Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 31 cameras to detect. Adding a layer of balls to the surface of his shooting tank prevents the light from creating the disruption, while also allowing the actors to come to the surface and breathe and survive." In his 2017 interview, Cameron called the solution "a little bit like a fighter plane dumping a bunch of chaff to confuse the radar system of a missile." VRS: How were you able to use production sound if there were all those plastic balls in the pool?! GYW: When Peter Jackson did his series on the Beatles [Get Back], he discovered that in order for the Beatles to talk to each other without being on film, they rehearsed their iconic music while they talked and it was all recorded on a mono Nagra. Peter and his team invented a way to separate all the instruments, as well as the voices! It's called MAL which is Machine Augmented Learning. Peter was able to separate the voices from the musical instruments in order to hear what they were saying. In 1969, when they shot the footage, it was all pretty unusable except as archived footage. Peter found a way to bring it back to life! When we came upon the problem in the water tanks with the plastic balls, we asked Peter if we could use MAL. It can also magically separate dialogue overlaps! VRS: What!?!? GYW: I know! Right!? MAL learns each person's voice and it pulls them apart with no artifacting! It's incredible. It was a real game changer. Normally, we would have to ADR any overlapping dialogue (and of course, the noise of the balls in the tank) but using MAL allowed us to use the actors' original performances. ADR is a great and powerful tool to fix problems from the set but a lot of directors don't like the artificiality of recreating performances. A lot of actors don't like doing it either. With MAL, we were able to preserve their performances in the moment. It's amazing. MAL gives you layers. It gave us a "ball" layer only; the water noise only and the voices only! It's really miraculous on the Beatles documentary because it separated the people in the booth from the vocals from the instruments so that they could focus on whatever they wanted to in the shot. VRS: That reminds me of Robert Altman's multitrack recordings where he had a separate mic on each actor in a scene! I remember my mom telling me about editing California Split and trying to figure out how to edit 20 mics on a sync block (that only held two tracks and a guide track). GYW: Have you seen the film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould? There's a scene where he goes into a restaurant and you hear all these conversations going in and out at the same time, beautifully edited and mixed. Sometimes the filmmaker doesn't want you [the audience] to hear every little thing, like Altman. There's editing—where we prep all the sounds, and then there's mixing, where the choices get woven. VRS: How did you handle the Sigourney Weaver character in The Way of Water since the character she played was a 14-year-old girl? Did you have to pitch her voice up? I remember thinking when I saw the film … wait … is that Sigourney's voice!?! It blew me away, really! GYW: Thank you. Yes, at first we were like, 'How do we do this?' Believe it or not, Sigourney's voice is hers—no pitching, no modification, no treatment. It's totally her performance. She turned herself into a 14-year-old girl. It is a true The plastic balls used in the pool to get rid of the glare for the cameras in Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). Right: Gwen with her friends Norm and Jake from Avatar (2009).