Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  Murch fully recognizes what’s just happened, and its implications for film editing: “Harvey signed off on the film looking at it on Final Cut Pro. One of those milestones that will go unremarked but is actually a tremendous achievement. That the image and sound presentation was more than adequate for the head of a studio to make such a fateful decision on such an expensive film.”

  Indeed, this same week, as if to comment on what’s just occurred, Avid Technologies releases Avid Free DV, a stripped-down version of its Avid Express DV software for digital editing. The Boston Globe, Avid’s hometown paper, reports: “Steve Jobs may have something to do with [the decision.] Today’s professionals pick Avid products first. But the up-and-coming youngsters who’ll be the video artists of tomorrow are buying Macintoshes and getting their first taste of video editing from an Apple product. When they’re ready to upgrade, they may think Apple instead of Avid. And Apple is ready for them with Final Cut Pro, a $995 video editing product that’s so good that film editor Walter Murch is using it to cut the upcoming feature film Cold Mountain.”

  Friday, October 17, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  2 am. Locked the film: Congratulations!! It seemed (as it always seems) anticlimactic, a kind of wobbling to a stop. But there it is. We will check screen it tomorrow morning and then release the reels to the various departments. Walking past the Chinese restaurant on England’s Lane—two waiters in there having a happy loud conversation at one of the tables—2:30 am. Got a hamper of Fortnum & Mason: foodie goodies from Harvey. “Thank you so very much for all your time and endless patience. All the very best, Harvey.”

  * * *

  Date: October 21, 2003

  Subject: Lock

  From: Ramy Katrib

  To: Walter Murch

  Dear Walter,

  This is just the best. Cold Mountain locked. I think it’s been around 19 months since the call from Sean. Congratulations to you for making history again, gracefully, naturally. Hats off to Anthony, to Sean, for taming the technology, and all your team.

  The ‘sleepless fear’ throughout was that the technology would get in the way of your editing. Cheers to that damn Final Cut Pro system, withstanding your fury, refined cutting, blinking all those months.

  We cannot express enough our awe for your decision to engage something new, for all your reports and encouragement, for conquering.

  Best regards,

  Ramy

  * * *

  Chapter 11. Bullets Explosions Music People

  Murch mixes sound at De Lane Lea wearing his lucky sweater. “Aggie’s mother knitted it for her in 1964. A few years later I stole it. It’s got a few scars on it.”

  Monday, October 18, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Amazing to remember in retrospect that Francis was not in the room during the mix of Conversation or Apocalypse. I played the mixes for him and he had comments, which we incorporated. Not around during the premixes of Godfather, but he was for the final.

  The relationship between a film director and the sound mixer is just as intimate and complex as the one between director and film editor. After all, the mixer realizes the director’s imagination of how a movie will sound. At its simplest, sound mixing means plaiting three disparate elements—music, dialogue, and sound effects—into one harmonious whole. But to achieve that requires tens of thousands, maybe millions of decisions; no one keeps track, least of all mixers, who might blanch if they ever knew. For every sound there are choices about volume, equalization (EQ, or bass/treble), reverberation, synchronization to picture, placement within the speaker array (left, center, right, left-surround, right-surround, boom), the tonal quality of music, transitions between scenes, and more. These are subjective determinations, most of which can only be decided on a trial-and-error basis. There are no predetermined rules or formulas defining what sounds good for a particular film at a particular moment. The mixer brings together elements prepared by the sound editors and, like an orchestra leader who relies on top-notch players, succeeds only by virtue of having the best, properly prepared sound elements to work with.

  Unlike filming, where the director approves the composition and angle of every shot before it’s taken, much of post-production sound work happens outside the director’s purview. The director may not be involved in choosing sound effects or even premixing the dialogue. Depending on the director’s personality and interests, he or she will normally participate in more essential aspects of sound preparation, such as recording ADR (automated dialogue replacement) and music taping, but even that isn’t a given.

  Murch made eight passes in the sound mix before being satisfied with Inman’s cough.

  For the most part, a film director is involved at arm’s length in sound mixing: watching and listening until the mixer is satisfied with the work, and then giving an okay or not. It’s a tedious business, and some directors don’t or can’t participate at such a minute level for the six to eight weeks it normally takes to do a mix from start to finish. In the scene where Inman gets shot, for example, Murch makes eight passes before he is satisfied with the equalization of Inman’s cough—the proper bass/treble, the right density of sound, reverberation, and pitch. He makes 16 refinements until he is happy with the separation he creates between the sound of Ada’s piano and the raindrops splattering on her window during the scene in which she sees her father die.

  The mixer has to pay close attention to details, be a savvy audio engineer, operate a complex set of constantly evolving, cutting-edge controls, and work in a give-and-take style with numerous personalities—studio heads, producers, director, editor, other mixers, sound editors, and technical support. Using a professional film mixing theater can run $500 an hour or more, and that’s often without counting the cost of the mixers’ labor. Time and financial pressures make the sound mix a pressure cooker. A professional film sound mixer works under high stress all the time, so it’s no wonder many of them have a reputation for being prickly and forbidding.

