Frank Kruse on "Cloud Atlas"

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]

Sonic Screens 2012 - full lineup

 

Electroacoustic music concert 
an event by U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi) in collaboration with O’ and Die Schachtel 

Premieres: 
Agostino Di Scipio
"Two Sound Pieces with Repertoire String Music"
for any number of bowed string instruments and live electronics

Andrea Valle
"Dispacci dal fronte interno"
for Violin, Cello, spatialized electronics and printers

Federico Placidi
"TimeCapsule"
for Violin, Cello and live electronics

Performed by: 
Èdua Amarilla Zádory - Violin
Ana Topalovic - Violoncello

Sound Direction: 
Matteo Milani

Live Sets: 
Thoranna Bjornsdottir aka Trouble
Massimiliano Viel

O’ | via pastrengo 12 Milan | Italy
Saturday, December 1st - from 8:00 to 22:30 p.m. 

Door 5 euro

Randy Thom @ VIEW Conference 2011

On Friday, Oct. 28, 2011 VIEW Conference hosted a Master Class with Randy Thom, Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound. He is a firm believer that the sooner the sound designer is involved in the pre-production, the better the story can be told. Randy illustrated how sound can shape a film, talking about how doors can be opened to sound. He also shared clips from movies where this kind of early collaboration has happened. Here's an excerpt of his talk during the workshop.

Sound as a full collaborator to make better films 

Alan Splet, Walter Murch and Ben Burtt where the three people who lived within about 20 miles each other near San Francisco who really brought a new revolution into American film sound during 70s. I was lucky enough to work with all three of them and “steal” some of their best ideas. One of the first things that you learn as a sound designer is not think to literally about sound, so one aspect of training your ear is to interpret sound in emotional terms. Subjectivity in filmmaking is a playground for sound: when the audience understand that they don’t figure out consciously, but what they seeing and hearing is being filtered through a character’s or filmmaker’s point of view in a subjective way. Very often working on a sequence for a film what you want to do is think of how you want the sound to make people feel and you analyze what it is about that sound makes you feel certain way and you go looking for sounds or raw material that have those qualities. 

Apocalypse Now

If there was ever a film where sound and image were treated more or less equally and allow to affect each other certainly is Apocalypse now. The first sound that you hear in the film - before any music or any dialogue - is a very odd, electronically synthesized helicopter sound - the Ghost Helicopter. Captain Willard is hearing the memory of the helicopter that he has. What you’re listening to is this guy’s brain. He’s remembering things, he’s hallucinating, he’s dreaming, he’s drunk and under the influence of drugs, he’s listening to his brain operate. The opening sequence is the launching point for all story, immediately the audience is put in a frame of mind that anything can happen, this is going to be a very strange ride. As he stands at the window looking outside he might heard a little fly buzzing: it took me a week to record that fly (laugh). At first he hears - and we hear - the sound of Saigon outside (car horns, Vespas, police whistles). Those sounds morph into the sound of the jungle: each one of those individual city sounds turns into specific jungle sound. Physically for the all sequence he’s still in his hotel room, but in his mind he moves back into the jungle.

Once upon a time in the West 

Sergio Leone decided early on that they will record all the music for this movie before they started shooting the film and they used the music during the shooting to help the actors and essentially to inform how the film is going to be shot. They were struggling how to make music and sound working together before shooting the sequence. Ennio Morricone, the composer, happened to go to a musique concrete concert - a genre involved using real world sounds, rather than traditional musical instruments - by a guy who played a latter, banging and scraping on it. Then he called Leone and said: “There’s should be no conventional music at all in the beginning of the film: instead you perhaps should shoot around the sound effects.” Leone went shooting the sequence thinking about how the sound of this little train station were going to work in the storytelling.

I think that’s a tragedy that very few studios these days will have the guts to allow a filmmaker to do a sequence like that. They say: “People are going to be bored, we have to fill up with uptempo music through the all thing”. Some budget filmmaking these days is “fear based”, it’s not an attempt to do something new, interesting and unusual, to open people imagination. It’s an attempt to avoid boring people, which is never a good motivation in art.

