ll put a mark and then I’ll put a smaller mark when I need something that’s gonna be a lot more on-mic, which is never really more than four feet away. All this stuff is recorded with a lot of space. The key to tgroup in the studio — I actually enjoy doing it very much because you get to fuck around with different mic techniques — you can’t really ruin it. It’s not like you have an actor who’s you know, in here and you’re you want to try something different. And if it goes wrong, they have to do it again. It’s okay, as long as it’s not time-consuming, if something doesn’t sound right. You say: “Alright, let’s hold on for a second, and let’s get started again.” With group, it’s mixed usually down at an effects level. So if you try something out, and you know, you know it’s gonna be okay, in the long run. But what I like to do is, is try out different things. I love movement, you know, insist on it. So if there’s a walk-by, I get the walk-by. And like, if it’s an interior scene, and you’re in a big room, I’ll have the actors walk by, walk, you know, keep the distance from the microphone, and they’ll start in the corner and they’ll walk to the other side of the corner still talking. So you kind of feel the Doppler of them. Even though it’s a mono signal, you’re still hearing the off… On.. Off, off, off of their voices, which I think mixes great. If it’s an exterior, they’re out in the city, they’re in the street, and they’re doing a walk and talk, I want to have them on mic the whole time, I don’t want to hear the room. So what I’ll have them do is walk by the mic and pivot at some point, and then just kind of walk backwards aiming their, you know… so they stay on mic, but the distance — you feel the distance, but you still get the movement, you get that same effect. So I set the room up so there can be a lot of movement going on. Again, there’s no science, there’s no rules to doing it. People do it differently. But generally, it’s what’s going to sound the best, that’s not necessarily going to be mixed up high. Depending on the scene. If you want it like Brian was saying, like some some radio stuff, we’re gonna get that tight. And so you can futz it. When when I’m in the studio, I record like — if we’re doing a walkie-talkie type of a thing, police, you know — I’ll record with the actual walkie talkie; I’ll record them on one track. So it’s u nfutzed. So it’s clean, so they can futz it. I’ll also give you a futzed recording. And I come right out of my mic pre into into the recorder with the other walkie-talkie back there. So it’s naturally futzed. I think it’s a cool thing for the actor to have the actual prop in their hand as they’re doing it. And also, I love the way it sounds in the back. And it’s quick for playbacks. And it’s the real thing. So again, it’s a fun, a fun day.

Brian Bowles 13:39
What Bobby’s talking about, like, his movement in his room and experimenting in his room is really a lot of fun. You know, he’s happy to reposition the mic 800 times a day, put it off and on and rearrange it. There’s a couple of different phone types that you can pick up and hold in your hand when you’re making phone calls for actors. We did a session where we had, what was it a dozen people doing, like waltzing around your room? So that the we got movement with conversation and so that people were feeling like they were in the action while they were doing it. Like, all of these things of trying to put back the reality of what was happening on set into the recording makes a huge difference. And Bobby’s always happy to experiment with that stuff.

Timothy Muirhead 14:23
So Nina, when you show up for the loop group session, what have you sent ahead of time? What are you arriving with?

Nina Hartstone 14:28
Yeah, I always send cues ahead of time. But I also have an awful lot of notes for myself. I think I always, as we’ve talked about here, we never seem to have quite enough money in the budget for the crowd, the amount of crowd we want to shoot. You know, I’m hoping to try and get many more voices than I can, and I always have way more pages than I can possibly get through on the day. So I have my own kind of priority list, always, of how to cover things and where to maybe go and grab some wild tracks, going through. If I know that I can use that maybe to cover multiple scenes. So but we’re not spotting to every single point. So we do send things over in advance. And also, I will talk with the ADR mixer as well about what kind of mic setup we’re going to want if we’re… because we quite often use a boom mic as well to try and get the movement. So we’ll get them doing all those things and have a distant, have distant mics and close mics and getting doing sort of round robins around the mic to get all that movement going up, and pass, and the Doppler effects. And then for some of them we’ll maybe have a boom swinger in there. So you get couples walking past and being tracked by the boom, and then the boom comes back again, and they carry on and track them through. And as these guys have said, like, movement is SO key to everything that we record in an ADR theatre. Movement, and just allowing the actor to suddenly… to feel more natural about what they’re doing. And there’s just nothing particularly natural about sort of standing in front of a lectern and performing their lines. So, all of that I do find is really, really helpful. So there’s as much preparation as possible, I think, genuinely in sending the lines and, and also thinking about, like, period pieces and stuff, if you’ve got a… if you know you’ve got something that’s set in Victorian times, I’ll sit there and I’ll start making little cheat sheets for the actors that they receive in advance of like, how much was a pint of beer back in those days, so that for the pub scene, they know what they’re ordering. What kind of foods did they like? What were common names that they might want to call each other. But you do have to be careful, because as soon as you tell them something, they tend to all use it. If I give them one name, or they hear a name from the show, that name is gonna pop up by every single actor. So we always get to the point where it’s like: “Right, you’re banned from using the name Steven! No more!”

