3-D or not 3-D

I just read an interesting blog post entitled The Myth of 3-D Immersion. Evidently, this particular blog post is a follow-up to another one which received so much response (overwhelmingly negative, I gather) that the author felt compelled to come back for more.

Now, I'm a sound person, and have my own bias on movies which is unashamedly audio-centric. I believe an audience will tolerate weak visuals, bad lighting, poor shot composition, etc, far more than they will sit through bad audio. If they can't understand the dialog, or if they have to really concentrate to hear the words over the background noise, it's over. If the lead actor's fill light is too low and makes the hero look like a jackal, they'll keep watching (and listening).

So, that's my bias. It should come as no surprise that I view 3-D in movies as far less important than a good surround sound mix. Done well, 3-D can enhance my enjoyment of a movie, but it won't make a good movie great and it won't make a bad mix sound good. (On the other hand, a really good mix can make a good movie great for me because it puts me in their world and I respect that even if I didn't especially like their world.) Done poorly, 3-D is just annoying and distracting. (Of course, surround sound done poorly can be annoying and distracting, too. I think of the early days of 5.1 mixing when they just felt compelled to place sounds behind your right shoulder just because they could. Generally, making the audience look away from the screen is a pretty good way to pull them out of their suspension of disbelief.)

Anyway, the core point of this blog I was reading which inspired all of this you're reading is this:

The introduction of 3-D technology can't be compared to that of sound, or color, or even stereo, as people like to do. And for a simple reason. We use these technologies to show more, to extend what can be depicted. These technologies enable us to increase the amount of information we can represent or put to work in film. And this is the stuff of story-telling.

And that thought leads to the paragraph which really inspired me to write this post:

Recall Marlon Brando's famous line, as Terry Malloy, in On the Waterfront, "I could have been a contendah!" You recall his facial expression, posture and movements, the line itself, the feeling with which it is delivered, but you also recall Brando's voice. You need sound to display the voice; you need sound for voice to be one of the elements in the composition making up the whole. Color similarly extends the working pallet of the director and so extends what can be presented to an audience.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes on the subject of sound in movies: "half of what you see is what you hear." (Attributed to many, many film-makers, perhaps most famously to George Lucas, although it was probably said by Francis Ford Coppola first.) Now imagine if you could hear Brando saying something, but couldn't really make out the words because the microphone was pointed the wrong way or the scene had been shot in an actual moving car or the music had been mixed too loud. First, turn the sound off on your computer. Now watch it without sound.



Kinda dull scene, no? Go ahead, I know you want to, watch it again with the sound on. Better, isn't it?

I can imagine the scene colorized and I don't like it. I can imagine it shot in color and it would probably be just as powerful, but not necessarily any more than it is now. I can't really imagine conceiving of that scene in 3-D, but when I try, I don't see how it does anything but distract me from the scene. So I have to agree, sound was a more important advance in movie-making technology than 3-D.

What does get really interesting to me is thinking about how sound can play with 3-D in interesting ways. We've had something like 3-D audio for my entire career (in 1977, Star Wars was the first movie to use Dolby Surround, Jurassic Park in 1993 launched 5.1 audio in theaters, I started working in audio post in 1995), so I've been spending my whole career working with how to place the audience into a three dimensional space. I haven't worked on a 3-D project yet, though, and I'm looking forward to discovering how those two different 3-D spaces can interact and compliment one another.

we agree wholeheartedly

Michael Davenport, music supervisor and owner of Expressive Artists, just alerted us to this review of our work (and his) on Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer:

Luckily the film's lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix is quite winning, especially from the very creative use of poppy underscore tunes, some evidently courtesy of bands the music coordinator for the film manages. There is also good, if inconsistent, use of the surrounds, including the many sewer sequences, which feature a lot of discrete channelization and good echo effects. The best overall sound effect is toward the end of the film when Darksmoke and Arthur have their final showdown. That sequence bristles with awesome LFE and the sound design is very effective. Overall, dialogue sounds great here, and the music is especially well done throughout.

(Quoted from http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Adventures-of-a-Teenage-Dragonslayer-Blu-ray/18666/.)

We're very proud of our work. (Sure, we'd rather not see the phrase "if inconsistent" in there, but we understand what they mean. We knew we had to focus our efforts on certain scenes to make those sections of the movie have the punch the filmmakers wanted. We would have loved to flesh out the movie throughout as much as we did in those key sections, but we had to pick out battles.) Kat certainly deserves the credit they give her for the "very effective" sound design on the final showdown and, in fact, throughout the film: she brought the dragons to life, and her Foley and background work filled out the reality. I'm very pleased to see what they said about my dialog work and the final mix. While we were doing the initial premixing in one of the "many sewer sequences" referenced in this review, I had the wonderful sensation of everyone behind me in the mix room leaning in closer as the suspense built and the mix surrounded them in the world of the sewer. We also agree with everything nice they said about the music, which it should be noted came from the combined forces of composer Mark Oates and music supervisor Michael Davenport.

Best Sound Oscar 2010

We watched Inception in the studio the other night--the movie which won both sound Oscars this year. (While our video friends laugh at us for the picture quality, we like the sound. We're working on the picture quality, too. Stay tuned.)

