Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545202
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 23 away. That's one of the challenges of Foley. And in a movie, you want to hear it. What I want to cover in F1 is totally directly relative to that. I just got chills, because it was a great experience. Coming up with a sound for two or three instances of a shot from the front of the car, which is miraculous, they got a shot from a car, some kind of boom that was hanging off the front of the car. Going around the turn, which was from screen left to screen right. And on the right side, the inside of the turn is a curb. And it's a ramped piece. The car can't hit anything hard and there are stripes on it, So the drivers, doing 200 miles an hour approaching the curb, see it. To give you a little background, I raced go-karts as a kid, and up until a year and a half ago, I raced vintage go-karts. So, I've experienced it going fast on a track like that. And I'm experienced about using the curb, which all the F1 cars used in the film. And here's reality challenging film reality. Al wanted sounds for the cars going up on the curb. And he says, I know that it can't be rhythmic because there's a bump, because bumps would tear the cars apart. And in the middle of a late afternoon into the evening, we recorded something that worked for it. I can't divulge, of course, but we found the sound. Working on this film with Joseph Kosinski, how was his approach compared to working with other directors? GJ: With shooting at live F1 races, this job was unique and not a workflow we'd ever experienced. Joe's approach was that we were the 11th team at the track, fully embedded with the real race crews. Joe was the coolest/calmest person in mission control (our large video village setup at the tracks) during fast-paced and very technical filmmaking. There was detailed scheduling (down to the second!) to enable us to shoot on the track on race days and achieve all the coverage we needed. Joe was fully supportive, knew what we were up against, and had our backs for the whole show. EM: There's a filter generally between the Foley stage and the director a lot of the time. Sometimes the directors will want to come and see the stage and everything. We shot a lot of the Foley pretty far ahead of the final. But certainly, we had the edict through the effects reviews that they were having with Joe about what they wanted and how to make it sound authentic. MM: He just takes everything in which helps with the movie. As he dives into stuff, even if it's Top Gun: Maverick or racing cars—which he's really into—he wants to make sure the balance of the dialogue and everything is mixed well. He really listens to the creative input that everyone will give him like, "What do you think?" Like when the guys in England did the commentary, it was pretty much playing the film, and they just did it on the fly. We would go back and we would maybe do some punch-ins. I learned a lot of lingo. I didn't know it was called this and they would explain everything. He's very kickback; one of the most delightful men to work with. He's great. Very creative. GR: Specifically for this film, Joe definitely knew that we had to have a real signature. Not just the car engines themselves, but the dynamic of the mix and the dynamic of the overall integration of the track. He knew early on that it needed to be something that was different, really from the first race to know that this was going to feel different than most of your other movies. Joe has never shied away from using sound to get people's attention at his film. Sound to him is not unlike light in that you can really affect the audience with color, and we do that with sound. We treat it that way. You know, how bright is too bright? And I don't just mean high EQ. I'm talking about magnitude, the way it comes off the screen, it is a feeling. Everything truly is an emotional feeling for him. Rarely does it come down to a technicality. It is always about what does it feel like? And where are we in the arc of our Michael Miller CAS Alan Meyerson CAS Dennis Leonard Hans Zimmer and Gareth John Dash Mason-Malik