Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1383665
can be found in documentaries, sometimes not motivated by the picture. Sometimes it's just motivated by the flow of the story, not a visual cue. That's sometimes an interesting opportunity to expand your sound design. You can be very free without a visual cue. Sometimes the documentary doesn't have that abundance of prolific visual cues. EM: With Foley on documentaries, are you usually cutting it all yourself from libraries and your own recordings? SRC: My friends edit the Foley and cut it for me. What they send me is usually pretty good. Like I said, everything about the process of narrative, and documentary is the same for me. It can be said that I treat narrative as a documentary because it's kind of similar. EM: I imagine that makes your films sound more real too. SRC: Yeah, I believe in what's happening on set. I'm a dialogue editor who spends more time on the parts that no dialogue is happening than when dialogue is happening. I like to leave everything in unless it's distracting, rather than cut it out if it is not necessary. In the very beginning of August at Akiko's, it is interesting, there are little raindrops hitting the roof in the production sound. I heard a little hint of rain on the window while dialogue editing, and I went to that part and tried to instinctively cut it out, but I actually kind of liked it! I was inspired by it. So later I changed the timing and added big passing rain in the scene, and then I thought that might be a good sound design motif in the film. There's no visual cue, it's just a sound cue. I was inspired by the production sound. What I found is that the whole movie's fascination with little things happening is actually a big cinematic fascination. Those are big things in that film, like wind passing through with trees, like "Oh, that's great." I was thinking that the rain passing by was like an Empire Strikes Back moment for me. That one production sound of rain drops in that first scene actually defined the whole sound design for the movie. I try to focus on little things in production sound and get hints and inspiration for the overall sound design of the film. If there's a dog bark or a rooster, if I like it, I'll think. "Oh, actually the rooster is good" so I'll put in more roosters, or time it differently, but I like to keep the rooster in because that's real to the set. That's the movie that you worked on, on the set. So I try to preserve it. It's pretty much making a narrative film as a documentary.