Brian Bowles 16:35
It’s really true.

Tim Adkins 16:36
Nina touched a little bit on something I missed out on when I was talking about the planning, actually, which is kind of, building up a palette of sounds that aren’t necessarily part of the cue list initially. But judging from the game’s themes and the region, like the setting, and things like that, I always try and get together a list of nice-to-haves that I’ll try and get that I just, kind of, have a feeling that will come in handy down the line for one of the sound designers or one of the voice designers implementing that stuff. So I’ll look at the map. And maybe there’s different districts. They might be talking about different things at different districts, for instance, different regions of the world. And the other thing that you kind of have to think about in games is the interactivity, of course, but also the, kind of, dynamic changing world. You go to a place in the daytime — it’s a busy market town. You want to hear that kind of market walla that you’re used to. But then at night, you come to the same place, you don’t want to hear that same bed of ambience playing. So you have to kind of figure well, is it going to be fine to have nothing? Or is there going to just be a few kind of sparser crowds around at that time. So all these kinds of extra dynamic considerations in games that I try not to forget. I have, but I try not to.

Brian Bowles 17:50
It sounds pretty fun actually. Like having to go to the same location multiple times of the day and like, paint that picture with voices sounds sounds like a pretty fun experience.

Tim Adkins 18:00
It is yeah. And then you also have to of course think about, well what if the player disrupts that crowd? Like what if someone stabbed someone? And how is the crowd gonna react? What’s going to happen to that audio? Is it just going to fade out? Or is there.. Can we record a nice tail leading into a panic, you know? Cue those kinds of things? Often, you’ve got to think about that as well, in the prep time.

Brian Bowles 18:22
Absolutely.

Timothy Muirhead 18:22
So something that has happened in the last couple years, as we’re all very, very familiar with — COVID has happened. And the idea of having a bunch of people in a small room yelling is become something that isn’t as acceptable anymore. Hopefully, that will change. But I’ve had lots of guests on the show recently talking about how this change has been revelatory for them, because instead of getting one recording of the entire group, they’re getting a bunch of individual recordings. Bobby, how much of a pain in the butt is that been for you? I’m sure that, like, quadruples the amount of work you’re doing. But it also quadruples the amount of work on the back end for the dialog editors, I guess, for the group, maybe Bobby can start? Is this something that’s going to stay or…

Bobby Johansson 19:05
No. I don’t think so. And the reason why… I think the groupers might like it to stay, because they can stay in their pajamas at home. But it comes down to acting and it’s hard to act or be somewhere, you know, city or whatever the shot is, whatever the movie is, when you’re in your closet. It’s difficult to be — even though you’re in the studio, in these cases, you’re with the other actors, so you feed off the other actors,. And it’s very difficult to do it remotely as you’re isolated. And then usually we’ll bring them together with a zoom as a visual and I take their audio tracks and we bring them in. There’s the one positive thing — I think everybody will agree, and any ADR sound supervisor will agree with this — is the fact that you can isolate the tracks. Because there’s always one voice in a perfect take that you want to get rid of. Always. And it’s always been a thing — this has been since they’ve been doing group. You know, you’re able to go into your ISOs and lose that one voice if it’s not working, and then you’re good. That’s the positive. The negative is no movement. You know, I was saying before about how important — Nina mentioned the same thing — it’s so important to have the movement and yet you’re sitting, again, in a situation, in your either walk-in closet ,if you even have one, or in your room. And it’s just — you can’t really stray off mic situations, because it’s not only that the mic’s really not that great, but it’s also their environments aren’t studios. In here, this is a dead environment studio with a floated floor on springs. So you can control the liveliness. We can’t do it from somebody’s house. They don’t have a studio. So it’s been an issue. But we’ve gotten really good at it. We weren’t the first to start doing it by all means. We kind of came a little late into the world because we were using cutting rooms down the hallway as studios, Bringing an actor, so they had their own private room. And we’re very COVID safe here. So we went through all the protocols, and they would come in and they would get their own private rooms. And I ran mics down the hall. And we could cover a 10 person group, especially if they’re coupled, if ithey’re a married couple or they live together, it was okay with SAG to be in the same room. We started that way. And we were early doing that. So, as home recording became… people got more… you know, we kind of figured it out more. It’s got its pluses. But really, as far as I’m concerned, once we’re back, we’re back, because there’s nothing like being able to act with somebody, doing the walk and talk, you know, and being able to physically act with them. It’s — again, these actors, they feed off each other. And it’s really an important part of group.

Timothy Muirhead 21:45
Brian, how have you found the tracks in COVID times?

