Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521562
32 S U M M E R 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y comfortable with that. That's kind of the environment he was used to in New York. And he felt that that benefited the film. Especially given that our mix was a headphone mix, so we didn't need the real estate. We didn't need the same volume of air we would need for a big movie with speakers because we were mixing and monitoring over headphones and making a binaural mix. I assume 32 Sounds was micro-budget. MM: The lowest budget I've ever had! I'm proud to have had an impact on how Sam made binaural happen, because he had it on his radar. He had seen a live show that used a dummy head as part of the performance aspect of it, but he didn't know how it worked. That was part of our technical discussions. I knew that he is a doc maker who is used to a shotgun mic on a boom pole, and that's the way you see the universe. But documentaries are supposed to have some sense of verisimilitude. They're supposed to reflect the way we see the world. And in verité, it's meant to be the filmmaker, completely removed from that process, and we're experiencing the event as if we were there. Well, we hear in 360 degrees. What's a boom? What's a mono boom mic doing in a documentary? He started to get a little bit of my religion there, so we recorded with binaural microphones and with Ambisonic microphones that we could decode not only to binaural but to 7.1. So, you had to figure out the recording approach so things could translate as effectively—especially given the subject matter. MM: I was instrumental in helping push that approach forward so that we would have real binaural source audio for the mix. We didn't get that implemented until halfway through the shoot, so we had plenty of good old-fashioned mono recordings that we tried to turn into a binaural mix. So, in the final mix, I also used some binaural up-mixers and down-mixers to take monaural material or traditional X/Y stereo material binaural, give it a greater sense of immersion with left and right and behind and above. The headphone version was always meant as a live presentation and Sam would do the voiceover live, and JD Samson, our composer, would do the music live. But there are occasions when we can't get one or both. We've made versions of it for headphones live in a theater but without either one of those components. We can offer a headphone experience in a theater. We can offer a headphone experience with live vocals but canned music and vice versa. And then we have the cinema version, and we have a streaming version, which is the binaural version only. [It will be on Criterion starting in July.] Sam told me he wanted the end of the film and all the credits, three and a half minutes' worth, to play with nature sounds. We are coming out of the sequence in the backyard with Annea Lockwood. She's listening to the sounds of nature in Upstate New York and we fade to black for 30 seconds before you even see a credit. Sam wanted nature sounds from that location, and I found an Allen Lomax-type FX recordist, Lang Elliott, and I built the final three and a half minutes out of all of his binaural recordings, which are geographically correct. Lang, how did you become involved in the film? LANG ELLIOTT: I knew Bob Kellough (sound effects editor on the film) from a previous project, and they were sort of stumbling around the ending of the movie, and Bob suggested to Mark that he contact me because I have all these nature sounds. We worked hand-in-hand. We went through some different scenarios because it was Annea Lockwood at the end of the movie, and the ambiance they had was traffic and not much else. What did you end up sending to Mark? LE: I think I first supplied him with some common cicadas, but it was too cacophonous, so I supplied him with a pulsating Director Sam Green Mark Mangini MPSE, supervisor and re-recording mixer, and composer Philip Glass