Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1197255
Possession: A Case Study in Production Sound for Multilanguage Projects MY JOURNEY INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES I was born in Morocco in 1958 and moved to France with my family when I was 12 years old. After high school, I joined ENS Louis Lumière, a leading French graduate program for audiovisual arts, where I specialized in film sound. After I graduated, I started working on various documentaries before becoming a boom operator. At that time, I was very attracted to Italian and American cinema, so I decided to work with international movie productions. I was lucky to be proficient in a few languages—namely English, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew—which helped me pursue a global career. I have been privileged to be a team member of great sound mixers such as Jean-Louis Ducarme (The Exorcist, Don Giovanni), as well as Jean-Paul Mugel, whom I worked with on Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great and Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia. I have also had the honor of working with Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Jonathan Demme to name a few. By working as a boom operator on movies spoken in a language I wasn't fluent in, I developed the ability to record sound by relying on the melody and intonation of words rather than on their meaning. Of course, they would be put in context beforehand based on an English or French version of the script. I would say my most challenging boom operator experience was on a movie in Swiss-German—a language that sounds like a mix of German and Yiddish, neither of which I was familiar with! At the beginning, I would write down the end of each sentence phonetically on a sticky note and put it on the boom pole … until I stopped staring at my notes and focused only on the actors. b y S a m u e l C o h e n C A S Sam Cohen CAS recording stereo ambiences