Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1383665
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 61 But ADR rarely takes much time. Usually one day at the most for three to four hours. EM: Is it ever an uphill battle to pitch for the production sound to stay in the film no matter what? SRC: Yeah. When I was younger, I battled with directors. I'd say things like, "I need this ADR," when most directors hate ADR. The third film I did, I spent two sleepless nights mixing and EQing one ADR line at the end of the film because the director didn't believe it could work with ADR. She didn't trust me, she didn't think it would work with ADR and I was like, "let's just try to make it work." I worked two days straight on the one line of ADR. The experience actually gave me a lot of insight about things. These days I'm kind of the opposite. There are a lot of tricks to get out of production sound and like I said before, these days I get less annoyed or stressed out by production sound. When you're not stressed out about production sound, you will actually find charming things from the production sound. There's a scene from a film I worked on, August at Akiko's, where there's a long shot in a volcano area and there's only a lavalier mic on. The mic was far away so there's a lot of interference, which was kind of painful to work on. Initially, I was thinking it could benefit from ADR, but we couldn't do ADR in those circumstances. I actually found that the lavalier mic had this charming thing, it sounded like they're in outer space, like they're communicating with a radio mic as floating astronauts. That feeling of isolation in the lavalier mic was actually a great fit for the film. So in that way, within dialogue recordings I aim to make that charming thing more beautiful, and try to remove any ugliness of it. More and more, I've gotten to appreciate what comes from production sound, and use ADR less and less. EM: When you are working on a doc, how detailed do you go with Foley and hard eects compared to a non- documentary project? SRC: I do as much. It's the same process for me. It's interesting, American documentaries resemble how Americans talk when they're making arguments. There's an assertion and a supporting part. There's an interview and then there's b-roll. To make the argument stronger, I try to make the supporting part, the b-roll, stronger and make the interview stronger. For me, what makes the b-roll stronger is the Foley. I actually think the Foley might be more important in a documentary than in a narrative film, because that's what makes b-roll come alive with picture. There are a lot of interesting moments that