Here's some info about the work of Frank Kruse, supervising sound designer on Cloud Atlas, in his own words [via duc.avid.com].
"I started on CA in November 2011 about 6 weeks before the ending of the
principal shoot. Tom Tykwer hates to work with temp sound effects and it
really made sense to start early on this film because we had a pretty
early first temp mix to cater about 10 weeks after the last day of
shooting which was quite tough for such a long film.
So I could spend some very valuable time creating some base sound fx and
B/Gs for the different stories. Tom usually has most of the music done
before the shoot starts so on his films we almost never encounter
temp-music. So we can closely work with the composer team. I physically
moved my studio into the same space as the cutting rooms and the VFX
production dpt. which also enabled very close work with VFX updates and
the editor Alex Berner.
I provided effects stems to Alex who would then cut with those in the
AVID so the directors could make notes while cutting the picture and
also adjust edits to make room for some sound ideas. I spread the info
the rest of the sound crew from there.
Quite a few things wouldn't have been in the film hadn't we had this
close connection during the editing both in terms of the picture cut and
sounds.
This gives the sound team the chance to go into wrong directions and try
things out early on instead of piling up a lot of redundant tracks for
the mix and build the sound track in the theater.
We talked about transitions and that we wanted the film to feel like one
story and not 6 episodes. tied together so quite some time was spent to
create seamless transitions that should never be on the nose. For
example there are some cool yet subtile transitions from the bridge
where Zachry and Meronym hide from the Koona warriors ("bridge are
broken hide below") the horse that gallops away turns into the rhythm of
the rails of the train with Cavendish and then when he sees himself
sitting in the opposite seat in the past the trans "morphs" from a
modern train to a steam train and back. So horse to train to steam-train
and back. I think most people won't recognize it at first "glance" but
we thought these kind of transitions were the ones that would help glue
the story together. Markus Stemler the second sound designer came up
with some great things like that.
Many transitions are at the edge between music and effects. We tried to
blur the differences a bit from the "waking up" of Papa Song's
restaurant to the flare gun when Zachry and Meronym discover the huge
Sonmi-statue. All those things we tried to treat as half way between
musical and sound effects.
The scene where Chang shows Sonmi the safe-house with the animated
cherry blossoms on the walls for example: The ambience there is made
with quite musical drones and some percussive sound effects played in
asian scales. I found S-Layer for Reaktor really useful on CA for these
things.
The close proximity to the cutting room (literally next door) enabled us
to keep a very close connection to the changes in the picture cut.
One other thing we discussed with the directors was the thing with the
gender changing actors in film. In the beginning they were concerned
that the men playing female characters would show their true identity
through their voice so I went on set to capture some test recordings
with Weaving and Whishaw and then experiment with some voice treatments
to disguise their voice or make them more female. So I had a
channel-strip prepped to treat these voices.
We tracklayed all the FX in a session prepped with EQs and Reverbs so it
was pretty easy to output a stem with reverbs etc. for the AVID and the
temp mixes were more or less based on these sessions which Matthias
Lempert and Lars Ginzel mainly mixed in the box.
Some things for the tech-interested: We recorded a prototype electric
car that a big German car mfg kindly let us use that served as the base
sound for the skiff (the floating "motorcycles"). We also recorded lots
of magnetic field effects with guitar pickups that foley supervisor
Hanse Warns built. A device we called the iHum was used to capture
fields of power tools, TFT screens etc. etc.
The main sound for the busted delivery truck that Chang uses to free
Sonmi from the prison is actually the electric field of our studio's
vacuum cleaner with further treatment.
Some of the gunship elements were created with iPad based synths that I
liked to use for the great touch interface that I could then modulate to
picture."
[wildtrax.eu]