Brian Bowles 21:48
Everything that Bobby is saying is correct. I’m very happy with some of the group sessions I’ve had for the series and the films that I’ve done during COVID. But that being said, you know, there’s a lot of like, emotional space that is lost in the track. I am very active on the ADR stage, when I’m directing. I’m usually standing up with the actors, walking them through body language and giving them things to react against, and you know, giving them little pushes or things like this, or you know, some physicality — things to give them a surprise or directing them up or down or whatever it is. And none of that stuff translates at all. In the Zoom medium. No one is paying attention to my little window in a wall of windows. It’s very hard to get something that feels as authentic as everybody performing together, playing together in the studio. I’m with Bobby, I’m really hoping that it changes. Like I can see principal ADR going this way for a long time. But I would really love to see a loop group go back to everybody in the same studio, same theater, all at the same time. You know, working together. I think that organic nature just produces a much better track.

Bobby Johansson 23:00
Besides that, the audio that you’re getting at the end of the session is very static still. And it’s on mic. You don’t have the ability to record something wide or off-mic with his home setups. So everything is on-mic. And it’s really not the way to do group. Again, like I was, I was saying, in the studio, I’ll have these guys… we have room mics 16 feet away — That’s what you kind of want. We want to deliver these tracks to the mix… Again, treat them like effects tracks so they can subtly sit in. And you know, with these home records, you can do it, you can take something and you can throw it behind the door, you can pan it as a walk. But it’s every it’s on-mic, it has to be on-mic. And that’s what that’s what you’re getting. And that’s what we’re delivering to the mixes. And the mixers know, they understand what we’re up against. And some are good with it. And some just like us, you know, we’ll just use production or whatever or effects. But our hands are tied, basically, with how we could record this stuff. And a lot of the microphones that they’re using, again, aren’t =really up to pro — what they would use on a set. So it is what it is. And you know, and I’m looking at it now as we’re actually finishing movies, and we’re creating scenes and we — you know, I just worked on a big HBO job that takes place.. it’s a period piece — and we got really decent stuff from home stuff. But as happy as I was with the quality of it, it’s still nothing like getting everybody into the room for performances.

Timothy Muirhead 24:28
Tim, you actually… I saw you post a video on social media. I think you know which one I’m talking about — where you figured out a way to do a large loop group session with a bunch of people. Do you want to explain how you went about that?

Tim Adkins 24:39
Yeah, I mean, I got pretty lucky really. The last big project I was working on — the video you’re talking about — it was a Ubisoft project, and they have a very large motion ca pture stage that we could make use of, so I am all too aware of how lucky I am to have that resource at the time. And also we — COVID protocol when we came to record was such that people — a certain amount of people could be in that kind of space at one time. As long as it was socially distanced. Well, the engineers at Ubi, Jacob Thiessen, he came up with what he dubbed the Octagon of safety, which was essentially a lot of large baffles in the round, and actors were face in, towards each other. But they’d be socially distanced with baffles between them. And yeah, it worked out pretty well, because we kind of had the best of both worlds in many ways.

Tim Adkins 25:40
I was a lot like Brian, where I like to kind of get in amongst the crowd and use my body language and conduct them in a in a sense. So I could do that in the center of the circle, which also made me feel like, like a badass. And a lot of the actors could see each other and still play off each other. A downside as well, of course, there’s still, there’s that lack of movement, still. We could get around that with some of the smaller group cues where they could walk around the mic in small groups, whilst remaining socially distanced. I had… I went a bit crazy, like Bobby was talking about it, it is a fun time to play around with with mic positioning. So we had, I don’t know, 20, 25 different mics just set up, including all the actors with their individual ISO mics. We had an MS pair distanced and a small, portable recorder really distant, and then an ambisonics mic in the middle as well. So there was a lot going on. Yeah, it worked out pretty well. And we still had the benefit of being able to duck down those voices that just poke out a little bit too much with the ISO tracks.

Timothy Muirhead 26:48
Yeah, we should just mention really quick that the example you just heard of that recording is the camera mic. It’s not all the the actual mics in the room. And if you want to see how that was all set up by Tim and his crew, you can go to Tonebenders podcast dot com and navigate to the page for this episode, and the video will be posted there. So a couple of you have brought up the idea of directing the loop group. Let’s talk about, kind of, the… I don’t know if politics is the right word, but the stage politics of who gets to talk to the actors, are you in the room with the actors? How do you go about directing the loop group? Nina, you want to take that first?

