Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531981
Spring 2025 – LOCAL695.COM 21 Terence McCormack Maitland Utility Sound Technician Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: Yes, I am the instantly recognizable "Sound Recordist" seen on the courthouse steps early in A Complete Unknown. A truly dazzling tour de force performance, I know. Tod Maitland, Production Mixer, (and my uncle), Jerry Yuen, Boom Operator, and I, have had the pleasure of working on several music-based movies in the last decade or so. Each one presents their own particular challenges and joys. We knew going into A Complete Unknown that we would be recording live singing, but we didn't know just how lively it would prove to be. Mic tests & rehearsals Tod has been doing lavalier microphone tests before we start shooting any movie for a while now, but it's especially important on the music-based films that have become a bit of a specialty for us. The test itself is pretty straightforward: We line up six lavalier mics of various makes and models and one Sennheiser 416 as the control. We have the actors go through some spoken dialog and singing at different levels. Tod then listens back to each person's voice, A/B testing between the lav and 416 to see how each voice matches, and then trying to match that to what they sound like in in person. We've found each mic accentuates or attenuates different parts of each voice and sometimes we end up preferring different microphones for speaking versus singing. On A Complete Unknown, we were able to sit in on weeks of rehearsals with the cast, the music team, and our Director, James Mangold. This time proved to be invaluable as we could see how the actors inhabited their roles, including their postures while playing guitar or in a duet, for example, and it was an opportunity to reinforce good onstage microphone practices. It was also a good time to get these lavalier tests done in an unobtrusive way. The rehearsals were also when we first got the chance to test the dozens of period vintage mics we used over the course of the movie. These were sourced by and cared for by our excellent property department, led by Michael Jortner, and Joshua Lutz, the operator of JML Studios, an encyclopedia of vintage microphone knowledge, and the owner of most of the mics we used. We did our absolute best to use the accurate microphone for each performance, with only a few substitutions to either get better sound or because the size of the wind protection they used was intrusively large. This was when our collaboration with Mangold began in earnest. He made it clear to us that we should try to keep everything we do as accurate as possible, while not getting in the way of the actor's performance or the movie at large. We learned that when we put as many microphone stands and mics out for the first rehearsal as there were seen in some of the reference photos of the Newport Folk Festival. It looked very cumbersome and busy. This made sense for the sound people who were running the live show back then, but they would not help us tell this story. Meet your heroes One of the earliest scenes in the movie, when Bob Dylan as embodied by Timothée Chalamet, visits his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), in his hospital room, the first song we hear Dylan sing in the movie is "Song to Woody," which is just him and his guitar, and yet for a song as seemingly simple as this, we had five mics going. One DPA 6060 on Timothée, a 416 from overhead, me on another 416 from below, a COS-11 inside the guitar, and another 416 hidden on the far side of the room to catch ambience and slap if the wire ended up being the best option. On the first take or two, my job was to try and mostly get the guitar, but as the scene progressed, it became clear that Bob's Tod Maitland CAS and Terence McCormack Maitland at the sound cart Tod and his crew wiring Timothée Chalamet. Photo by Macall Polay