Lost In Sound

ROLA-OVER

To take a break from the relentless hours the recording industry was serving up, Doron moved to Adelaide, where he worked for a short while at a studio called Soundtrack Australia, doing voice-over recording and editing on a 1/4-inch Rola:

DK: It was all valuable stuff – working there with Bob Allen taught me a lot about the craft of dialogue editing, which came in very handy later when I started working on film dialogue.

But the real link between audio engineering and film mixing came by chance when I travelled to London with the Australian Dance Theatre and went to an APRS trade show. There I discovered the Soundfield microphone. I distinctly remember I was played a recording of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing inside Westminster Cathedral for the wedding of Charles and Diana. The guys on the stand said: ‘Here’s a four-track, there’s the original recording, have a play’.

It was fascinating. I was able to zoom, tilt and pan in full 360º and immediately thought: ‘right, I get all this, this makes sense to me’ so I bought one on the spot – with everything I had. In fact, I think I had to get the family to wire me some more money. It was about $3,000 – in 1982.

Later I bought an Otari eight-track half-inch machine to go with it – which I still have around here in a road case somewhere – some dbx noise reduction and a little Alice 12-into-2 mixer, which I still use. I did lots of interesting things with that gear, mainly location work. Probably the most notable thing I recorded with that rig was Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome. The location sound for that film was primarily recorded – except for the desert sections – to that eight-track setup with the Soundfield on four tracks, another three tracks for sync dialogue and a 50Hz control track on the eighth track.

AS: Can you tell us a bit more about this original Soundfield mic; you still have it I take it?

DK: I do, the control unit for it is in the rack right there behind you, although the mic itself is now unusable. These days I’m using a Soundfield ST350/Sound Devices 744T rig. The Soundfield mic, which has been around for quite some time now consists of four mic capsules placed in a diamond shape sitting on an apex. The plane of each microphone is tilted off-axis by 45º [the mathematics of this setup was developed by Michael Gerzon who passed away in 1996]. Basically what is recorded to tape is three figure-eight signals: one facing forward, another sideways, and the third up and down, and finally an omni track, which is the sum of all. This creates a ‘three-dimensional sound graph’, which allows you to – by doing sine and cosine manipulations – zoom, sweep and pan the focus around the space. That’s the simplest way I can explain it – you can read dozens of pages of mathematics about it on the net if you Google it.

AS: It sounds to me like you just answered my question about how you got into film mixing – you obviously like immersive sounds…

DK: Absolutely.

MIXING FILM: COMPRESSION VS DYNAMICS

AS: Given you’re in the middle of printing the final mixes for Big Mamma’s Boy right now, it seems appropriate to ask you about the different ways you compress the ‘deliverables’. Is what I’m hearing right now the ‘cinema mix’ or a DVD mix, and tell me, how are they different?

DK: They aren’t all that different, but yes, one is more compressed than the other – this is the DVD mix. It’s fundamentally about the excursion – if you like – of the dynamic shifts rather than the panning and the mixing.

AS: Why isn’t the DVD mix simply the same as the theatrical print?

DK: Primarily because most people don’t want a theatrical dynamic, nor do they have the playback systems when you think about it. In the end the dynamic of the cinema release requires a system that can handle it and a relative amount of ambient quiet around you to appreciate those dynamic shifts. One thing I’ve come to realise over the years is that, as much as there’s supposed to be a standard for reproducing level and angles of playback in every cinema, the best you can hope for is that the relationship between the dialogue, the music and effects holds up. If you’ve achieved that your mix is good and it will translate to the cinema environment. Tonally, and in terms of reverberation and distortion, every cinema experience is going to be different. All you can hope for is that those relationships have been maintained.

AS: You never find yourself going, ‘Oh bugger, now that I’m doing the DVD prints, and my compression has been altered, I need to go back into the multitrack mix and adjust something else’?

DK: No because when you get into a noisy domestic environment where the kids are making noise, someone else is washing the dishes, what gets lost is all of your background sound, so your dialogue must always be punchy and upfront. The music always needs to be upfront too, telling the main story. If not it was secondary. Effects – if they were key effects – were always going to be up there. So what you find is that by adding a bit of compression you’re pushing all that primary stuff back. With classic compression, what’s your biggest problem? Bringing up the noise floor, but for our purposes that’s exactly what we want. And when do we want to hear it? Only in the gaps, so effectively, compression over an entire mix is the perfect solution.

AS: As a general rule, are you clipping say 3dB off the peaks for the DVD deliverable, or more?

DK: It very much depends on the program. It could be, say, six-ish. I would be quite happy to take 6dB off the peak of a cinema mix. Especially on explosions and things like that. Because again, you don’t want to be responsible for destroying people’s home hi-fi equipment, but obviously if there’s a gunshot or something, you want it to have some dynamic.

