Working with director Dawn Shadforth is always a pleasure and it was great fun having her, Michelle, Kellie and other members of the team (and their families!) into the studio to work together on creating a vibrant but realistic (and awkwardly British) soundscape for the film. Everyone put their all into it and relished the opportunities to make fools of themselves in the booth, ADR stage or even out in the street, helping me to get the content we needed to build up an atmos for the film and to help guide the story.
Film Synopsis:
Jess is super excited to attend her step-sister’s wedding and truly become part of the family, but after only recently finding out about her existence, her stepfamily are less than delighted about her presence on the big day.
When we were asked by the guys at Team One USA to get involved in their energetic and cinematic vision for a Lexus ad that would feature not just one, but five of their high-performance range cars, I knew this would be an exciting opportunity to do something really interesting with the sound. Each of the cars has it’s own unique voice – there was no way that building it out of library sounds was going to suffice, I had to record these cars for real.
Pre-production
I started by studying director Markus Walter’s treatment to get an idea of perspectives and camera angles so I could prepare for what I would need to capture in order to build a dynamic, exciting and convincing soundtrack. Drones, Russian Arms, on-board, internal, bumper and wheel-arch mounted cameras to film every imaginable angle was the observation…
To help deal with the daunting prospect of recording so many cars from so many perspectives in such a short shoot, in which practically all the cars were to be filmed at all times under a super tight shooting schedule – effectively making them all but unavailable for microphone rigging (at least to any kind of visible rigging) – I enlisted the help of car recording expert and all-round location sound recording guru, Kiff McManus, with a CV of high-profile work too extensive to list, but most relevantly known for his work on Top Gear and The Grand Tour. Excited by the challenge, Kiff agreed to escape wintery London and join me for the two-day shoot on the remote and picturesque Ascari racetrack just outside of Ronda, Spain.
Production
Upon arrival in Ronda, we headed to the racetrack for a recce. It was here that we realised the scale of the challenge ahead. The size of the track, the quirks of the body design on each car that would affect our ability to rig mics to the exhausts, engines, wheel arches, interior etc. and an extremely stringent production schedule, meant that we were going to have to be so much more opportunistic, crafty and intensely focused than we first imagined if we were going to capture what we needed.
After a night of preparation, we arrived on set for day one. The first job was to mic up the Russian Arm car, so that we could record it's perspective as it films the cars approaching, jockeying and tearing past. Like everything to follow, this had to be done in a super tight window of just minutes (before the crew could even notice it’s happened) and as securely as possible so we could happily leave it running all day, only checking in periodically to change batteries on the recorder.
The rest of the day we spent skipping around the film crew, Lexus mechanics and drivers; who themselves were racing against the limited winter daylight hours amongst other pressures. Loitering on our toes on the fringe of the rigging process, we had to jump unnoticed into any gap left by a crew member, taking the chance to tape on our own leads and microphones as quickly and discreetly as possible before the cars were ripped away from us to be filmed tearing around the track. We capitalised on pit-stop camera rig changes, crew lunch breaks and strategically seized gaps in a given car’s shooting schedule to discreetly rig up a car ahead of it’s next circuit, or talk a kindly driver (after some sweet-talking to the 1st AD) into shortening his break to take us on a secret lap around a section of track not being shot at the time.
In addition to this we needed to capture distant perspectives for the drone shots. The aim was to capture an array of field recordings by experimenting with different distances and varying Mid-Side, ORTF and Spaced Omni set-ups for a rich stereo ambience. In practice, this involved lots of running around the vast perimeter of the track, lugging heavy equipment and multiple
microphones, trying to find the best location and setting up before the cars themselves get there. And plenty of diving into thorny bushes to avoid being seen by a drone camera passing overhead.
Post Production
We finished the two day shoot exhausted, battered and sunburnt (in my case, at least), but upon getting back to String and Tins HQ and getting to play around with the vast amount of varied, texturally interesting and generally badass recordings of these amazing cars I now had at my disposal, it had become super worthwhile!
Given the nature of the shots in the film – tracking shots following or leading the cars favoured over static and panning shots – it was little surprise that the on-board recordings were the most valuable. Short of using some form of 'rolling road' dyno (rare, and something which in itself presents sound recording challenges), It is not possible to record the kind of constant, sustained driving sound required for these shots from a static position without somehow carrying the recording equipment alongside the cars at the same speed, or mounting them on-board the vehicle.
Having a multi-track, on-board recording of a car as it drives a lap of the track enables us to simulate reality by mixing between the perspectives in post to follow camera movements around the body of a car or match shots from different angles, bringing the appropriate channel forward in the mix that best represents the perspective one would expect to hear in the real word.
