Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 39 I've been on a couple films where the directors, from the start, are very specific about how they want certain things to sound. As soon as that happens, as a supervisor, I go into a mode of trying to listen and remember and process what they're telling me, because they were their ideas, not mine. I'm copiously taking mental notes and physical notes and from the start, you're not really exercising your creativity, just trying to articulate theirs. At that point, you're just thinking, "God, I hope I can please them and come up with these sounds the way they've described them." Zack sets you free at the beginning to see what you'll come up with, and then at our first temp mix, he'll make comments and suggestions to make certain sounds better or the way he'd like them to sound. He also gives "love notes." Typically, when you get a client in the room, they initially give you notes on things that need to be different or changed. But at the end of the playback, the first thing Zack says is "I love this" or "I love that!" and everyone in the room shouts, "LOVE NOTES, LOVE NOTES!!" After the "love notes," he gives you a handful of notes about things he'd like to change or make better and then we move on. Very efficient. Zack's a cinematographer by trade. He used to shoot commercials, so he's very much a visual beast. The sound part of the process isn't his first or primary focus, so it's good for people like myself and the composer. It frees us to present our initial sound design and musical ideas and let him react to what we come up with. I love to work that way, so at least the filmmaker gets my take on it first, and then at the end of the day, the movie is going to sound exactly the way they want it to sound. That's one of my favorite aspects of doing what we do. EM: How was the post-production process on 300 different for you compared to films leading up to that point? SH: Well, I'd never worked on a green screen film. Almost the entire film was shot on a sound stage. So the whole movie sonically was from scratch—there was nothing recorded other than the original production dialogue. On the set, when they were climbing up on these rock-like surfaces, the production footsteps were all thumpy and clunky, because it was all fake set props. We had to do a lot of dialog editing to clean up the production, to get rid of those set noises. Actually, one of our biggest challenges was the reflections of the voices, because all these voices were recorded indoors in a warehouse. It's hard to get rid of some of those reverberations, especially when Leonidas is shouting, "This is Sparta!" There's a lot of loud yelling and screaming in the film, and we really had a challenging time getting rid of reverberant tails of all the yelling. The sound design was built from the ground up. That really freed us to be able to support the images with very bold sounds. EM: How early on were you able to see renderings of animals, weapons, and gore? SH: Well, it was a gradual process. We didn't start on the film until about five or six weeks before the director's cut, when Zack had to show the studio the film. But before the film was ever made, Zack did a proof-of-concept clip—a little short piece for Warner Bros. You're probably wondering, "Why did he have to do that?" If you remember, a few years before this movie was released, Warner Bros. had released the two movies, Troy and Alexander, both sword and sandal films. Neither one did well at the box office. So here's Zack saying, "Hey, do you want to make a film about the battle of Thermopylae?" So, Zack did this proof-of-concept clip and it was just one long shot with the camera constantly moving. It was mostly what we call the "freelance scene," where Leonidas is defending himself and fighting in slow motion. It's that iconic scene where everything goes slow-mo with all the various speed ramps. After 300, you started seeing those speed ramps everywhere in films, even TV shows and whatnot. It was groundbreaking for sure. Zack is a visual genius with great ideas, it's like beautiful eye candy. EM: How did the idea of scale affect your approach to loop group for armies in this film? SH: The armies themselves were huge, and it was challenging to come up with crowd sounds that big. At the end with the big Greek armies beyond just the 300, there were Xerxes's armies like 10,000-fold as well, right? It was definitely challenging, but it was a combination of organic crowd recordings and layers of loop group performances. We did a lot of custom loop group recordings with Caitlin McKenna's group, and then stacked and layered those recordings. We also had organic crowds from our voluminous sound effects library of men yelling in battle scenes and things like that. I've never liked to rely exclusively on loop group, only to use it for specific Supervising sound editor Scott Hecker