Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532181
Mark Paterson. 32 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E the process was that we got to start design work in pre-production and production, so Fede had us added into this system they use called ShotGrid. It's project management software in an online cloud system that the production design and visual effects teams use for all the creative concept stuff. It was cool, too, seeing all of Fede's notes and the feedback. Because of ShotGrid, not only were we aware of what the initial visuals would look like, but we also submit- ted our sounds into the system. A creative bubble formed where we could tap into the feeling of the film even more than we probably would have. Usually, post is exiled to a silo of sorts, but in this case, we got to be part of that pre-production bubble. I would love to see that happen more; it promotes a rich exchange of ideas. CineMontage: Polly, tell us what it was like recreating Ian Holm's iconic "Alien" character, the android Ash, as Rook? M c K i n n o n: Th at 's a w h o l e j o u r n ey in and of itself. I've long wanted to do a Respeecher feature project—it's a fairly new technology, and what it can do is super-interesting and exciting. But we had some real limitations. We needed to build a voice model to drive this new speech, and we were limited in what we could use from the "Alien" universe; in fact, we didn't have enough material. Respeecher recommends having, ideal- ly, two hours of material to build a model from, and we had about eight minutes of clean audio. There was a lot of discussion about what we were going to do. This was also when the strikes were happening, and AI and all that stuff was a hot topic, so we were careful ethically for that reason, as well. We wanted to find the old production dailies from the original film and mine them for outtakes and build a model that way. But of course, that's from 1979, so where are the dailies? Where do we get those outtakes? And we eventually were able to track them down somewhere deep in the archives. They still had the old tape reels. CineMontage: How did you help recreate the texture of the original film from a sound perspective? Paterson: From my perspective, a large portion of that is related to music. I know Ben [Wallfisch], the composer, was on that