Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1401019
64 I m ps e . o rg business where people are very worried about sticking out or doing something weird, but in this creative relationship that we have, it's important that we are not worried about those things. DB: Yeah. The biggest gift of the process on this film was the fact that the shackles were off. There wasn't a wrong answer. If you had an idea, you tried it. If it didn't work, it was pretty clear in the room. There wasn't opposition to the attempt. It was just, "Go for it. Let's see what we've got." Going back to that opening sequence, we were mixing, Peter's got the sound design going, and he looks over and says, "try some delay on the feet" (I was mixing dialogue, ADR, and Foley). David runs for quite a while in the opening, so about halfway through the sequence, I started feeding the feet through Slapper and really cranking it all around the room in 5.1. Now you've got the rhythm of his feet that are going, "ka-ke-da, ka-ke- da, ka-ke-da" and it became another layer of texture, building up the orchestration and intensity of the sequence until we shut it all down when he shuts the truck's door. Up until then, if I was mixing someone running up a street, I would have never thought, "Yeah. Let's delay those feet and see what happens." ALL: [laughter] DB: But that's the kind of great environment that we were in. And Robert created the condition for that to happen. MA: This is a two-parter that we'll start with Robert on the picture side then we can hear from Peter and David. 4:3 is a very deliberate style to show this film, which usually does feel like it really brings everything in and kind of makes things a little bit more claustrophobic for the audience. Then we also have this expansive mix that's got creative panning sometime going beyond the limits of the screen. It really gives a very interesting dynamic. Can you explain your thoughts behind these choices? RM: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Oscar (Ignacio Jiménez, the DOP) and I talked about when we were initially kind of finalizing the aspect ratio was this kind of aspect of a family album and this portraiture of a family, but then the characters existing within these frames. So in the aspects when we're close on David, you really feel that claustrophobia in many ways. But then when we're with the children or when we're in situations where David is with his wife, we didn't do that. We ended up being very far away. So, the world was really open. The world is really what David is in fear of losing. There is this aspect of losing his wife. There is this aspect of losing the day-to-day with his children. But the other reality is he's losing the entire life he's been living and creating. And so the world played an important part of that in those. When it related to the kind of sounds specifically, I felt it was very important that we could hear the whole world that he was living in. The train 10 miles away was important to be a part of the narrative as was the leaves rustling and so forth. So that it wasn't just fully a subjective space, but the fact that all of those things were on the table as it related to him losing.