Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1533995
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 29 against the walls. And they started chanting these chants that I can't repeat because, you know, they're filled with profanity. They start chanting. And then we move in. Charlie Campagna, the sound eˆects recordist, and I went down an aisle we created. I was walking backward, pointing at the audience. He's walking forward. And this was the sound we used as the camera is tracking through the audience. You can hear people not just coming and going, but you actually feel them passing through you. Then we took the loop group up on the roof of a parking structure and had them doing the same chants. We're outside, near a police station, going: "F*** the police!"—chanting it real loud. I was just waiting for [the cops] to show up, but fortunately they didn't. So that gave us a sense of small, medium, large. And we got this great sound. Mark Stoeckinger, who supervised with me, treated it to make it sound like it was in the right space. And then the pièce de résistance was that I found some soccer crowd recordings. I took the soccer chant and cut it in sync with that "F*** the police! F*** the police!" and pitched it so it kind of rose and fell. If you listen to it by itself, it would sound weird, but when you put it in with everything … I mean, I know how we did that, but I can't believe it's faked. It just sounds so good and so rich and so full. I think it's up to seasoned editors like myself to try to pass that kind of knowledge down. I wish we had more confabs where people would get together and do things like with the (AMPAS) Bake-Oˆ. The Bake- Oˆ is great. But I would love to do what I do when I lecture in a class, which is show a scene and dissect it and listen to the various pre-dub elements. Even though we don't do hard pre-dubs like we used to. But a lot of the time in films, we still work in groups and listen to the various groups and pick it apart, and you start to hear people's work. When I was at Warner Bros., we gave a talk for some students and one of the things that someone played was the stems from the movie Inception, the scene where they're in the street and everything kind of blows up. We started listening to the various stems and it was eye-opening in a great way because I realized that when you saw a hole blow up in the street, they weren't trying to do an explosion with bricks and what that would sound like. What they did was a stylized thing. And I was like, oh, this is brilliant. It's got to be visceral and explosive and yet not what that thing sounds like … because it's a dream and it can't be real. If you listen to the pre-dubs, it just made no sense but when you put it together, you see what they were doing. So, it's that kind of knowledge that I would love to see transferred down to people coming up in the business. I think it's up to seasoned editors like myself to try to pass that kind of knowledge down. Rachel, Greg and Rebecca Hedgepath, attending the 72nd Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Awards where Greg was honored with the Career Achievement Award.