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Lon Bender on Drive's sound design L OS ANGELES — When veteran sound designer Lon Bender of Soundelux (www.soundelux.com) here teamed up with colleague Victor Ennis and director Nicolas Winding Refn to build the sonic por- tions of the movie Drive, they thought, at first, their work would focus on the typical, time-honored art of enhanc- ing spectacular cinematic car chases. But as Refn claims, the movie's strength is not so much the "wow" nature of its car chase sequences, but rather, the personal and psychological nature of the piece. According to Bender, this was the area where sound design most directly supported the story. In the picture, he explains, the Driver character (Ryan Gosling) and his vehicle are essentially one and the same, and the sound design reflects that. What we hear in the film is pretty much from the Driver's POV. "The movie isn't about the car chases," Bender says. "It's about the car being part of the character, so our mission was to sonically create a mood in the car — the way it interacts with the world, the way the driver interacts with the world while driving or being chased. The goal was to go into his personality. In the movie, for example, he's in a car with several hundred horse- power and a special engine, and no one can catch him. Yet, when thieves leap into his car after robbing a ware- house, you expect him to floor it. But the opposite happens. Our director compared him to a fish swim- ming in dangerous waters, where the police cars are the sharks. He doesn't go at high speed, but rather creeps along, stealthily and silently dodging his pursuers. [ Cont.from 30 ] The specific sounds you hear are from the POV of a person who is hiding, and the sound of the car was used to tell the story of Driver's personality." Bender, who won an Oscar in 1996 for Braveheart and had a nom in 2007 for Blood Diamond, is effusive in explaining how he and Ennis were able to work much in the style of a picture editor, alongside their director all the way — experimenting, fixing, changing, and evolving sounds for the picture with Refn's input, using Avid Pro Tools 9. Ironically, Bender, though a longtime industry veteran, did not start personally using electronic editing platforms until about six years ago. "I only came back into the world of editing design and mixing in the last five or six years," he explains. "Therefore, I skipped many (technology advances) and most Pro Tools (versions). I only got into it when (Pro Tools) was already fairly powerful. Now, I can play all these tracks together, and split them into groups, such as dialogue and music coming from the film editor's OMF tracks, and sound effects, sound design, backgrounds and Foley. I can bring each group up on VCA tracks, so I can see them all together on the Control 24 console that I am cur- rently using. I can fine-tune and enhance the tracks prepared by my editorial crew before presenting the material to the director or editor, so that they can get a sense of what the final tracks will be." Bender's point is that by working this way, he can be more creative — a benefit that really paid off on Drive. He says Pro Tools, over the last few years, has VFX FOR SPOTS "It has a really good R3D raw file inte- gration into it, so we are able to color off the R3Ds," Petersen notes. Shooting with the Red provides a lot of flexibility when working on spots that require visual effects, particularly its ability to acquire 5K images. Peters- en and Carlson reference another spot that they worked on — this one for the NFL Network. In the spot, players were required to interact with holographic design elements. "We knew we were going to have to do 3D camera tracking in order to place our graphics into the environment that the actors were in," Petersen recalls. During production, they shot at a wider aspect ratio, which allowed them to capture the tracking markers. The final spot was cropped slightly to exclude the markers, but without sacrificing any image quality. HERSHEY'S KISSES Michael Pardee, owner/executive producer at The Mission (www.themissionstudio.com), opened the Ven- ice, CA-based visual effects studio last January follow- ing the abrupt closing of VFX house Asylum in Novem- ber of 2010, where he was previously employed. "When Asylum closed, instead of going to a differ- ent place, I decided I wanted to set up my own thing," he recalls. "It was a great opportunity, and with past relationships with different clients, it was the right time — if there ever was a right time — to branch out." 46 Post • January 2012 Pardee and his team initially spent several weeks rent- ing space while their would-be home underwent a huge renovation. They were finally able to move into the remodeled space in January of 2011. Today, The Mission (www.themissionstudio.com) has 15 full-time employees. The facility features four Autodesk Flame suites, along with Smoke and Lustre for finishing. For 3D animation, The Mission relies on Autodesk Maya along with V-Ray for rendering. There is also an assortment of Adobe tools available, and when editing needs to be performed, The Mission has several Apple Final Cut Pro stations. Their first year has seen work for T-Mobile, Nike and Nintendo. This past summer, the studio created Earth's Treasures, a CG character-driven spot for McDonald's and Dr. Pepper that features aliens that have abducted the restaurant chain's soda machine. For Chevy, the studio created visual effects for a spot promoting the automaker's new Silverado HD pickup truck. In it, the truck is used to rescue "Tommy," a young boy who keeps finding himself stuck in tricky situations — first at the bottom of a well, then in a cave and finally in the belly of a whale. The spot closes with the truck's driver exclaiming, "I didn't even know this town had a volcano?!" At press time, The Mission was wrapping up work on a new spot for Hershey's. The job continues a long- time relationship between Pardee and his team and the chocolate maker's agency, Arnold. "We have a good relationship with Arnold advertis- www.postmagazine.com ing," notes Pardee. "We've been doing the whole Hershey's factory world and just finished another one that will be out in January." One recent Hershey's spot shows the stylized fac- tory world in which Hershey's creates its Kisses candy. The highly polished chrome and brass assembly line (all CG) is making Hershey's Kisses Air Delight candy, and the animation shows how the bubbles of chocolate air are created and infused into the final product. The ani- mation seamlessly transitions into a live-action shot of two young ladies who are enjoying the chocolate. "It seems like every year or 18 months they want to do another round of them," says Pardee of their Hershey's work. Their continued work for the client has allowed them to build a catalog of assets, but sur- prisingly, few are re-used from one spot to the next. "You would think it would be the same, but it always ends up being a different part of the factory," says Pardee. "We keep them fresh and original. It's the same theme and palette in terms of the factory, but we are seeing different things every time, so it definitely keeps it fresh." The look is based on the factory's previous look but with the addition of new industrial components. "The last one was putting the air into the Hershey's kisses and the whole machine that created these bubbles. It was really important for them to underscore that point." The Mission spent approximately eight weeks pro- ducing two :15 spots, both of which close with live- action end tags. intrinsically informed every aspect of his approach to sound design, because it lets him design sounds far closer to the final version, and far closer to his true intention, far earlier in the process. To accomplish this, Bender conducts a single, mas- sive session for the entire movie, dubbed the Super Session, in which he imports and uses virtually every element created and tweaked for the show. The Super Session taxes Pro Tools 9 and all of its 192 available voices to the limit, but Bender says its more than worth it in order to be able to organically create "relationships of one (element) to the next in advance of our mix." The Super Session evolves in the intimate setting of Bender's editing room, working directly alongside the filmmaker. In the case of Drive, this permitted him to build a detailed template to be used in the final mixing session — a process handled near the end of the project at Sound One in New York by mixers Rob Fernandez and Dave Paterson. . Bender says he is particularly proud of the intensely creative work he and his colleagues were able to do on Drive. The ability to seamlessly use technology to enhance and streamline the creative process with out- of-the-box directors like Refn, he suggests, could poten- tially make sound design and its execution an even big- ger player in the filmmaking process." To hear Lon Bender talking "Audio," visit www.postmagazine.com. By Michael Goldman, taken from our Post Oscar Contenders newsletter.