Post Magazine

March/April 2021

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1357405

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 18 of 35

Company 3 did the grade with Clooney, Kasmir and DP Martin Ruhe. Other Best Visual Effects nominees include Love and Monsters (Matt Sloan, Genevieve Camilleri, Matt Everitt and Brian Cox); Mulan (Sean Faden, Anders Langlands, Seth Maury and Steve Ingram); and The One and Only Ivan (Nick Davis, Greg Fisher, Ben Jones and Santiago Colomo Martinez). It seems only fitting that Sound of Metal, the sub-titled drama about a punk-metal drummer (Best Actor nominated Riz Ahmed) who loses his hear- ing, should also be celebrated for its innovative sound design conceived by director Darius Marder and created by sound designer Nicolas Becker and his mixing team of Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc, Carlos Cortés and Phillip Bladh, all nominated. Marder says he wanted to use sound design "to create a point of view in a way that I don't think has been done before. But it was important that it wasn't done in an obvious way. Sound can get very geeky, and can easily be overdone. This film needed an approach that was deft and artful." Sound mixing began with a premix at the Los Angeles studio of music pro- ducer Mario Caldato Jr. Then Marder turned to Estudios Splendor Omnia, the award-winning post production studio in Tepoztlán, Mexico, for the final mix. "I believe that the various disciplines in film should communicate and work together," the director says. "Normally the editing of picture is separate from the editing of sound, which is usually part of post production. The sound recorded while shooting is manipulated in the mix later. Nicolas and I had deep and intense conversations about integrating the sound and picture edits well before shooting began." Marder's plan was to work simultaneously with the sound mixers and the film editor, with input from both Becker and his brother and script co-writer Abraham Marder. "From my point of view, it was the only way this film would work," he says. "The merging of disciplines had to be constant and never-ending. It was truly next-level, not just because of the bells and whistles we were able to come up with, but in the techniques we used." It took a total of 20 weeks to finish mixing and sound-editing. The film's editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen was also nominated for Best Film Editing, along with Yorgos Lamprinos (The Father) and Alan Baumgarten (The Trial of the Chicago 7). Director Paul Greengrass, who helmed the Bourne blockbuster franchise, won an Oscar nomination for his real-life 9/11 drama United 93, and directed such crit- ically-acclaimed films as Academy Award Best Picture nominee Captain Phillips. Now his latest film, News of the World, an elegiac period western, has earned four more noms, including one for its evocative soundscape, courtesy of its sound team of supervising sound editor/designer Oliver Tarney and re-recording mixers Mike Prestwood Smith, William Miller and John Pritchett. "We did all the post and sound design in London at Goldcrest, but most of it was remote because of the pandemic," reports Greengrass. "For instance, [composer] James Newton Howard was in LA, but we recorded the score at Abbey Road, and then editor Billy Goldenberg, who cut 22 July for me, came to London, where we began cutting together. But when COVID hit, he flew back home to LA and we had to do the rest remotely. "When COVID hit, I thought, 'This'll be a huge challenge. We'll never finish post now,'" Greengrass continues. "But after we got it all set up remotely, it went amazingly smoothly, and the technology's so sophisticated now that you can post quite happily like that." For Greengrass, "Sound and music is half the experience in any film, but especially in one like this, which I wanted to be totally immersive, and Oliver did such detailed and careful work with the sound design — everything from insect sounds to wagon wheels. Then James wrote such a beautiful score that really evokes the epic scope of the story, but also the intimate side of it, and I wanted a score that sounded broken like the characters. And we also used a lot of old instruments. He'd send me demos while we shot and he'd work away on stuff in his LA studio. Then we did all the ADR and the final mix in Atmos at Goldcrest, where I was, and simultaneously on the Universal lot, where Billy had a small crew on the stage, and we linked both stages together virtually so we could work on it together in realtime. It was a whole new way of posting, but it worked out great." Another period piece, the WW11 battleship drama Greyhound directed by Aaron Schneider, also got some Oscar love for its — pun intended — equally immersive soundscape, crafted by Warren Shaw, Michael Minkler, Beau Borders and David Wyman. "We wanted the audience to feel like they were at sea, with all the sounds of the ocean and elements and guns firing and so on," reports Schneider, "even though none of it was actually shot at sea. In fact there's close to zero real water in the film. We built it all digitally and did all the sound design on the lot at Sony, who then sold [the film] to Apple, right when we were in the middle of the DI at Company 3 with colorist Bryan Smaller." Other Best Sound nominees included Mank (Ren Klyce, Jeremy Molod, David Parker, Nathan Nance and Drew Kunin) and Soul (Ren Klyce, Coya Elliott and David Parker). Mank Pieces of a Woman The Trial of the Chicago 7 One Night In Miami... OSCAR CONTENDERS

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - March/April 2021