Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335892
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 59 the very end, once we knew what we had. This procedure frustrated Fincher at first, but he quickly adapted it once we made the analogy to shooting the picture. If you put vaseline on the lens in the beginning, you can't take it off later. Early on, we had gotten a copy of Citizen Kane, digitized it and ran the data through a spectrum analyzer to look at the visual representation of the sound frequencies. It looked like Devil's Tower in Close Encounters— nothing on the left, pokey bits in the mid-range and then dropping off on the right. We reverse engineered that shape using a software filter program that we put our mix through that did the shaving we needed to make it match. We worked with Kirk Baxter, the picture editor, to figure out a pipeline where we could do that in a temp manner, which later we refined for the mixing process. Throughout the editing and mixing process, the Patina evolved. David had notes, we tweaked settings, added other plug-ins and techniques that helped with the Patina. We even added sound effects, like hiss and fluttering 35mm gate and motor noise, to help produce the sound we were going for. We had as many as 28 versions of the Patina effect in some places of the film. To make it even more complex, each scene and each department (Dialogue, Effects, Ambience, Foley, and Music) were Patina'd differently as we realized what worked for Dialogue didn't work in the same way for Music. After we mixed the film in full resolution and applied the Patina to work to Fincher's satisfaction, we set to address the theatre echo he desired. Fincher had originally wanted to bring the film to the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland and play back the Patina there where we would then re-record the echo. While the Grand Lake ended up not being a practical solution, we did end up with a fortunate solution: We went to Skywalker Sound and used their scoring stage—a large wood floored room with hard surfaced walls and high ceilings. The scoring stage, much like a church, has a long echo time of more than three seconds. This was just the sound we were hoping for and—as luck would have it—there was an added bonus: The scoring stage had built into it a 60-foot movie screen with just the playback speaker system we needed. We set up 12 microphones in Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst.