Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/65901
COVER STORY [ Cont.from 16] 1960s indoor Alcatraz sequences, they built an amazing and fairly complete set, but every now and then we have to add a ceiling to extend it and tie everything together." POST: Can you describe the workflow? WORTH: "We work with editorial to pull the un- color-corrected 4:4:4, 10-bit DPX files straight from the ProRes masters. We composite, track, do all of our work in that. We then review it with just a basic LUT for producer review and QuickTime. After that we deliver back to DPX files. The show finishes on HDSR, so we deliver that and they do a traditional conform from the original ProRes files to get the highest quality image. Editing is done on Avid Media Composer." POST: Do you care what type of tools the VFX studios work in? WORTH: "Certain shots I take to certain vendors for certain reasons, but they are compositing in every- thing from After Effects to Nuke and lots in between. It just depends on specializing it to the artist and the shot itself. For the most part 3D is via Maya, but I also have guys working in 3D Studio Max doing texture mapping and basic 3D modeling and not taking it all to Maya. It all depends." AUDIO FOR TV [ Cont.from 44 ] with sound effects and dialogue, and a hint of music underneath. Natural sounds introduced you to the scare so there was a lot more impact." As the season unfolded, though, "viewers discovered more and more elements of the house and its charac- ters, and more sound design events happened," he says. The house was a character itself with crows, hawks and jays heard outside and "edgy" sci-fi sounds announcing ghosts and making certain places, like the basement, feel distinctly uncomfortable. Some location work was done at an actual house in LA near Paramount Studios. "We had great location recording and production mixing," says Earle. "The goal for everyone was to suspend disbelief so the cleaner we could make the soundtrack the more we could add elements to the atmosphere and design what we wanted it to be." Earle is no stranger to the horror genre having previously worked on the miniseries of Stephen King's The Shining and Storm of the Century. He notes that series creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk wanted to go somewhat retro with the sound effects for American Horror Story. "They love how Hitch- cock would lead you down a trail until you were on the edge of your seat, then you experienced the horror at the [ Cont.from 20 ] HOW I STARTED IN THE BUSINESS access to the ENG package, which was a video camera with a 3/4-inch Umatic field recorder attached. So I started shooting as much as I could with a video camera, but film-style production. This culmi- nated in me making a horror movie originated on video (Interview With Terror) as my final student project. While working on posting that project, I ended up meeting Howard Brock, who offered me a job helping with his fledgling editing system rental company called Matchframe. My intention was to use that as income generation while using my film to launch my filmmaking career. It didn't take long for me to fall in love with editing, and that, combined with my realization that to direct in Hollywood was more about schmoozing than actually working at the craft, changed my focus. So I same time as the characters," he explains. "So we stayed very organic with sounds — no sci-fi whooshes." The Hitchcock fans even took a leaf from the direc- tor's signature music. "In the pilot you see the exterior of the house with a sort of Bernard Hermann score, and you're instantly in the Hitchcock mode, drawn in by the dark score," Earle says. "They used music the way Hitchcock would — it would lead you to a point, drop you off, then there were long scenes with no music, just atmosphere." A flashback to a Columbine-style school massacre built a career from being employee number 1 at Matchframe to being senior editor when they had 70 employees. When Avid first introduced the Symphony, which allowed uncompressed standard definition video edit- ing on a computer, I had an epiphany. I realized that Moore's law would now change our business and one day people would be able to do this editing on their home computer. Which meant that businesses that were built on the model of charging a lot for very expensive edit gear would be in real trouble. I took matters in my own hands. That is what led to the founding of Alpha Dogs, which is based on the talent, not the gear. STEFAN SONNENFELD [ Cont.from 22 ] including Michael Bay, Tarsem Singh and Dominic Sena. By this point, Sonnenfeld had built a name for him- self and a list of clients who continually requested him. Many of the directors he'd worked with on short-form projects were now also directing features and they were asking for him to handle the color when their movies were being mastered for TV and home enter- tainment — this was before there was such a thing as a feature DI. Sonnenfeld was responsible for a significant number of projects his employer (Pacific Ocean Post) was bringing in and by the late '90s he decided to make another career change. "I loved the work but I didn't love working for somebody else," he says. "I thought I could do things better so I started Company 3." With a small group of colorists Sonnenfeld built Company 3, starting with music videos and com- mercials. In the early 2000s, as feature films really started taking advantage of digital color grading, he began evolving Company 3 into one of a feature post facility. Significantly — one of his first DI proj- ects was the Tom Cruise thriller Collateral…direct- ed by Michael Mann. was "sonically frightening," he reports. Students are seen hiding in the library with screams, gunshots and running sounds in the background. "Things get louder when it's quiet, and the library was deadly quiet so you could hear the [killer's] boots, the light turning of the door- knob, his overpowering jiggling of the doorknob, the gunshot through the door and his boots walking around the room." The menacing boots were enhanced with Foley, and viewers watching the show in 5.1 surround were able to track the killer's path. "You could hear the feet move around you from all sides and hear breathing and gasps while the pacing of the footsteps remained the same," says Earle. Quiet but suspenseful moments can't be completely devoid of sound. "You have to leave something there so viewers in rooms big or small know the sound isn't turned off," Earle says. "But you get as quiet as allowable, then there's a bigger dynamic when it gets really loud. You're always held in check by the dynamic range TV shows have to follow, which is a lot smaller than movies in a theater." Earle worked on an Avid Euphonix Series 5 console, which he calls a "best of both worlds" solution for mix- ers. "It's what every Icon mixer has longed for and what Pro Tools guys working virtually have wanted in terms of warmth and great sound." He praises the ability to "change sound and pitch, clean, compress and expand a sound with the package we can load up on the com- puter dedicated to our virtual toybox." Thanks to the tools on stage and the show's work- flow, Earle finds that he does a lot less editing at his mixing station than before, which gives him more time to spend "on the creative parts. I'm not swamped by the technical aspects so I can focus on shaping the show and making it scarier." www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2012 51 POST: Anything you'd like to add? WORTH: "I can't say enough about the artists who work on the show. It's great when we come up with amazing ideas — the writers writing great stories, pro- duction designing amazing sets — but it still comes down to artists coming up with solutions to the prob- lems we have. There is so much more we can do now to enhance storytelling, and I think that's the amazing thing about VFX — it's kind of this magical thing, and until you visit a facility you don't realize it's just a bunch of amazing men and woman who sit at computers and create these incredible worlds."