It wasn't as clear a standout to me as a Best Sound Oscar as The Hurt Locker, but it sounded very, very good. The sound design was very good--interesting without being distracting--and that's what usually wins the Best Sound Editing Oscar. What really stood out as exceptional to my ears, though, was the final mix. It was really clean and clear and easy to understand; it was dynamic without loosing the quiet moments or blowing us out of our seats on the loud parts.

when it rains, it pours... and when it pours, we get wet.

Wow, what a week this has been... and it may be almost over, but it's not really close to over. We've been working most of the week--days and nights--one two feature-length documentaries, both with the same deadline, Friday, March 11.

The two projects really couldn't be much more different. We started last week working with the lovely and talented Scott Cervine on his latest, People v. The State of Illusion. This project is put together by, and features, some of the same people from What The #$*! Do We (K)now!? This one is a very provocative look at how emotions control how we perceive the world, and how our perceptions affect our state of mind. It's very inspirational and uplifting to work on, even when it's the middle of the night and our ears are starting to get weary from too much work.

The other project is called The Proving Grounds directed by Ld Dyksterhouse and it's about a Mixed Martial Arts training gym here in Albuquerque run by the inimitable Greg Jackson. We've actually had the distinct pleasure of recording Greg Jackson for an entirely different project, but that's another story. While on the surface, this is a very different kind of project, it is also very rewarding to work on, which is good because we've been putting a lot of hours into it, and it has some surprising similarities with People v. The State of Illusion. I'm not sure I've had enough sleep to articulate those similarities... perhaps you'll watch both of them and tell me what you thought.

Good Sound Sells / Bad Sound Sucks

We were at the NMPA Just Finish It! event today and had a great conversation at the post party with Post-Production Supervisor Michael Donnelley and his partner, Laura. (Sorry, Laura, I either didn't get or forgot your last name, but we both really enjoyed talking to you this evening!) You'll read more about that conversation later, but Michael said many things in his presentation during the event which I would love to see tattooed on the foreheads (in reverse lettering, so they can read it in the mirror) of aspiring producers. (OK, a tattoo is too extreme. I love producers and don't want to mark them for life. Maybe we should just paint it on their mirror.) Among these gems of wisdom:

• don't fall in love with the temps Temp sound effects, music, etc, are all put in the timeline by the picture department for very good reasons, but they shouldn't be confused with finished audio. You should be hiring a composer to improve upon the temp music, not to knock it off. (In fact, that's illegal, but it's also a poor use of a creative opportunity.) Likewise, your sound designer specializes in sound effects and should be able to improve on something which was pulled from the libraries in Soundtrack Pro. 
• good sound sells / bad sound sucks This is so very true, and I could write about it for hours. I'll try not to, though. The real world is a noisy and, frankly, annoying place, sonically speaking. Right now I'm listening to a leaky toilet valve down the hall, the rather loud fan noise of this particular computer, a rather unpleasant-sounding keyboard (it feels fine, but sounds kinda, I don't know, chicklety), and I'm sure the refrigerator will cycle on soon enough. Our brains do a fantastic job of ignoring the sounds we don't want to hear and focusing in on what is important to us in that moment. If you simply put a microphone in a room and play it back in a movie theater, our brains don't have the same auditory cues to go on and it ends up sounding like mud because we can't filter out what we don't want to hear enough to focus on the important stuff. If you deliver your post audio team really crappy production audio, they'll have to spend all their energy and time (and your budget) just to make the dialog understandable without the background noise distracting the audience. If you endeavor to get quality audio on set, your post audio team can focus on making your movie sound great instead of just making it sound tolerable. And here's the bottom line from Michael's presentation: distributors fancy themselves audiophiles and are going to be snobs about mediocre audio long before they'll even comment on your color grading, cinematography, or even acting and writing. If they don't like your audio, it either lowers your chances of them buying, lowers the purchase price they'll offer, or adds a big (and expensive) pile of stipulations to the sale. 
• plan for audio post early You shouldn't be surprised when you finish the edit and realize you know have to shop for a mix. You should know during pre-production roughly how much of your budget you'll need to get allof post production done, including audio post. If you're running over budget in production, you need to consider how you're going to make up for that or the last step of your project will suffer, and audio post is often the last bill you'll pay. The same goes for budgeting time. If production runs long or picture doesn't get locked as quickly as you'd planned, audio post could get squeezed and again you'll pay--either with more money or less quality. (See good sound sells / bad sound sucks above.) Production overruns and delays will happen more often than not, so plan accordingly such that the sound on your picture won't suffer.
• Michael didn't say this in his presentation, but agreed with me afterwards, and many other people hinted at it during the conference: lip sync of production sound is the picture department's responsibility, not the audio post department Ensuring lock sync is easiest done in dailies. Then the picture editor should maintain that sync throughout editorial. The guide track delivered with locked picture should be the bible for sync throughout audio post. Once you start chasing it away from that guide track, you can keep chasing it forever and never feel as though you've found it. We have the skills to reestablish sync on production dialog, but we could be spending more time making your movie sound great if we didn't have to worry about chasing sync.