Nina Hartstone 27:19
Sure, it really resonates you guys talking about that. I often feel like an air traffic controller, and those signals just don’t work over zoom, of course, you know, so you are getting very physical with directing them through. I mean, I work very closely with the casting agent who usually attends the sessions as well, who’s very familiar with all the group that have come in and each individual, you know, their specialty and what they’re best at, and who might be good for this role, or that role of, of individuals that you’re spotting on screen that you want to give voice to. So we work together really closely, kind of just trying to get the best out of them and keep the energy up and keep everybody very excited about what they’re doing, which as you say, you know, is — getting everyone together is absolutely key for that. Through COVID times, we’ve sort of, we’ve started trying to figure out different ways. I mean, as you know, we’ve recorded a fair bit ofloop group outside anyway. So it just seemed natural to carry on doing that kind of stuff. It’s obviously completely tricky for anything that’s very sync. So you know, we always have to do sessions in the studio to capture the sync stuff, where we really need to actually crowbar some voices into mouths. But a lot of the crowd we use, we can use as sort of, you know… it’s setting the scene, or it’s creating a scale or a depth of crowd, in a street or in a concert or wherever. So in that sense, it doesn’t need to really be synced to picture so we’ve just carried on doing the same kind of thing. So we’ve shot crowd in a couple of schools. I’ve just kind of begged, borrowed, stolen and go, can I go in there? Can I bring some recorders? Can I bring some microphones, go into your playground and record in there? We’ve also started using my local football stadium, which is only — it’s only a small football stadium. But it’s great because they’ve got all the facilities for, sort of, green room area, which is really quite large. So people can be, we can open all the doors, make sure it’s ventilated, and they can pop in there for their breaks. But they’ve got plenty of space outside. And again, that gives us the capacity to put mics everywhere. As you’re saying, Tim, we’ve got mics at many different distances, and capture that real reverb. It is so key to just get the reality of what you’re recording. And as you say, in that whole is great having the single mics, but them all being on mic is problematic when you get to the mix because everything that we’re doing his fakery. So as soon as you add fakery on top of fakery, which is like adding plugins to try and create some sense of space in your recording, of course it all just pushes you a little bit away from believing it. So being able to record it authentically on distanced mics, you know, you just, you just can’t beat that. Having this sort of distance between the microphones has been, you know, so actually quite a good thing. I mean, normally we’d do outside stuff, but we’d have a boom, and they might all come together. Or they might go in groups and do small pairs, or fours, or all those kinds of things. And they’d all be gathering. But as soon as COVID kicked in the first session we did, which is quite early on, in the pandemic, where we’ve been very, very strict, we did it entirely outside, and we had a, you know, a strict two meters between every microphone and each individual artist had their own microphone, and we didn’t swap. We cut out the boom, and we just made sure that they had their own mic for safety. Again, we’ve been able to record like 20 people at once, but actually have quite good separation on their individual mics outside. So it’s almost like you’ve got the best of all worlds in that way. So looking on the bright side, that is one of the positives that that has come out of it.

Brian Bowles 30:56
Sounds pretty amazing.

Nina Hartstone 30:57
It’s fun. It’s loads of fun!

Timothy Muirhead 31:00
Brian, how do you go about directing your sessions,

Brian Bowles 31:03
I’m pretty hands on. The jobs tend to trust me, the director tends to trust me. And so they know that I’m in there to get stuff to support the movie. The supervising sound editor trusts me and, and so I’m in there, and I’m, you know, I’m getting what I think is the right thing to get, all the way through. Working closely casting with our casting directors and our coordinators, and they know what I’m looking for. We’ve worked together for years. And so like, I can give them a, you know, I need to this kind of person, or that kind of person, a dozen of these kinds of people and so on. And then some of the stuff I’m doing is not really what we’re seeing on the screen, you know, like, if we’re in a restaurant, I’m not going to shoot eight people, having little peas and carrots conversations. I’m going to put them at a table, you know, with some cutlery and with some, you know, glasses, and let them have a casual conversation and I’m going to shoot that four or five times with four or five different pairings so that I can, when I’m editing it, start to paint a better picture with their conversations and let it have, you know, a little bit more of an ebb and flow and you know, and prepare it in a way that is much more prepped, like an effects pass. So that when it gets mixed, there’s a lot more control over how things are put together, I try and let the actors do what they get to do. You know, like giving them a short two second cue: “Give me the perfect thing for this moment” never work. You know, they never nail it the first time through. So I tend to record 40, 50 seconds too long on any given take. Let them get their, sort of, improv brain turned off. Run out the one or two ideas they’ve already put into their head. And then they actually have to think and then they become more of a real person. And the content becomes much more usable. So I’m using often the end of a take that is, you know, 30 seconds, a minute past the moment that we beeped in for. By doing that, it speaks to something Nina was talking about: like, how can I reuse these materials all throughout the movie.Four, five different tabletop conversations — I can use that in every restaurant scene in the entire movie. So I may have taken longer to do one cue, but it addressed four scenes. And so, like, that’s a time management thing that you start to figure out, you know, through all of these sessions of, like, how can you be really efficient. You don’t actually have to touch every moment in the movie. You have to touch the important ones, and gather material that recycle, repurpose… “Oh, there’s this little four syllables of something that don’t make any sense. But it’s the right frequency to drop into this other scene.” So that, you know, it just feels the little hole in the dialogue, you felt like there was somebody in the room, and then you move on. And you know early think about it. I’m thinking about those kinds of things a lot, Like how to be efficient with time, but also get the most natural sounding performance as possible. Because everybody says loop group is horrible. It’s very rare that a director is excited about loop group. Everybody has their opinions on how horrible loop group is how horrible loop group actors are, etc, etc. And so I, I’m very happy to let all of these incredibly talented actors actually get a chance to perform and show what you can really do with loop group. Because this stuff doesn’t exist in effects libraries, and rarely does it exist in production. And so it really is, you know, we are painting the middle ground between what is our lead actors’ world, and what becomes the effects world. So we’re painting that four to 10 to 15 feet zone between what’s in the foreground and what’s really in the background. And so, that’s where the whole second layer of life really, like, starts to play out in the movie. So without quality stuff, it just gets turned down real low… slapped a lot of reverb on it, and it just sort of goes away. Spending the right time to record quality material — I’m always happy when I get a lot of loop group into a movie, because it means I did my job well and allowed, you know, actors to do their job well. And that’s always a good feeling.