One of the things that these two scenes have in common is a very strong sense of point of view. Camera angle are very important to sound, believe it or not. The kind of shot, where an actor looking at nothing in particular, is another open door for creative, subjective sound, because the audience knows intuitively that they’re going inside the character’s head. It’s an open door for sound designers to put almost any kind of sound that we want. Having some ambiguity or mystery about the visual image makes it easier for me to do something useful with the sound. Extreme close-ups get across the idea of subjectivity. Long duration shot opens the door for sound, too. The character’s closing eyes is also an opportunity for sound to do something interesting (imaging, remembering...). The most difficult kind of shot is a brightly-lit medium shot, because you’re not focusing on anything in particular and there’s no mystery there, there’s nothing that invites the ear to help figure out what’s going on.

Another element they’ve in common is sparse dialogue. I’m certainly not against dialogue in film - dialogue will always has a role. Dialogue and sound design generally don’t go well together, because there’s something about the human voice that the human ear want to attempt to.
If someone is talking - no matter how hard a director ask me to try to push sound effects during that sequence - it will distract you from the dialogue, which the audience is trying to hear. The way to solve that problem is to design the sequence in a way that there are moments for the dialogue and moments for sound effects. A compromised has to be made, you can’t as a filmmaker try to fire all your bullets at the same time, it’s not going to work. One category of sound tends to dominate at a time - it’s dialogue, it’s music or it’s sound effects. Another bad tendency in contemporary filmmaking is to try to set it up so that all three dominates simultaneously, it will never works. Lazy filmmakers will just call the composer: “make some very strange music telling the audience that this is a very strange place”. As a sound designer you try to do things and variations in the same way a music composer, to use sound in pure musical way: tempo, harmony and rhythm to evoke emotion. Think about what elements in a set could generate the sound useful for the storytelling: this will be more powerful at the end, it’s not a decoration, that’s a very organic way of telling the audience “this is a very strange place”.

Sound-friendly scripts

Most writers are obsessed with words, and they tend to think words should dominate every sequence, with wall-to-wall dialogue.

Filmmakers simply don’t think about how to use sound in that way before start shooting the sequence. Think about what the characters hear. Think about how the things they hear affects them and how character changes over time. I often found people who come from visual/light background - which David Lynch did - have very interesting sound ideas. He demands you to be creative all the time.

Another thing I told to directors is: during rehearsal in a live action scene, play with your actors in terms to find things in the space that can make sound that will be useful to the story.

As a sound designer, try to imagine ways that sound could playing in an interesting but organic, truthful way to help the storytelling in the sequence. Try to think to other powerful sounds that the audience doesn’t expect. Part of your job as a sound person - I think - is to help the director make the best film possible. If you have interesting ideas - and you should have them - about the way of film shooting that allow you to do something you couldn’t do otherwise, of course you should talk about it.

Sound for Animation 

Thanks to big aesthetic jumps in animation, more contemporary animation directors want movies should sound like a live-action movie. For “How to Train Your Dragon” I come up very early on with some speculative vocalizations for the dragons that will help the animators to animate to those elements. I tried to use real-world animal sounds - tiger growls, elephant, whales, goats, camel, dogs - to cover a wide range of emotions, allowing sound to influence the animation. The challenge is how to make the transition from one to another, which needs a lot of work and experimentation with pitch-changing techniques.

Sound Mixing 

Mix is about to choose right or most powerful sound in any given moment. In a moment when you need to hear the dialogue you try to artfully lower or eliminate sets of other sounds that are competing with the dialogue at that moment. Space can make sounds useful to the story: there are a lot of others tricks like moving the sound effects and the music into the side loudspeakers and have the voices mostly come out from the center speaker, which make a little bit easier to understand the lines of dialogue. Sound is more powerful if comes from a place we doesn't expect. You need to think of sound in terms of spectrum and frequencies and tailor those for a given moment.


Related Post:

• Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.1