Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504731
34 M PS E . O R G either on the heel strike or just the frame before the heel strike. If you cut it on the down of the footstep, it'll be late. BF: How did the shift from magnet- ic to digital affect you? SSS: When we went from 35mm film to Pro Tools, there were eight audio editing systems at that time. At Weddington Productions, they only used Pro Tools because it was able to be read on the dub stage, as well as the cutting room. I didn't think I would be able to cross the digital bridge because I had never worked on a computer. Not only did I have to learn the process, but I also had to learn Macintosh. It took me a year to learn Pro Tools. I just could not conceptually get it. My very first Pro Tools movie was called Alien Nation (1988). Mark Mangini was the supervising sound editor. It was in the middle of the summer; it was my birthday and I'm in my cutting room. One of the editors comes in and sits down and says, "Solange, you're not cutting it. You're not making it. You need to work faster. You need to cut more. And I'm afraid that if you're not up to speed with Pro Tools, we're going to have to let you go." I started cry- ing. I'm like you can't let me go, you got to give me a chance. I will work nights, weekends, overtime, free, I'll do whatever it takes. They did. They didn't have to do that. They let me stay on. I finished it with honors. I delivered big time. I worked nights and weekends, around the clock on that movie. That was my kick in the butt for Pro Tools. I'll never forget it. BF: Is there a scene that leaves a very strong memory and your approach to breaking it down? SSS: In Soul Surfer (2011), we had three pre-dubs, footsteps, props, and water. It's about this girl who surfs with her family. One day when they were out in the ocean, she got her arm bit off by a shark. The film is about how she became a champion surfer with one arm. It's a true story. We had to conceptually come up with all kinds of underwater Foley. Underwater Foley is very compli- cated and Soul Surfer is that movie which had a lot of underwater cues. There was so much water! Another movie is called Jacob's Ladder (1990) on 35mm. You open it up to a soldier wounded in the bushes, you see his point of view. You're under the bushes, it's rain- ing, cut to New York City, you're a postman, you've got a girlfriend, you're living in an apartment, cut to a beautiful house in Connecti- cut with your three kids, cut to the Vietnam soldier, cut to New York, cut to Connecticut. It just keeps rotating and you don't know which ones real and you're trying to figure it out. The lead character is Jake Ja- cob and there's a drug called 'The Ladder' that they got in Vietnam. It's a party scene where Jake starts to hallucinate, and the music is blar- ing, the birds are going nuts, the girl turns into a dragon, and there's this head shaking violently in the back- ground creating a blur. At the mix, they started playing all the effects for the shaking head and nothing was working. The director is not liking any of it. I whisper, "Play the Foley." The mixer lowers all the effects busses; he opens up the Foley bus and plays it. Turns out that's exactly what the director was looking for. Whatever we did, con- ceptually, it worked, and they ended up using the Foley instead of the sound effects. BF: How easy has it been for wom- en like yourself in sound, in Holly- wood, in a business that's predomi- nantly been a man's world? SSS: Back in the day, in the eighties and the nineties, women usually did dialogue. Allegedly, women could not handle what we called 'boy Dog House Post supervising sound editor Solange Schwalbe on the mix stage at Todd-AO with re-recording mixer Steve Neal, 2015.