Timothy Muirhead 35:16
Very well said.

Tim Adkins 35:18
That was very eloquent!

Timothy Muirhead 35:23
So Bobby, what is someone who’s coming in to do their first loop group session with you…what are the common mistakes that you can tell someone’s not hasn’t been around the block before? What can someone do that kind of pisses you off or tips you off to their lack of experience with this.

Bobby Johansson 35:39
It would definitely be fake voice, like, you know, like not a cartoon voice, but something that they’re trying to be unique about? The idea — and I always tell this to the group, and I reiterate it all the time — we want everything to blend in. So unless we’re looking for poke outs, we want you guys as a group to all kind of work together. You don’t want to have a stick out. And the thing of it is, with group, it’s difficult too because you know, they’re getting paid to be here, and they’re doing a job. In their mind, they want to do a great job. So they want to have their voice, you know. And ideally, what we want is everybody, depending on if we’re doing a walla pass, or you know, just a group pass, everybody to kind of stay in that same realm. So it’ll work as like a bed, and nothing will be poking out. And if you have that voice, that’ll be… that’s usually the case. But I find out that a lot of actors that will come in and this will be their first time doing it are really good at it, because they’re not overthinking it as much. Or it just seems like, you know, we’ll get a lot of… we get good performances once they warm up to something, but you know, it’s a difficult thing. It’s like, especially if you’re tracking sync, you know, this one over in the corner up there, you know, you got to watch the sync and get it to the point where it’s believable. Again, it’s going to be mixed way low, the audience is never going to hear it. It’s a subliminal, you know, what you see in the theater, that you’re not going to think about it. And that’s what we want to do, we don’t want it to all sudden go: “What is that weird voice coming from that lady in the corner of the screen? ” and take you away from, you know, Tom Cruise. So the idea is the blending, you know, if unless we look for call outs, and we do that as a part of our day to, to get peaks. So we can have these voices come out, we can mix them real low. And it’s not a peeve because it happens all the time. It happens even with the pros that are here all the time. You just gotta say, you know, just can you bring up your pitch? Can you lower your pitch? You know, just to kind of let everybody kind of meld together as a group.

Timothy Muirhead 37:36
So Bobby, when Nina shows up and tells you what mics she wants you to use, because she’s got that Oscar in her back pocket, you’re gonna listen to her.

Bobby Johansson 37:43
Absolutely. What, are you kidding!?

Nina Hartstone 37:46
I like the collaborative approach. Let me just say that!

Bobby Johansson 37:52
If Nina’s coming in, we’re all ready. We’re ready for anything.

Timothy Muirhead 37:56
But when someone that you’re not as familiar with or haven’t worked with before, if they show up to the session and start asking you to use certain mics, is that something that you like or don’t like, or…?

Bobby Johansson 38:05
No, it happens. You know, we’re here to make everybody happy. You know, we’re not redefining — I say it’s not rocket science. There’s a science to this, but it’s not… you can overthink this very easily. And you can overcue it very easily. And you can over… you know, “I want to do this.” I’ve had people come in, they want to use a DPA microphone, fine, we use it. In theory, a DPA microphone in a space like this isn’t really going to give you what you want. Because you don’t have the space to really let it work, which is basically a stereo — it’s a three mic, you know, give you left, right and center. It’ll give you that Doppler effect. Again, if that makes you happy that you have that absolutely will give it to you. And I’ve got big sound supervisors that swear by it. And so I do it for them. And I’m happy to. It’s just, it’s a little bit of a pain in the neck because it takes me off my game of what I listen to normally. So… But we adapt. If it’s some new sound supervisor that comes up with a great idea, again, group is time to fuck around with recording. So it’s I’m okay with it. Again. I’m also used to hearing what I hear, so it does hamper then the way I’m going to monitor things. So I always back it up with what I know, familiar and let them use their wacky mic setup. And they probably use my mic. In the end.

