Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1316380
70 I M PS E . O R G we were very careful to make sure the dialogue remained true to performance but also robust and clear to a less familiar ear. We recorded crowd over two sessions with Sync or Swim, with the late, great Jay Benedict, who sadly passed away recently. We had a number of smaller characters to revoice, as the actors were not native English speakers. In addition to needing unique crowd work for our busier scenes, we also had some important sequences to build with protesters, who took offense to an affair Marie had in the years after Pierre's death. In reality, these crowds were nasty, violent, anti-semetic, and anti-immigrant (Marie Curie was a Polish immigrant). Marjane wanted to make sure we reflected this unpleasantness and also seized the opportunity to draw a parallel with similar populist sentiment we are seeing around the world in the present day. We carefully scripted these sequences to reflect this and the crowd gave us great material, which we shaped with our own additional recordings and crowd effects into these scenes. We also recorded an exact translation of a real Chernobyl emergency call (which we found as part of our initial research) that plays in the fire truck racing toward the nuclear plant after its explosion. RADIOACTIVE SCORE Marjane felt it was important to capture the essence of Modernity and that progressive period of intense human discovery and creativity in the score. From the get-go, they had been talking about having something electronic in the score rather than going with something more typical and orchestra led. The film's composers, Sacha and Evgueni Galperine, had done some research and sourced some very early electronic instruments from the time period of the film. Their thinking was that this would be something that would reflect in music and culture the work that the Curies were doing. They began working on the score early in the process, too. Their demos were part of early cuts of the film and were working in tandem with the editing process in the same way that we were. Again, it was an ideal way to work, as we always had a sense of what the finished score was going to sound like and how it would work with a scene or sequence, allowing us to tailor our sound work to it. We could consider music usage and placement and judge how to best work with it. If music was in a particular key and using particular frequency ranges, we could work outside of these allowing the sound design to coexist with the music, leaving space for both things. There were a number of places where we were able to allow sound and score work so closely, blurring the lines between them, so that they could seamlessly hand off to one another. COLLABORATION It's really important to mention the wider sound crew on the film, who all brought so much to it. While our core team was small throughout the process, we did expand for our Foley record and edit, which we did at Pinewood Studios. Our Foley artists were Zoe Freed and Rebecca Heathcote, who along with Foley mixer Jemma Riley-Tolch, and Foley editors Lily Blazewicz and Adam Bourne, brought a whole other depth and dimension to the track. Nigel Mills joined us as the dialogue/ADR supervisor in the later stages of editorial and my colleague from Ireland, Niall Brady MPSE, came onboard to finalise the dialogue edit when Nigel got