  The final sound mix occurs at the end of post production, sometimes only a few weeks before the film is released in theaters. By this time, the director isn’t always available to sit in at the mix. Anthony Minghella will be gone from the Cold Mountain mix for days at a time to attend to matters such as last-minute dialogue recording with actors in New York, or major press events, such as an interview with Jude Law and Nicole Kidman on the Barbara Walters show.

  Even when he is in London, Minghella must go off to meet with producers, write new dialogue for ADR, check film prints from the lab, and so forth. The soundtrack will not be final, however, until he approves it.

  Wearing both hats, as picture editor and sound mixer, enables Murch to keep his and Minghella’s confederated vision for the film intact. In the more typical filmmaking structure, where editing and mixing are handled by two different people, the editor’s extra pair of eyes and ears adds another layer of complexity to an already complicated creative process. The film editor is often marginalized during the sound mix in order to maintain a workable chain of command. One sound facility manager describes “a wall” between mixer and film editor during the typical feature film sound mix.

  Sunday, October 19, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Heading to work at 7.20 pm. Already dark. Prep things for the temp mix on Tuesday.

  Before starting the final mix on Cold Mountain, Murch must first complete one last temporary mix of the soundtrack so the film can be previewed at advance press screenings. Reviewers for monthly magazines and other publications with long lead times need to see the film right away to make their deadlines. It’s like another dress rehearsal for Murch and the sound team—working with newly revised scenes, new ADR, and finessing their audio work one more time before the real thing. Each new mix version begins where the last one left off. The continuous temp-mixing that began back in June only improves the end result. The movie soundtrack, like sedimentary geological formations, accretes enhancements as it evolves over time.

  Because
he has to squeeze in a temp mix before the final mix can start, Murch turns to Final Cut Pro for a technological innovation. The sound editors are busy prepping material for the final mix, which begins on Thursday, October 23. Murch decides to do most of the preparation for the temp mix himself at the Old Chapel, in FCP. “The tracks from the previous temp mix had been imported into FCP,” Murch recalls. “I recut them to match the new version, and we used my recut FCP tracks to do the last temp mix at De Lane Lea.” Murch says it saved time, allowed the sound editors to do their work without being bothered, and the result sounded great. The only compromise was using 16-bit digital sound (CD quality), the highest quality Final Cut Pro 3.0 could handle, rather than 24-bit. “I can’t really tell the difference,” Murch admits. “It’s miraculous really that we are able to do this—run FCP tracks straight into the board and get a Dolby 4-2-4, encoded/matrixed mix out of it.” He had pushed Final Cut Pro past another milestone, one neither Murch, DigitalFilm Tree, nor the Apple project team could ever have anticipated.

  Thursday, October 23, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Today is first day of final mix. Good luck to all of us. May it go well. God willing.

  Just as every scene in a movie must have a purpose if it belongs in the narrative, so the soundscape for a scene must be designed with specific intent. For example, Murch recalls wanting to use the sound of a field of crickets in one of the beginning scenes in Apocalypse Now when Willard is alone in his hotel room at night. “For story reasons,” Murch says, “we wanted the crickets to have a hallucinatory degree of precision and focus.” That led him to bring live crickets into Zoetrope’s basement studio to record them individually, over and over, creating a sound-effects layer with thousands of overlapping chirps. Effective sound design rests on concrete ideas like that. And mixing together such effects, along with music and dialogue, requires the mixer to have the equivalent of a script—a blueprint of sound that instructs his choices.

  Walter Murch mixing sound on Apocalypse Now (1979).

  Walter Murch has a map to comprehend the universe of sound, and he uses terms of light for its legend. White noise consists of every possible element of sound, just as the color white contains every color of light. Put white noise through an “audio prism” for decoding, and Murch finds the full spectrum for the language of sound. Speech, which he calls “encoded” sound, is at one end of the rainbow—violet. Language is considered to be encoded in the sense that the listener must decode it using linguistic tools to associate meaning. At the other extreme, where red exists in the light spectrum, Murch places music. He calls it “embodied sound,” in the sense that it requires no code for understanding; it can be experienced directly without analysis. In between speech and music are sound effects—half language, half music. They refer to something specific, like crickets chirping or a battle explosion, that requires some thought. Neither completely uncoded like music nor coded like speech, they are yellow, midway in the rainbow of sound colors.

  If sound is like color, how might audio composition compare to painting? Murch wrote about this in a 1998 article, “Dense Clarity—Clear Density”: “A well-balanced painting will have an interesting and proportioned spread of colors from complementary parts of the spectrum, so the soundtrack of a film will appear balanced and interesting if it is made up of a well-proportioned spread of elements from our spectrum of ‘sound-colors.’”

  Like a memorable painting, be it abstract or realistic, a good soundtrack doesn’t overreach. Trying to do too much with too many colors can produce an undesirable level of complexity that pleases no one. This is what Murch calls the “logjam.” Avoiding excess means, among other strategies, “choosing for every moment which sounds should predominate when they can’t all be included; deciding which sounds should play second fiddle,” he writes. The axiom to help make these choices is Murch’s “Law of Two-and-a-Half.”