Timothy Muirhead 39:23
So what is your mic? What is your mic setup?

Bobby Johansson 39:26
I mean, you know, I use a Schoeps up front because it has a wide diaphragm where it’ll capture if you have nine people standing in front of it. It’s usually everybody’s kind of caught up. Everybody will be on mic …ish… enough. I use what I use in here. They’re all production mics, they’re all booms. You know, 81’s, Schoeps, whatever works. It’s really the space and the performance. Like you could probably use a handheld 87 and record group and it’ll work. It’s getting the performances and the right sounds. And really the microphones are a plus, you know, but it’s It’s not necessarily gonna make or break your group.

Timothy Muirhead 40:02
Brian, how do you go about interacting with the recording engineer versus also interacting with the actors? Do you just leave the recording engineer and trust them? Or are you talking…?

Brian Bowles 40:12
I think it’s a back and forth. I mean, like, I know what I can hear live in the room, because I’m not — I like working without headphones on, you know, like, I’m interacting with them. And so like, I’m hearing what they’re doing live. But I am regularly checking in with Bobby or whoever’s studio I’m in. L”ike, what did that sound like to you? Can I hear that as a playback?” Sometimes you’re hearing things not as dynamically as you want to in the room. But you hear the playback, and it’s actually better than you expected. And sometimes you have the opposite. And so I’m constantly checking in and leaning on them. They are ears that do this on a regular basis. And so, you know, trust what they do. I’m in their space. If they tell me it’s not working, let’s figure it out and make it work right. I may not have thought that we got a great performance, but I’ll look back and Bobby would be like, “Wow, that one was really great.” It’s like we’re doing a production team at that moment. Like, you know, we are collectively working together to get the best possible thing. So, I think interacting with your engineers, and your recordists and your mixers is all important stuff. Everybody’s in this together. No one should feel like, you know, relegated like, “Oh, well, you’re just the person that’s putting this down for us.” Like, we’re all in this together. And the day is a collaborative day. And the more that we can be a team, the better results we’re gonna get all the way through.

Bobby Johansson 41:29
Very important too is, when we play this stuff back, Brian wants to hear something, we’re not playing just the walla or the group that we just shot by itself. We’re mixing it down. So we’re ADR mixers, is our title. And basically, we’re just live mixing this stuff. So it’ll show you how… it’ll give you a feel of how they’re going to mix it. It’s important for us to, kind of, play this stuff back as they’re going to use it. So if we’re, if we’re recording, you know, a park and somebody’s having a football catch, they’re going to be right on mic or mic-ish, and they’re going to, you know, be giving us this loud, these loud voices; I’m going to take this stuff to play it back, I’m going to put it so far back in the distance with volume, maybe a little bit of reverb or whatever to, you know, just kind of sell it as how it’s going to be mixed. And then that’ll give Brian and Nina or everybody an idea of how it’s gonna work in the film. And then you know. But meanwhile, you’re getting your tracks and it’s too loud voices, you know, naked by themselves, without any effects on ’em. It’s our job to kind of, like, show how it’s gonna work.

Brian Bowles 42:33
No, it’s true. Bobby’s playbacks are always really smooth. You know, there’s always some fill to it, there’s always some space, there’s some thought there’s like, oh, you know, it’s like it’s being ridden through, it’s being crafted and presented. There’s plenty of times where it’s like, “Hey, I can play that back for you better. Let me do it one more time.” And again, that’s part of the team aspect. Like we’re all working together. And it’s fantastic. I feel lucky to have worked with Bobby for years, and we have a good understanding. There’s now a shorthand in place. That’s not always the case. But if you give everybody in the room respect, they’re gonna give it back to you, and you’re gonna get good work. Trust your engineer. And if they are saying that, “Hey, this doesn’t seem like it’s working,” take them at their word. You’re in their space. Figure it out together.

Timothy Muirhead 43:15
We’ll send this to Tim first. And if anybody else wants to jump in on this… You’re directing people. You’re using your arms up and down, you’re gesticulating wildly. How do you also take notes on which are the good takes? Or how are you relying on keeping the information? So when you go back to your edit system, you aren’t just staring at a million hours of material and nowhere to start?

