Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1261193
48 I M PS E . O R G BF: How e‚ective was the sound in this movie to aid to the power of the narrative? PA: There are several scenes where the main characters talk about listening. There is even a scene where our main character, Amani Ballour, talks with a friend about being hypersensitive to sound. All of this means that the audience is listening even more intensely and it makes you very aware of all the sounds around you. The audience becomes more aware of the sound than you might normally be because you sympathise with the main characters and your ears are alert just like their ears are. We're hearing things all the time—even when we sleep—but we're not really used to listening. We're not used to focusing so much on sound. And when we do, it makes the whole sensory experience stronger. Sound is incredibly psychological like that. And it happens all the time in The Cave. BF: Peter, how important is sound in complementing the storytelling process according to you? PA: Sound is incredibly important. It's even more important than sound people would tell you it is. Sound is half the picture. And this goes for documentaries as well. The amazing thing in this documentary is that sound is always emotional. The atmospheric potential of the sound can be used to its full effect right from the very beginning. I love working with people who are not afraid of sound. There are all these rules about how to do things in the film business. You have these schedules and traditions of how something should sound that come from classic movies. I really love when you push that a bit and you try new things. I love to make movies that are just a little bit different than what you usually see and hear. This takes a lot of bravery and it takes a lot of courage. Recently, I did a Danish WW2 drama—The Good Traitor, where we did the sound design for a few sequences while the script was being written so when they shot the film, they shot images to support the sound and not the other PA: During the process we kept on developing new ideas, but it's quite amazing how many of those initial thoughts which are now reflected in the final film. Feras Fayyad is very visionary in that regard. He talked very much about the physical and mental aspects of sound in the war. He called it traumatising sounds: when sound is not just a sound, but a physical experience, something that connects with you on a deeper, scary, instinctive, subconscious level. For example, the jets are one of the signature sounds which Feras talked most about from the very beginning of the process. For him, that was a traumatising sound. The jets weren't just jets but monsters. The sound of the jets in the film is a mixture of the original recordings and I used different beastly noises to create the feeling that Feras was looking for. It took a lot of experimentation, trials, and errors. The final elements to the jet sounds were actually added during the very final days of the mix at Skywalker Ranch, after many months of experimentation. Pretty much every sound in the film has its own unique character and I spent a lot of time gathering sounds and then kept on constantly developing and refining them. Both Feras and me are perfectionists, so we kept on being creative till the very end of the final mix. There's always this mix between having a vision for the project and the wonderful creative accidents happening. The final result is a mixture between this vision and happy accidents. BF: How long was the documentary in shoot? Can you talk about the quality of the production sound? And expand on the di†culties faced during the dialogue edit? PA: The shoot itself took more than three years and they shot 500 hours of material. An enormous amount. The picture editors did an amazing job. The production sound was terrible and it really took a lot of work to clean up the dialogue. Many weeks. The original sound was recorded with small camera microphones and it sounded awful. Some of the footage sounded so bad that we needed to clean up the dialogue before the translators could even hear what was being said! Nowadays there's all this brilliant noise-reduction software that makes it possible to make even very bad recordings work in a cinematic sound mix. Lars Ginzel, the German dialogue editor and re-recording mixer, did an amazing job. He cleaned up the dialogue and found lots of bits and pieces of background sounds which we could use to make the environments come alive when all the noise was removed from the dialogue. We did a lot of Foley sounds for footsteps and movements to make us feel close to the characters. I work with an amazing Finnish Foley artist, Heikki Kossi, and we have developed this style of Foley for documentaries where things are recorded realistically to make it sound more real and fit in with the gritty documentary sound recordings. LARS GINZEL: During dialogue edit it was very helpful to know that we were not just aiming for a reportage-style approach. Feras Fayyad had a clear vision to make this a subjective story from the point of view (and listening) of Dr. Amani. The production sound had all kinds of unwanted sounds that would blur or divert the focus from Dr. Amani. Like people standing right outside the frame, close to the camera, talking. So our main aim was to focus on what we want the audience to see and try to eliminate or minimize everything else. Peter Albrechtsen, Demark Studio. Photo by Povl Thomsen