Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1383665
70 I M PS E . O R G much, your story kind of drags out. Sometimes it's necessary and you have to make it smoother. If I do ever crossfade, I'll make it really apparent, like, "I'm crossfading…." in a long, deliberate way. So yeah, I want to make it obtrusive. I want the scenes to collide with each other as much as possible. But within the scene I try to smooth transitions out. EM: You've been working for so many years on so many unique films. How did you enjoy working on Making Waves, being that it was about post- production sound? Have any fun stories from working on a film about what we do? SRC: Yeah, it was actually very educational for myself. I mean I always try to listen to all the production sound for everything. There were long interviews. I spent a lot of time just listening to all these interesting interviews. Actually, the editor and Midge did a lot of work to concentrate the length of the film. Going in I thought, "Oh, it's recorded by and made by sound people, so the dialogue should be easy to clean," but for me, no film is easy. I found there needed to be a lot of editing within the words, in the syllables, so I decided to make a library of consonants from each character. Like "This is Walter's 't' and 's'," I had to edit in so many of them. I had an X track of consonants for each character. The major work was done by the editor, so I just needed to smooth it out. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. Actually, working on it affected me in my sound design work after that. It was something that I got inspired by. I tried to do an homage scene in my Japanese film 37 Seconds. With Walter Murch's approach to sound design, that was the first time I heard the phrase "abstract cinema." I grew up with David Lynch's films. I liked them but I couldn't grasp why, like what was interesting about them. I didn't actually know what it is, but the moment he said "abstract cinema" I thought, "Ah, that's it!" In Chris Yogi's second feature that's going to Sundance, Chris used a lot of abstractness in some scenes and I thought, "Ah, okay. That's how he goes…" I think I understand that part of Chris's films better now than when I was working on his first film, August at Akiko's. EM: Wow, that's amazing that it inspired you and changed the way that you worked. SRC: Yeah, it was a fun documentary. Making Waves; Photos by Cheryl Richards