MPSE Wavelength

M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 43 Why are the MPSE Awards important to you? ODIN: It's wonderful to be recognized by your peers, especially when the competition is so challenging. Was there anything specifi c within the story that infl uenced your decision to take on this project? ODIN: This fi lm was a love letter to sound effects because the main character was losing his hearing and he wanted to record his favorite sounds for posterity. How did the pandemic change the way you and your team worked on this project? ODIN: We had to work remotely for much of the schedule and then we needed to keep the staff on the stage to a minimum. Was your vision seen through from initial spot to fi nal mix or did any interesting new perspectives arise along the way? ODIN: I actually started on this picture when it was just a script. The director gathered images and clips that demonstrated what the fi lm would be and I designed sound for this sizzle reel that eventually helped get the fi lm made. I was so happy to see the movie through its completion. Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing Foreign Language Feature THE EIGHT HUNDRED CMC Pictures Supervising Sound Designer and Editor: KANG FU Sound E• ects Editor: STEVE MILLER Dialogue Editor: AI LONG TAN Music Editor: FEI YU What challenges did the team face and how did the sound add to the overall experience? KANG FU, SUPERVISING SOUND EDITOR: First, it describes the specifi c situation of the history in China (1937). According to the script, all of the actors performed in local dialects. My team recorded the demo for every character's dialect. Before shooting, all of the actors practiced the dialect acting according to the demo. The location of the shooting was on the bank of Yangcheng Lake in Suzhou. There was a high-speed railway near the location position. Like wind, snow, rain, smoke, blast, etc., noise cannot be avoided. So we made a decision, 100 percent of the dialogue will be done with ADR. In addition, my production sound team recorded the IR sample for every shooting scene. It provided the reference of dry-wet ratio for ADR. I think battle movies are more real than realistic movies. The war is cruel. This fi lm is more about how people feel in the war. I let my team do the fi eld recording of live shell in Spain. We had a famous gunshot recording coordinator in Spain, and he arranged the same guns of World War II for us for all of the live recording. We used more than 30 mics for recording, including all of the details of the gun sound (e.g.: gun fi re, impact and bullets sweeping the air). About Foley: The Eight Hundred material and texture of props are very real, so we took all of the props, cloth, gun, etc., back to the Foley recording stage in order to make this epic movie sound realistic. FEI YU, SUPERVISING MUSIC EDITOR: The Eight Hundred became the No. 1-grossing movie of 2020 worldwide. I was extremely lucky working on this movie as music supervisor and music editor (Including music producer for the ending credit song sang by Andrea Bocelli and Na Ying). The most challenges for this movie was I started edit music from fi ve hours, 30 minutes cut, till the end around 2½ hours with almost more than 100 times editing version (including the censorship even after the music recording session), I need to make sure that nobody will hear the edit spot. One of our composers, Rupert Gregson-Willliams, worked in London, the other composer, Andrea, worked in Los Angeles, and I am based in China. The recording session also happened around the world (with brass session in London, perc session in Beijing and L.A. strings session in Europe). I spent a lot of time coordinating and making sure all of our music will be sounding perfect. Another big challenge for this movie is that there are a lot of source music included, in the picture you could see a Peking opera stage and it's part of the story. I needed to make sure that all of the music synced with their gestures perfectly so the source music transitioned extremely well with the score. (I recorded all of the source music before they started for shooting and sent it to the actors for the rehearsal.) Overall, it was a really big project and we worked on this project more than 1½ years since there are so many music elements.

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