Tim Adkins 43:40
That’s a great question. Yes, I do like to gesticulate wildly, it’s true. But in between takes, I’ll be taking notes. I have a laptop in front of me. I’ll just make a few notes whether a take was good or not, or whether there’s something within that that stood out as something that would be useful for a particular scene. But more often than not with games, everything we get could be useful. So I might make a note that something is completely unusable for whatever reason — maybe someone said a word that cannot be uttered for for legal purposes or something? But generally speaking, there could be gold in a lot of that stuff that I may not necessarily pick up on the set. And I will also trust the engineer and ask for their opinion. I will take it all back. And I’ll go through it. And I’ll edit it after the fact. Because I have a bit more of the luxury of time. I’m also not always the one to implement this stuff in the game, like a lot of time it’s going to a sound designer, or it’s going to someone who’s in charge of the cinematics, to put into our cinema tool, or even it’s going across the world for a different team to use in whatever mission they’re working on. So my job really is to package up a delivery that is useful for all those people and easy to get their head around. So it’s not a perfect system by any means but I would go through, like I said after the fact, and try… I actually utilize the UCS file naming system. To make it abundantly clear just from looking at the file name what was contained in that file. I also attach a lot of metadata in Soundminer. And embedded that to the files so that people could get as much information just by looking at stuff. And whether there was anything I thought useful in the take, I might put in the metadata as well. And additionally to that, I’m going a bit off piste from your question, but I would have a folder structure just in Windows or whatever. And you could see if it was walla for a particular scene, it was organized by the cinematic names. And then the palette stuff, the wild stuff was in its own folder, which was also subdivided into, like, what kind of crowd it was. So the challenge is really to make it as accessible to as many people without them having to think too hard. And even with those additional mics, it’s great to have them but with games, you don’t have quite have the luxury of knowing exactly where it’s going to be played back, in what environment that’s going to be in. So I’ve done outside walla before, and I love doing that stuff, because it just sits perfectly. But in games, unless your whole game is taking place outside, then there’s a good chance that it can be played in interior space. So you have to kind of think about making the end result as malleable as possible for the people who are going to be implementing it into the game. For ease of use, I would usually… I’ve mixed down the ISO mics into a stereo track. And then also the the ambisonic mic, because that was a bit more of a useful perspective as well. And so those are the two stereo things you could get, if you just wanted to not dig in too much to the different mics that we recorded. But I also made the Reaper sessions available to anyone that would like to sort of dig in deeper, maybe do their own mix of the ISOs if they wanted different voices to stand out. I mean, they could even pretty much remove all the female voices or the male voices if they needed to as well. So yeah, I don’t think I answered your question particularly well, I meandered around. Hopefully there’s some useful info in there.

Timothy Muirhead 47:12
Nina, how do you take notes and manage the session?

Nina Hartstone 47:16
Well, it’s tricky. I always come in thinking I’m going to take lots of notes. But I’ve come to the realization now that I am just like, waving my arms like a mad thing through the duration of the session, and absolutely shattered by the end of it usually. So obviously, if I’m in a studio, my ADR mixer — if we play stuff back, you know, if we’re trying stuff out, as Bobby was talking about, we’ll have a select track, because we know that, you know, something is popped in, we’ve got some good bits in there, and that will work. But I tend to now, if we’ve got a big session, I’ll bring along an assistant or an additional editor to sort of, take the notes while I’m kind of speaking. And waving my arms around. It is very handy to have someone who’s kind of got an eye on that. But again, much like Tim, we listened through everything. And what we’ll generally do is we’ll have our cue names for things, but we’ll then go through and all the material that comes back, we will go through and catalog it and rename it and create a kind of a library for whoever is going to come to it and edit it, so that you can pluck things. And it is that whole you know — “We’ve we’ve touched on this scene, but we can use these people having dinner for another scene.” So we kind of we know it’s you know, a couple talking about dadadada, or whatever, and we’ll type those kinds of things into the names.We sort of do a combination of: trying to capture as much information on the day because there will be things that pop into our head or things that you don’t forget. But usually you take that material away. And that’s when you start living with it. And you’re listening to it in a detailed way and you start actually editing it. Yeah, at that point, kind of the names are meaningless. Really. You’re just you’re listening through and you’re you’re cutting all the best bits together.

Tim Adkins 48:51
It’s interesting that you mentioned how tiring it is because yeah, it is absolutely exhausting. Yeah, and so yeah, taking notes is maybe the last thing on your mind a lot of the time.

Nina Hartstone 49:02
No, exactly.

Brian Bowles 49:03
If you’re not tired at the end of a day of group, you’ve done something wrong.

Nina Hartstone 49:09
And if your group have got no voices left, or if they can still speak you’re doing something wrong!

Brian Bowles 49:13
Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. That’s exactly right.

Tim Adkins 49:17
A big part of the directing, I think, is to keep the energy up.When it needs to be up. And that that is a tiring thing to be doing.