FULL IMMERSION

AS: Your experience of working with the Soundfield mic obviously means your preference and your focus is on immersive sound. How does that manifest in your film mixing would you say?

DK: It can be truly immersive, certainly, if you want it to be, but – and at the risk of being boring or sounding like an evasive politician – it really just depends on the material you’re working on. The way I describe this process to film students who come in here regularly is that film is essentially made up of two half-spaces. The pictorial half-space starts at the surface of the screen and goes backwards, away from the audience. Conversely, the sound half-space starts at the screen and travels towards the audience. The sonic environment is where the audience is, so how you control the connection of the audience to that moment of impact at the screen is best done with sound, because you can quite literally put the audience in the space.

AS: Do you nevertheless still use surround speakers as atmospheric sources rather than point sources – given that the traditional approach still seems to harbour a reluctance to ever pull focus away from the screen?

DK: You’ve got to remember that in the cinematic environment the surrounds are designed to be diffuse. They’re not point source, whereas the Soundfield mic most certainly can be. Again, even though it’s a relatively boring point to make, how you mix something for a film is very much program dependent. You’re talking to somebody here who is fascinated by immersive sonic experiences, that’s certainly true – that’s what drew me to the Soundfield microphone in the first place – but in the end, as a film mixer, you’re telling the story that is represented on the screen, and until someone comes to me with a multi-screen setup, those front speakers behind that big perforated screen in front of us there will always dominate the mix.

That said, it doesn’t discount the possibility of deliberately unsettling the audience with sound or creating a ‘disconnect’ from the screen. In the end there are no rules and each day is a new one in the vast world of sound. You’ve got to utilise all of your tools and skills, but above all else, you’ve got to continually challenge your own understanding of the craft. I mean, that’s the joy of what we do here isn’t it? When you do things today the same way as you did yesterday it’s time to go home! But, of course, that’s the dance, challenging yourself not to reach into your back pocket of past experiences all the time and call up an old solution, although having that capacity does make you more flexible at times. 

AS: It must be frustrating sometimes though, given that most directors want a solution from your back pocket, or worse, theirs.

DK: Many of the filmmakers that we work for are inherently traditional – they want dialogue and music. Some just don’t understand the capacity of the storyteller and that is, I would say, our biggest frustration in the world of film sound: that the film schools are so dominated by people who are visual aligned – cinematographers, visual editors etc – that sound is often sent to the back of the queue.

I’m constantly amazed by how misunderstood sound is in the film world. I have film students in here all the time; I see first-hand how sonically unaware and disinterested they are. Incredibly, many of them come in here thinking they know all there is to know about it so they don’t open up their minds and ears to the capacity of the aural story-teller. Some of them don’t even know there are speakers behind the screen or that the screen is perforated. When you ask them to point to the speakers in a cinema they all point up there to the side walls! Hell, I even know of an incident where a film director, who had already directed two films, ended up in a screaming match with a mix engineer – apparently he had no idea there were speakers behind the screen!

WASTED ON THE YOUNG

AS: Have you done anything you’d regard as relatively radical or new in recent times with a film mix?

DK: I have indeed. If you go and check out Wasted on the Young, there’s an example in there of something interesting.

I was working with first-time filmmaker, Ben Lucas and Sound Designer Jed Palmer – both of whom did a brilliant job.

There’s a scene at the end of that film where a bad guy is affected by drugs – he trips, he falls, things get knocked over. We had Foleyed that scene entirely accurately but when it came to the final mix, for whatever reason I became completely possessed. I had no idea, how, why, when, where or what happened at the time but I grabbed hold of the Foley masters and pulled them out so that when our drug-affected guy hit something we didn’t have the sound for it. We only heard the consequences of the action – which was perfect because in fact the whole film is a Greek morality play about consequences. It was never a conscious decision, or maybe it was, I don’t know. I was only responding to the total dynamic of the film at that moment, as a hands-on ‘performance’. And despite having the capacity to visit and re-visit the mix almost endlessly, that moment in the film was only ever mixed once – one pass. The director loved it, the sound designer loved it and I loved it. It might just be the peak of my professional career!

We worked very well together on that film. In fact, there was another incident during that time that I wish every cinema student could have witnessed. We went back in to touch up the final reel of the film, which I just didn’t feel we’d nailed in the previous session, and six hours later we had it. We had pulled it together sonically in what could only be described as the most positive, collaborative, beautiful working day of my life. It’s amazing what you can do when you take sonic signatures from other parts of the film, consider the emotional value of them, draw them together, and manipulate them in space and time to achieve the emotional outcome. Six hours earlier there had been ‘stuff’ there but it wasn’t complete. Six hours later we had something that was absolutely satisfying, tied up with a bow, ready to deliver.

I treasure those six hours. It was like being on stage with a band going: ‘Where did that come from?’ Beautiful.

If you want to get Doron to mix your next doco or feature, email him at: dkipen@musicandeffects.com or phone (03) 9827 3348.