  The mind seems capable of keeping track of one person’s footsteps in a movie, for example, or even two, but not three or more. Murch had this realization early on, in 1969 when working on George Lucas’s low-budget sci-fi film, THX-1138. In the middle of the night at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Murch recorded sound effects for the movie’s policemen/robots—recording himself clomping through the halls in special metal shoes he built. Later in the edit room, on syncing up the sounds to the images he realized that with two robots, their footsteps had to be in sync with the picture to be believable; but with three robots, none of the footsteps had to sync up exactly. “Our minds give up,” Murch writes. “There are too many steps happening too quickly—the group of footsteps is evaluated as a single entity.”

  A soundtrack shouldn’t contain more than two major elements and a minor third—not unlike a musical chord. Or, to put it another way, the soundtrack should simultaneously give the audience a view of both the forest and the trees: “Clarity, which comes through a feeling for the individual elements (the notes), and Density, which comes through a feeling for the whole (the chord). I found this balance point to occur most often when there were not quite three layers of something—my ‘Law of Two-and-a-Half.’”

  The physical properties of sound make such layering possible, what Murch calls “harmonic superimposure.” Like musical tones, sounds can be added together while each element retains its identity. The notes C, E, and G create something new, a C-major chord, but you can also hear each of the original notes. If movie sound effects have a relationship with each other (the crickets of Apocalypse Now) they can be multiplied and work in harmony. Pile up too many unrelated sounds on each other (dialogue, music score, auto traffic, a car radio, horns honking, ambulance siren, jet planes, etc.), and there is too much information—white noise. The sound mixer begins with many more sound elements than he can possibly feature at any one time. Like the cinematographer who shows different options of camera angles to a film director, the sound mixer gets a plethora of elements from the sound department, each of which he arranges by priority, or eliminates, depending on his sense of the scene and its relationship to scenes before and after.

  Walter Murch still walks to work, but now it’s two miles in the other direction from Hampstead: south to Soho and De Lane Lea. He joins dozens of other pedestrian commuters through Regent’s Park to London’s central business district. Entering the park from Primrose Hill, it’s a quiet, pleasant route along the Broad Walk adjacent to the London Zoo. These mornings Walter is serenaded by whistles, wails, warbles, and screeches from the nearby monkeys and exotic birds. The animals drive his dog Hana wild as she goes off leash chasing down scents and squirrels. He passes Daguerre’s 1828 Diorama building, which Walter calls “a sort of early 19th Century IMAX experience.” On leaving Regent’s Park at Marylebone Road, he is swept into the clamor of a 21st Century London rush hour: buses, motor scooters, taxis, honking horns, sirens, hundreds of commuters’ conversations—urban white noise, but still “a sort of morning calisthenics for the ears,” he says, “and better than listening to the car radio.”

  Sean Cullen, Hana, Walter, and Dei Reynolds meet in Walter’s edit room.

  Studio A at De Lane Lea is taking on a decidedly lived-in look. The Cold Mountain sound team has been premixing or temp-mixing the soundtrack here on and off for over four months. For two days now a pink bakery box with several chocolate croissants has been on the long table behind the mix console. Bottles of water and days-old newspapers lie around, along with empty coffee mugs, a bowl of fruit, many laptops (all PowerBooks), magazines, piled-up dishes, and assistant Tim Bricknell’s mobile office: a banker’s box full of files. Half a dozen green and blue Ethernet cables snake around the floor for high-speed Internet hookups. If not for the movie screen or the movie sounds, this could be the aftermath of a hacker group’s all-nighter.

  The London Diorama.

  * * *

  The Diorama in London

  This was a specially constructed theater showing naturalistic illusions to the public. The first one was built in Paris in 182
4 by distinguished painter Charles Bouton in partnership with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, an expert in lighting and scenic effects—and later the inventor of the Daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process. Two huge pictures, 70 x 45 feet in size, were painted on translucent material. Using elaborate lighting designs and accompanied by live music to enhance the mood, the pictures took on a three-dimensional look. The amphitheatre, which held up to 360 people, swung back and forth between the two views.

  * * *

  A day at the final mix begins unceremoniously. The sound editors and co-mixers are at work when Walter walks in; it’s like coming into a party already in progress—a very loud party. Martin Cantwell, the effects editor, sits at his ProTools station on the right-hand side of the console working on a section from the Battle of Petersburg. The crew greets Walter with cheerful good mornings between short bursts of high-decibel Civil War combat.

  Before Murch takes his place at the console, he catches up on who’s doing what, and where. With the finishing work moving so fast, it’s critical for him to know all these details so he can plan for the tasks that lie ahead. Sound supervisor Eddy Joseph tells him that Mark Levinson just dropped off new ADR from the previous night’s loop group recording session with off-camera actors’ voices for the battle scene. As Joseph explains this new dialogue, sound editor Colin Ritchie puts it into the soundtrack on his ProTools work-station. Gruff male voices fill the theater: “Come on! Let’s get ’em, boys!” “Them Yankees gonna die in their own holes.” “We’ve got ’em now, boys!” “Shoot ’em!”