Nina Hartstone 49:26
It is. Especially when they’re doing repetitive stuff. They’re quite often having to do the same sorts of things over and over and over again. So, to make them do it again, with energy… “One more time!”

Timothy Muirhead 49:38
So Bobby, what does someone leave with when the session is over? What are you delivering?

Bobby Johansson 49:43
With COVID, we actually have a cool method where we break it up. So not only do they get the ISO tracks, which is everybody’s microphone from their feed separately. I also do a mix down, so I’ll break a five or 10 person group going — I’ll take five of them and put them on one side, five of them on the other side. So ultimately the editor then can actually if they don’t even want to go into the ISOs, if they think all 10 people is too much, so they could just drop one side and go.. or listen to either side. Again, another advantage to this, but they’ll just, you know, the Pro Tools session we’ll clean it out. Everything will be labeled. Nina mentioned a select track, if we’re redoing an individual or something, we’ll build a select track, but ultimately, they’re just gonna get, you know, the files down as we laid them down, in the time sync. And that’s pretty much it. I mean, we record everything. Generally, that’s… it’s simple. You know, it’s it’s not a crazy session that, you know, you’re going to be looking for things. Everything’s time stamped.

Timothy Muirhead 50:40
Just one final question for you. How often does like, an above the line person show up? Does the director ever show up for loop group? Like, that’s pretty rare, right?

Bobby Johansson 50:47
There’s certain times when the film director will want to be part of the loop group. And if they understand what group is, it’s great. It’s great to have their input, it’s great to see, you know, it’s important to them. They’ll understand it. We do get the occasional director that doesn’t understand loop group, or will come in and listen, you know, cold on something that we’re doing. And they’re like, you know, “What the hell you don’t have my movie?!” And they really forget that this stuff is going to be mixed down, it’s going to be cut, it’s going to be edited, you’re not going to really hear it, you’re just going to feel the voice. I had a director, years ago, we were doing a movie, it takes place in a disco. And he sat there and he was like, pacing back and forth in the room. And he’s like, “Those two people in the back booth over there…” –it was like studio 54 type — “I gotta have them saying something that’s, you know, pertains to the time” and he’s walking back, and we spent 10 minutes of him trying to come up with something, when there’s no way you’re ever going to hear that mixed in with disco music, you know. It’s going to be played so low. So it’s an understanding, and it will slow us down, it slows down the motion of the session. And again, it’s a good thing if they understand group and how it’s going to be used, because they’ll be able to look by some of these performances and know that I’m not going to use that or I love that. And it’s a whole different world when a director is involved in the loop group session, but I personally, I prefer it when the editor is just here, because they know what they’re doing. Like Brian was saying, the film trusts him, and he knows what he’s doing. And then it’s more of a collaboration with someone like myself or any mixer to be involved in the session. And it’s like too many chefs in the kitchen. So we kind of have to bow out when the director’s here. But again, we give everybody what they want. And that’s that’s the idea.

Nina Hartstone 52:27
I totally agree, though it can be tricky. And I think, you know, we’re all, because we do it so often… when we hear group performing, I’m sure you guys are the same, I’m editing it in my head as I’m listening to it going through. So I already know as it’s going through which bits I’m going to use. But obviously that’s something that we’ve learned over many years of doing this. Whereas I think you know, to come into it as a director, and you’re used to directing principal actors, of course, you’re sort of presuming you’re going to hear every piece of it. I think, you know, loop group actors –and it’s no reflection on them — they do need to be kind of wallpaper and as you were quite rightly saying, Brian, they kind of, you know, they settle down into something bit more normal a little while into the take. And it’s a hard thing to do. It’s actually quite hard to sort of make up a fake conversation and sound real and all that kind of stuff. So it’s quite rightly, I think you need to, you need to know what you’re dealing with when you’re working with loop group. So that you can actually sort of appreciate the session and appreciate the bits that have gone well and understand that you have to record way more material than you’re ever going to use to get the bits of gold out of there and the bits that are going to work.

Timothy Muirhead 53:35
Thank you very much for joining us today, everybody. I think this is a really great talk. Not only did I learn a lot, I was entertained. So what more can I ask?

Nina Hartstone 53:44
Thanks, Tim.

Tim Adkins 53:45
Thank you.

Timothy Muirhead 53:46
Thanks for joining us, and hopefully we can all have you back on soon in part two of the loop group conversation in a little while or something like that.

Brian Bowles 53:54
That’d be fantastic.

Nina Hartstone 53:55
I’d love it!

Bobby Johansson 53:55
This was fun!

Timothy Muirhead 53:57
Awesome.

Narrator 54:00
Tonebenders is produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. Theme music is by Mark Strait. Send your emails to info at tonebenders podcast dot com. Follow us on Twitter via at the tonebenders and join tonebenders podcast on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop with 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 54:29
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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