Sadly, the perspective we had been most excited about exploring – the Russian Arm mounted mics – turned out to be the most disappointing as the noise of wind, car and road proved often too overbearing. In all but some key moments, this rendered the recordings unusable. I would, however, persevere with this approach next time as it does offer potential for a sustained recording that has a certain real and raw energy with a full-bodied sound given by that little bit of extra distance, as compared to the on-board microphones that are best for focusing on one particular (LOUD) element of the mechanics.
Overall, these recordings gave us a great amount of flexibility in post, and enabled us to match the perspectives and movements of the cars in a way we never would be able to with recordings from an SFX library. At the same time, using genuine recordings of the cars themselves, for that crucial sense of authenticity.
Andy Stewart, String and Tins
Agency: Team One LA Location Sound Record: Kiff McManus, Andy Stewart @ String and Tins Sound Design: Andy Stewart, Will Cohen @ String and Tins Producer: Sascha Peuckert Director: Markus Walter Production Company: Reset
Working with Partizan director Tom Beard to create an intense and uncomfortable soundscape for his beautifully moody and provocative short film; RAGS, was an extremely rewarding challenge.
Set somewhere in the mid-late 1990s;
Rags is a story of abuse and adulteration, told through the fleeting repressed memories of a teenage mother. Skipping backwards and forwards through time, we unravel the dark revelations of grooming and sexual abuse in her past at the hands of the very person who was meant to protect her.
Our primary objective was to build an oppressive and claustrophobic sonic environment that makes the viewer as uncomfortable as possible, but one that’s also a restrained, understated component of the story. This, to me, was an exciting opportunity to create a dynamic soundtrack, playing with severe loud/soft contrast between scenes and to experiment with a very powerful sound tool I’ve been keen to explore for a while; silence.
“…[that] moment in the film – in a crowded cinema…was extremely uncomfortable when he’s so distressed…suddenly, it’s so quiet in the cinema that you can literally hear everything, and you don’t have the protection of the sound blanket of mush…there’s nowhere to go. It’s like that moment when suddenly you’re talking animatedly and then everybody stops talking and you realise your voice is a bit loud”
[Figgis, M. 2003 Silence: The Absence of Sound. In: Sider et. al (eds.) Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures. London: Wallflower Press, 2003: pp.2]
This is exactly what I wanted to achieve with the sound design for RAGS, and I was pleased to have experienced a similar level of discomfort when watching the premier screening of our film at The Prince Charles Cinema. The juxtaposition between the oppressively tense loud scenes with the near silence or, in some cases, total silence of the next scene was pretty unsettling.
In some instances – keen not to over-use the silent treatment - we opted for oppressive tones and agonisingly intense ‘tinnitus’ whines. These served to link together memory sequences across the film and bring some surrealism to the otherwise gritty, real-world sound bed.
These tones were treated in a number of ways, from the simple use of pitched raw sine waves to create discordant, oppressive tinnitus sounds, to the morphing of a telephone (amongst other things) with high pitched drones using the aptly named Zynaptiq plug-in; Morph. With this, I could take an ordinary real world sound from the diegesis, blur it into something sustained, unidentifiable (yet familiar in tone) using Michael Norris’ SpectralDronemaker amongst other spectral plugins in his range (kettles boiling, clocks ticking, babies crying were all given the Michael Norris spectral treatment) and morph it into something else to produce an eerie tone that grows out of the real-word sound bed from whence it came.
Here’s a soundbite of a spectrally blurred baby cry:
And here are some screenshots of various Morph and spectral drone-making set-ups from my Pro Tools session for RAGS:
And if all the intensity gets a bit much, at least we can enjoy the odd moment of catchy, positive joyfulness from 90s heroes Ace of Base. Excellent.
RAGS is currently doing the festival circuit – I will post a link to the film as soon as it is available online.
Watch this space!
Thank you to Tom Beard, Jason Oakley, Emma Stone & all at Partizan for getting me involved on such a great project and to String and Tins for the linkup, support and facilitation!
I recently had the pleasure of working on a promotional film for a typically ambitious and exciting project by digital arts collective Is This Good?, for O2 Recycle. The BBC have deemed this a newsworthy project and you can see director Chris Cairns chatting to them about it’s development here!
Their objective was to create a flutter of motorised butterflies using scrapped mobile phone parts that respond interactively to a phone call. Call one of the butterflies from your mobile and it comes to life; flapping it’s smartphone wings and flashing it’s LED eyes and er… lasers.
My mission was to delve into a world of bleeps & bloops, servos and synthetic laser sounds to help bring character to the butterflies and to create a digital, “Sci-Fi jungle atmosphere” for them to call home. Exploiting my synthesizers and raiding my sound effects libraries, I set about creating a jungle sonic bed purely made of electronic sounds.
