Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1076412
23 From top left: Adam McKay with Sam Rockwell and Christian Bale; Cast and crew between takes inside the Oval Office; McKay directs a scene as Steve Carell and Christian Bale look on; Dick Cheney (Bale) and Bush (Rockwell) at the President's desk. All Photos: Matt Kennedy/ Annapurna Pictures, except as noted. Pre-production is where Novick puts in the brunt of the work to give sound its best chance during filming. "The tech scout is the most important day of prept," he says. "Going to look at the physical locations and finding out what the problems are in advance is going to allow you to solve them much better than you would on the day." Besides the locations' natural sound elements to contend with, the conversation involves other departments, especially grip and electric and deciding on where to station things like generators and cables. Tapping Boom Operator Randall Johnson and Sound Utility Ryan Farris, the dialog-driven script was shot roughly over sixty days with production ramping up in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Los Angeles to stand in for 1950s Casper, Wyoming, where Cheney grew up. It's during this time, we learn how influential then girlfriend and future wife Lynne (Amy Adams) was on Cheney. In a scene filmed in Newhall Orchard west of Santa Clarita, Cheney is driving drunk, singing along to the Hank Locklin song "Send Me the Pillow You Dream On." As the camera gets closer, sound drives the performance using an earwig, recording the live vocals sung by Bale with a plant mic and lav. His eventual crash and arrests forces Lynne's hand, telling Cheney over the phone she doesn't want to marry a nobody; sending him on a completely different path. Phone conversations are a reoccurring theme in the film and Novick used different methods to record performances. The sound mixer will use a JK Audio BlueKeeper to connect cellphones, a Viking Ringdown and Genter box to connect landlines, and for playback, Soundplant, an application that allows the user to load audio into the program and trigger playback through a QWERTY keyboard. "It's important for actors to have someone to talk to and I think they benefit more when they can have the other actor on the line rather than an AD or a script supervisor reading the material," he admits. As Cheney starts his political path, his first stop is the Congressional Internship Program where Rumsfeld makes a speech to the inductees at a podium inside a large echoic room—something that doesn't bother the sound mixer. "We're making sound for picture," says Novick. "The most important tool I have on my cart is the video monitor. It tells me what the shot is. If we're in a big echoic room, we try to make it sound like what it looks like." The sound team also took the time to