Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1455123
SPRING 2022 – LOCAL695.ORG 21 by Tod A. Maitland CAS Be While that may be true about the visual style of musicals, it is absolutely true about sound. Think back to movies like Singing in the Rain and how they were filmed—big master shots on giant studio stages with brightly lit sets. Compare that to West Side Story (WSS) or tick, tick…BOOM! (TTB) or virtually any of the more recent musicals. Of course, cinematography on musicals has evolved immensely, but it pales in comparison to the transition in sound that has taken place on musicals since as late as the early '80s. I was there in those early days (meaning the late '70s and early '80s) when practically every musical number was filmed using loudspeaker playback. The only sound that post received from production to fill the speakers' void was Room Tone. The rest was up to Foley, working hard to make the best of things with a lack of in-sync ambience. Audiences just accepted the "canned" sound of vocals. Of course, there were exceptions. I remember working with my father, Dennis Maitland, a prolific Production Mixer for forty years who was always on the edge of innovation. For the film The Tempest, he used a very early version of Earwigs to capture live vocals. They were so new, to make them function, you had to run speaker wire around the entire set twice and attach the leads to a powerful amplifier to create an induction loop. Actors/singers had to be inside the loop. Earwig sound quality varied greatly depending on where you were in the loop. It was all very time-intensive. Live songs were a rare breed. Today, it's entirely different. It's all about creating reality, making musicals sound "natural" and not canned. The days of simply turning on the playback machine on set are over. Paul Hsu (Re-recording Mixer, Supervising Sound Editor, TTB) summed up our goal very well during a recent interview, calling it "hyper-reality." Musicals live in a real/ non-real world. Some songs are recorded live on set, some are prerecorded PB, and many are a mix of both. Our goal is to weave between live singing and PB while maintaining an in-sync ambience, so the audience never knows the difference. But that's so much easier said than done.