Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521562
34 S U M M E R 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y have the SoundField SPS 200, just the first-order Ambisonic. A lot of the more atmospheric sound effects type stuff was Ambisonic or binaural. The other thing that made it a special project for me was the first round of shooting days. When Sam had contacted me, he had several days already lined up. I told Sam that I wanted to do this project and I'm willing, but I need to let you know that I will be nine months' pregnant on your shoot days! And Sam said, "Okay, we'll play it by ear." Because of that, Sam kind of pushed me and made me appear on camera. We managed to finish those first few days and then my water broke three days after that! I took four weeks off and I went back to work. Wow! Mark, were there difficulties with intelligibility on the binaural material? MM: No, because there are no sequences in our film that are shot binaural and require the audience to understand the dialogue. I have yet to experience those challenges with binaural, though I believe they exist. When you think about it, it's almost a technical impossibility, because binaural is meant to have two omni's in a dummy that resembles the shape of the head. That means, whatever it's pointing at has nothing on-axis with the speaker. Nothing is directly on-axis, so we use it more as an immersive effect than we do capturing dialogue. One of my go-to techniques in cheating was to put the binaural sound effects that had been recorded as wild effects, and I panned the shotgun mic or the lav to the center channel and laid a nice binaural recording around it. When you got to post-production, were there any issues that you had not thought of when using binaural recordings? MM: Having not thought of it sooner, I struggled to create a binaural effect out of non-binaural material. It's a pale comparison. The best of the tools come nowhere near actual binaural recording. We mixed using Sennheiser 600 headphones. After a fair amount of review, that's what I felt was a great quality, but not boutique quality that no one could access or afford. They gave us the flattest, most neutral response that would reproduce the most consistently throughout. When viewers are watching this live, they're wearing headphones, too, right? MM: Yes. The live show is broadcast wirelessly over FM. We struck a deal with a British company—they've been very generous with us—and we carry 500 wireless headsets because wired headsets were way too expensive and way too problematic for us. So, we put out these wireless headsets, and they do a pretty good job. FM covers a 300-seat theater pretty nicely. How did you find your Foley crew? SG: At some point, Film Forum in New York wanted to show it, so I called Mark and asked if we could ever do a 7.1 mix? He said, "I have to think about this," even though later, he admitted he'd already started work on the 7.1 mix. A lot of the binaural stuff doesn't really translate, for example, the matchsticks around the dummy head. I asked Mark if we were going to have to re-record all this stuff, and he said, "I got a great idea. Let's get Joanna Fang to Foley." It's like this weird extra Meta. She did a great job. She's awesome, and she's super articulate about sound and Foley, and just loves her work and is such an artist. I've always known about Foley and was curious about it. Watching her work, I realized this is a combination of sound, art, music, and performance. I have a huge admiration for what she does. MM: Joanna is also featured in the film in the Foley segment, and I think she's so beautifully spoken. I mentioned this in my CAS acceptance, for her sequences, we didn't have to do any Foley for her Foley on camera—which I think is pretty funny. But we did need to Foley the binaural sequences. When I up-rez to immersive audio, a two-channel binary recording doesn't translate to 7.1, and I needed to feel Edgar and his son walk around into the surrounds, so I could cheat the voices. But I needed that little extra bit of detail of them walking on grass, L-R: Foley artist Joanna Fang MPSE and Foley mixer Blake Collins CAS A very unique ADR setup