Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 87 "You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old." —George Burns I have taught, and my mother before me, that it's not the new technologies or equipment that makes one a good editor. It's our brains. It's how we think about solving the problems and contributing to the storytelling of the film through our sound choices. The questions we ask ourselves about editing production sound or adding sound effects and/or sound design—those are what are most important. How do I want the audience to feel right now? Where should that sound come from? What combination of sounds will tell the audience what they need to know? What sounds will make them feel scared or make them laugh or even cry? "You know you've reached middle age when you're cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police." —Joan Rivers For years, I've shown my classes the production sound of the bus scene in Speed, which won the Best Sound Oscar (which I would have received had my name been added as co-supervisor but alas…). I was the ADR supervisor, and we were still editing on film back then, so every ADR line had to be as close to perfect as possible since there was no digital stretching of the dialogue—no "time compression/ expansion" plug-in. The story involved the bus never dipping below 60 or it was rigged to blow up. The director, Jan de Bont, wanted the bus to be driven, not towed, to give the actors a real sense of driving. But the actual bus was only going between second and third gear most of the time and you could hear the changing of the gears. That is NOT in keeping with the storyline. This was Keanu Reeves' first big role after Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and in Speed, he is a hero. So he used the opportunity in ADR to make his voice a little deeper and more "manly" and "authoritative." It was hard work to redo a whole performance, and he was working in Canada on Johnny Mnemonic—a very demanding role. The director, his assistant, and I would fly to Canada every Friday for three weeks in a row and record ADR with Keanu Reeves on Saturday and Sunday and then we'd fly back to Los Angeles on Monday. One time we spent many hours (and many takes) on the one line that Jack, Keanu's character says: "Arizona Wildcats." It was so frustrating to try and get all the subtext of the meaning of that two-word line. We recorded 26 takes late on Sunday night and then decided to call it quits until the following weekend. There's a great phenomenon that I've noticed over the years when a line is delivered with the right performance, vocal quality, sync, and volume that everyone gets goose bumps when it's right! The reason that line of only two words was so hard was because it's the moment that Jack (Keanu Reeves) realizes that someone can see into the bus because on the back of her chair was her coat that said "Arizona Wildcats" on it and the bad guy mentions it. So that line had to be just the right intonation for the audience and Jack to understand its importance. Finally, he recorded another number of takes until the one that gave us all goose bumps! The production sound on the bus was sometimes so bad that you couldn't dig out the dialogue from the noise floor, mainly because the doors of the bus were open. In classes or workshops, after I show that production sound sequence, we talk a bit and then I show them the final sound. There's a quiet scene where Jack is talking to Annie (Sandra Bullock) and he's trying to comfort her after the lady (the fabulous actor Beth Grant) decides to get off the bus and she blows up, where the noise of the open bus door is so predominant you barely hear what Jack is saying to her. In the finished sound, he was able to sound intimate and authoritative and the bus sound effects took second seat. "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative." —Maurice Chevalier As I've shown this sequence over the years, I've realized how great it was that it HAD to be ADR'd. Since Speed was released in 1994, we have a lot of noise-reducing plug-ins now. (VX Clarity Pro, for example) that can take out the bus noise. Today, if we got a film like Speed, we would probably noise-reduce it and call it a day. We might not ever think of doing ADR for that sequence because, now, the bad noise is gone. In relinquishing that sequence to noise reduction, we would have deprived ourselves of the great job Keanu did to hone his performance, to reshape it, to make it more