Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
62 M PS E . O R G one of the stars, Tom Hanks, needed to lose some weight for, I'm not sure what else he was doing. So anyway, there was this hot set, The Green Mile, that the director Frank Darabont loved the sound of the feet walking around on it, the actual set. And that's incredibly unusual. So, I would imagine, probably Mark, or maybe it was Aaron or both of them, remarked why don't we try to record the Foley on the set? Okay, why not? Well, of course, there's some logistical hoops to jump through, or maybe nightmares depending, because a shooting stage is not designed to be a Foley stage per se. So the first thing was the technical aspects, we needed to make sure that we could get the audio to there/from there, from our Foley stage, so Mary Jo Lang, the mixer at the time, would be able to listen to what we were performing there and lay it down correctly. And of course, we needed to be able to see it visually. All of that was taken care of, it was great, they really did a great job. We had this large monitor on a stand that we could move around, and we got a mic and a very large microphone stand that had wheels, so we could move that around pretty easily, too. We learned we were not constrained by working on the actual set. In fact, that was liberating because we could put the monitor way down the, quote, "Green Mile Hall," and walk the distance all the way up to the foreground to the microphone. So we would capture live the psycho acoustic effect of coming from background to foreground. That was a game changer. That was fantastic. I'm sure we did all of The Green Mile footsteps there, and some other ones. Now, that being said, we did not Foley the entire picture there. There are some things we needed to do, let's say exterior cement or whatever, which we did back on the Foley stage, and there were the actual logistics. In other words, I had a truck back then, I've always had a truck, it seems, and so I needed to make sure that I got all the props from the Foley stage over to The Green Mile shooting stage in the morning before we started, then some of those props needed to be utilized back over at the Foley stage and they needed to come back. This is all during the day. So I will tell you, I was beaten up on that show big time. It was really, really a tough film, but it was really a great film. And in fact, old Sparky, that was the electric chair, was there on the set off to the side. All told, it was a wonderful experience, because again, we were able to capture something for the director we just knew right out of the gate he was going to love. Very tough film, very tough, probably top 10 for me to do. Hilda Hodges was my Foley partner on that and again, Mary Jo Lang was the Foley mixer, and Carolyn Tapp as the Foley recordist. SSS: The footsteps in The Green Mile were in the actual hall of the green mile, which was from the jail cell to the electric chair. That was the definition of the green mile, from the jail to the electric chair. The element of the footsteps had such a high noise floor that we had to cut it like dialogue. JR: Oh, sure. On some takes I could hear the birds in the rafters cooing, because this was a shooting stage. But your efforts there paid off for us because again, Frank Darabont loved it, and it sounded great. SSS: It was very difficult to cut because it had to be treated with a high noise floor. It had to be that the noise floor had to even out, we could not have different levels of noise floor. So with each angle or each microphone movement, we had to keep the noise floor the same. It was like cutting dialogue so it was a very difficult film to cut, but what an honor it was to work on. Okay, the next film is called Transformers, 2007. JR: Right. This is the original Transformers, and here we have robots that were like 100 feet tall if not more. Okay, well, what do we do? We could pull the ECM 50 out, or do we … hmm? It just wasn't happening. My son was going to camp that had some footlockers and one was in fairly bad repair. I brought that to the stage, and I had the idea to put the microphone actually on the footlocker, mic stand and all. We put some metal on top of that and start moving it around. Oooh, boy. I don't know, just somehow, it was magic. Now we could get these huge sounds that would help us. Again, we were a very small part of a very large cog. The sound designer was Erik Aadhal and the sound supervisors were Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins. But, what I am saying is I really think we were able to help out on that front. When the transformers are talking, I would do some [Foley] The TAJ Soundworks director's chair John used to create a sense of feet running on the Zeppelin in The Rocketeer (1991).