In short, we really live to make every project we work on sound better. The more time we have, the better we can make it sound. 

the best sounding movie of 2009

We were among the many who didn't see The Hurt Locker until after the Academy Awards. We got it on DVD and started watching it. About 30 seconds in to the movie, Kathleen turned to me and asked "this won Best Sound, right?" To both our ears, the movie made a very good impression right from the first shot. It was that good.

We both delight in telling people "if we did our jobs well, you didn't notice it," so saying a movie caught our ears as having great sound may be an oxymoron, but I don't think so in this case. For one thing, I don't know if it did stand out to everyone the same way it did to us. (If anything stood out to you, please do comment and let me know what you noticed and whether you liked it.) For another, what stood out to me was the lack of distractions. Most movies, even very good sounding movies, have some sound which distracts from the action. The truth is, reality is full of sounds which distract from the action of the moment, so--enigmatically enough--some of these distractions are more real than none. Somehow, Paul N.J. Ottosson and his crew managed to keep the reality of the movie intact with a surprising lack of these distractions.

Every sound in that movie seemed to be perfectly crafted to fit the moment--sometimes spot-on naturalism (which isn't as easy as you might think) and sometimes surrealistic sound design to underline the heightened reality the characters were experiencing. It was a great dialog mix. What makes a great dialog mix could be the subject of it's own post--and already is the topic of several books and endless discussions--but the short story is the important words can be heard and they sound as though they were spoken in a space which matches what's visible on screen. But I digress, the bottom line is the dialog mix is the foundation to the rest of the mix--if the dialog is weak, there's less a mixer can do with the rest of the sounds.

What really impressed me most throughout the movie was the perfect balance in the mix. The hard effects and Foley always seemed to fit the action perfectly. Score and sound design meshed together seamlessly. Nothing ever seemed to compete with the dialog, and yet everything could be heard. What impressed me most was how the mix was both sparse and lush. Advertising art directors call it white space, and I have a habit of using the same term. Call it what you will, the upshot is every sound had it's own space in the mix and didn't have to compete to be heard. When Sergeant James was cutting the key wire to diffuse a bomb, there were other sounds playing but nothing competed with that crisp report of the wire cutters. When a bomb did blow up, the music stayed out of the way and let the violence of the explosion play out.

It's worth noting there are two Oscars for sound, and The Hurt Locker won them both.

1. Best Achievement in Sound Editing goes to the Supervising Sound Editor. Innovative selection and crafting of sound effects is what tends to win this award. In this case, I would point to the sparsity of the sounds as well as the use of naturalism and surrealism to complement the action. I also point to the dialog mix--it's very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve such a smooth dialog mix unless the dialog has been very carefully and proficiently edited.
2. Best Achievement in Sound goes to the Re-recording Mixer and the Production Mixer. The dialog mix couldn't be this good without very good dialog recording. I'm a Re-recording Mixer, though, so I have a tendency to point to the perfect balance of different elements in the mix.

Paul N.J. Ottosson was both Supervising Sound Editor and Re-recording Mixer, so he won both awards, sharing the Best Sound award with Production Mixer Ray Beckett. Of course, the whole sound crew, whether credited or not, deserve kudos for their hard work. This certainly includes the composers and music department. Furthermore, the picture department deserves a lot of credit--and received an Oscar of their own for Best Achievement in Editing--and, of course, Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal and all of the producers deserve credit and were also well rewarded by the Academy. I'm not saying this to kiss up or to imitate an acceptance speech cliché, but it was clear in watching this movie that the movie couldn't have sounded as good as it did without the good choices made before the post sound department even got the edited film.

Hear Kitty Studios Steps in to the 21 Century

Or is it the late 20th Century? In any event, here I am, writing a blog for our audio post business, Hear Kitty Studios.

We recently completed work on Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer and, as such, I have some extra time on my hands but am still flooded with professional energy. It seems a good time to start getting more involved in the internet as it pertains to our work.

Being remotely located (i.e. away from a major film post-production hub), we use the internet more than we did when we were located in Hollywood--whether it's streaming audio in real time to a producer for approval or sending files back and forth. It was a few years before leaving when I noticed all of my work was basically being done by moving data over a network--it wasn't much of a leap to realize that network could be expanded. There is more work in it this way, especially when it comes to getting a full feature to us or working in real time with remotely located producers, but it can be done and we've proven that in the time we've been in New Mexico. But I digress... the point is, it's about time we started using more of the internet than streaming media and file transfers. Thus the (new) Hear Kitty Studios Twitter account (@HearKittyStudio) and the (soon to come) Hear Kitty Studios Facebook "fan" page. At some stage, I'll get around to wrapping all these things in to our web site.

It's worth noting, I owe some of this inspiration to Andy Snavley and bendymusic.com. I first met Andy about 10 years ago, and Kat & I have worked with him on various projects since, oh, I don't know, since awhile ago. This partnership, Bendy Kitty if you will, has enabled all of us to expand our reach beyond geography in a way none of us can do individually. Furthermore, Andy is way ahead of me when it comes to web things, from smart phones to work flows.

So here we are. Welcome to the web, eh?