Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545099
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 35 to remove the gritty footsteps! I put the whole scene on the ADR sheets and when Nicholson saw it, he freaked out. I explained what the issue was and how noisy and snappy it was. (I had to play it a few times for him to hear it!) He said, "That was the night of my 50th birthday and I was drunk as a skunk, and it was the best performance of my life!" Meaning, he didn't want to even attempt to loop it. I told him, "Okay, I get it. I don't like doing ADR if the production can be saved either." I told him, "I'll make you a deal— you ADR it the best you can and I promise to work on fixing the production tracks." So, he did it. Not very well. Actors know that if they don't do such a great job that you will be forced to use the production no matter how bad it is! I think he knew that he just wasn't that good at ADR. So, I edited the scene. It was about a 90-second scene and it took me more than a whole day to fix it. Since we were on mag film, I had to use many degaussed razor blades to carefully make crisscrosses on the spots where the grit was, usually about a quarter frame (1 sprocket) or more. The crisscrosses would reduce the snappiness of the grit without affecting the voice. If I went too far, I would have to order another reprint of the take! (And wait for it to come back from the transfer department). I had so much white tape of splices where I could remove a sprocket or two (which then need to be filled with clean ambience to stay in sync) that it looked like one solid piece of white tape! I scraped, I crisscrossed, I took out sprockets and filled and, in the end, we were able to use the production sound. (And the ADR wasn't that good anyway!) Ah, the days of scraping mag! Do I miss them? Not so much but it was (and is) still fun to figure out: What is the problem? What's the best way to fix it? hich brings me to Speed 1994. I was brought onto the film to supervise the ADR by the film editor, John Wright, who knew of my ADR expertise. Stephen Flick was the supervising sound editor on the film. Gary Gerlich was the supervising dialogue editor. The three of us, with a whole team of editors, made the soundtrack of the film. No one did it all by themselves. The Oscar that it won for Best Sound Editing really should have gone to all three of us. But alas, it didn't. The film was a great challenge because it was the first feature film directed by Jan De Bont, who was a cinematographer. When it came time to film the climactic scenes on the moving bus, he wanted the bus to be actually driving, not being towed by a tow truck. He felt that the action would be better on the actors' faces if the bus was being driven. However, this presented a major sound issue. The concept of the story is that if the bus drops below 50 mph, it was rigged to blow up. The actual speed of the driven bus was only going from first to second gear most of the time. Any cyclical sounds, like changing gears, are very hard to make smooth. It was also noisy because the bus door was open a lot of the time. And the gears were changing from angle to angle. Usually, we would smooth out the sound by preparing the heaviest sound and editing it so it continued under the lighter sounds. But almost every angle had a different noise floor. That was the problem. What was the solution? A. Cover and overlap the different angles with even more noise and then add sound effects on top of that and let the mixers try and dig out the dialogue. B. ADR everything. So, we ADRd everyone on the bus. That way, the sound effects could be wrapped around the dialogue, not the other way around and would give the mixers more leeway for weaving in music and sound effects. When I say everyone, it was everyone who had a speaking line. Some of the background people on the bus were extras and we looped them with a loop group. It took three weekends just to ADR Keanu Reeves, as he was up in Canada shooting Johnny Mnemonic. The director, his assistant, and I would fly up to Canada every Friday night and ADR all day Saturday and Sunday and then fly back on Monday. For three weekends! Poor Keanu—working W Making crisscrosses with a degaussed razor blade to reduce the grit of footsteps in Ironweed (1987).