Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
perspective. Eric elaborates, "We're lucky in that mics are not cameras. We can cheat a lot in that way. We can exaggerate. We can get in way too close on something and make it sound more psychotic than it is. If you did that with a camera, you would just see the texture of an object and not know what it was. There's a lot to play with in terms of proximity. You can get down to a character level of interpreting how they would hear something that happens. What does it sound like to them vs. someone across the room in the same scene? Do you really want to isolate a sound as if it has completely taken over your mind, as if it's the only thing in that moment, or do you want to incorporate the atmosphere and the ambience with the sound as just one part of a whole environment. I enjoy both. I think it's more challenging to try to capture something in a context of a setting that matches the scene of a shot. I enjoy that a lot. Establishing a context for a sound on the actual recording and not having to create ambience after the fact." Okay, we get it. You've sold us on the farm-to-table artisanal sound effects approach, but how do I, as the supervising sound editor, know when I can add some pizzazz and elevate the narrative impact of my sonic storytelling? Consider these scenarios: maybe there's some potentially tone-setting background material that you'd like to explore, a moody distant freight train, or perhaps you're in need of something that requires unusual specificity in its literal representation, such as a Zamboni or wind agitating thick, dry, spiney thorn-bearing vegetation. If your producers are on the ball, you could even find yourself on set taking advantage of whatever unique events that are happening out in the world that the production mixer might be too busy to capture in a manner that would best suit your post-production needs. ERIC POTTER kindly took some time to recount just such a situation, whilst plying his craft for Hostiles (2017), during a brief five-day excursion between two other films: The producer of Hostiles called Skip Lievsay and had the forethought to tell him, "You might want to come out here and capture these environments and … steam locomotives." Thank goodness producers are starting to think that way. I met up with one of the location guys who lived there in New Mexico and intimately knew all the locations. There's dozens of miles of open space and steep canyons and rivers, and it's all landscapes that no one will ever see in their lives except in this film. It was quite brilliant. As luck would have it, a lot of those actual locations had some fantastic acoustic properties. Winds and rivers and reflections off canyons. My location guy happened to have a couple of vintage guns that were his grandfather's, so he brought those along, and we were able to shoot those 19th-century guns in these remote canyons of New Mexico. The steam locomotive was a regularly running steam locomotive, and those guys are sticklers for historical accuracy. We did some interpreting of the landscape. We did go to some places that the production did not, because I was looking for some nice early-morning ambiences. So I went in to Sana Fe … to a coffee shop and started asking people, "do you know of a super quiet place that has maybe some birds and insects that has a really waking up morning feel to it?" I got a couple of really good leads from kind of just being a tourist and asking around, but, asking for things that maybe most tourists don't Eric Potter and John Fasal recording Steve Bush's Ferrari Testa Rossa for Ford v Ferrari.