CAS Quarterly

Spring 2017

Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/830490

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 20 of 59

For many of the concert pieces, there was an assumption that the Silk Road Ensemble would probably have someone record- ing all the performances and we discovered, after the fact, that many of them were not recorded well. One of the pieces was recorded only with a headset mic on Yo-Yo Ma. I was getting an incredible amount of breathing. That was the entire mic for that piece for the piano and the cello and it was just covered in breathing. So that was a case where I did a lot of Spectral Repair to try to minimize the breathing. Also, I leaned heavily on Altiverb to give it a fullness. I took what was a very thin-sound- ing mic with breath all over it, removed the offending breaths as much as I could, then tried to make it sound like a lush track. That was the most difficult challenge in the film. Another challenge was filling a 5.1 sound field. In a lot of cases, all I had was a stereo source. For this task, I'm very fond of a plugin called Penteo. I think a lot of people think of it as just an upmixer from stereo to 5.1 period, but I think of it more as an un-panner. It has an amazing ability to give you five, or in the newest iteration, seven discreet slices of the stereo sound field and what you end up with is a center channel that often sounds like a dry vocal and a left and right that sounds like the reverb without the vocal. It's astonishing to me how they are able to parse it like that. What it essentially does is give you a greater control of the tracks, so I can spread it out any way I want, and even tip the relative wet/dry balance or instrument balance. I made a lot of use of that tool on many tracks. As far as your basic equipment, what kind of board do you use? I assume you are on Pro Tools. Yeah, on Pro Tools, I'm one of those who is often on the bleed- ing edge. We have an incredible support staff at Skywalker— Danny Caccavo is a former DigiDesign employee who was responsible for the 7.2 release of Pro Tools that finally gave post-production people the things that we wanted. He's now at Skywalker and will give me the beta versions and solicit feed- back, so I'm always interested in pushing our tools forward and Danny is a great help in that. I am pretty ambidextrous when it comes to mixing consoles. For this particular project, I mixed on the Avid S6, but I'm just as likely to be on an Icon or a DFC, depending on the workflow and what the project is like. I noticed that you work on docs, fiction, TV, and film. Do you have a different approach in dealing with different genres? Obviously, different films need different things, but I don't necessarily feel like I approach documentaries as being very dif- ferent from anything else in the sense that I feel like all films want to be cinematic, as full and rich as they can be. The stories that people are telling through documentary are every bit as rich and nuanced and sometimes epic as any blockbuster or narrative film. The one thing I do notice is that working in documenta- ries expands our palate because there is much more tolerance for "bad" sound. In a narrative, audiences won't accept "bad" sound, but in a documentary, they will accept it and, in fact, it lends an authenticity in a strange way and that is something we can exploit. I will often reach for "bad" sound to add in because it has the right texture. Another thing with documentaries, the images are often of varied quality, and so, when an image is degraded in a certain way, it begs for a different sonic palate. So, I don't flinch at putting in the sound that it wants. I think that is one reason why I love working on documentaries. DIMITRI TISSEYRE: PRODUCTION MIXER I see you were one of two production mixers. How did you divide the work? Dennis took care of the LA and Nebraska part of the movie and I did New York and Turkey. I see you compose music, too. It must have been a thrill to work on a documentary about music. It was. I was lucky to meet Morgan Neville back in 2012, we worked on 20 Feet from Stardom and it turns out that Morgan and I are both upright bassists (I think he still plays). He has done a lot of music films, so this was a treat. I am also a composer and sound designer at Envelope Music [my studio in New York, which I operate] with my two partners. Do you mostly do production sound? I like to divide my time between production sound and studio time. It all depends on what job comes in. Sometimes, I get to stay in the studio for months at a time and other times, I am out in the field. What kind of gear do you use? Is it different for film or TV? I brought two recorders with me. I used a Sound Devices 788T for live performances and a Zaxcom Maxx recorder for record- ing in the street when I had to travel light. I also carried two small Zoom recorders that I would hide in different places. I used quite a few Lectrosonics wireless and Neumann mics. In documentaries, there is a lot of improvisation, meaning that things happen and you have to grab it right there and then—we usually do not have second takes. It makes the job The shoot in Turkey Dimitri Tisseyre at the NY shoot

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of CAS Quarterly - Spring 2017