Along with his sound career David was also the editor of the Movie Sound Newsletter.  It was a chronicle of audio for film from the trenches of Hollywood.  The Newsletter is long since out of print but David is bringing it back to life on the web.  You can find online versions of the original Newsletter here.  There were numerous notable contributors to the Newsletter including David’s brother, Richard Stone, a composer and multiple Emmy award winner who, among many other projects, composed the scores for Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.

An accomplished visual artist as well as a consummate audio professional, David is truly a man of many gifts.  Probably most key of all is his curiosity, sense of humor and temperament.  David hosted me for a weekend series of workshops at SCAD in the Spring of 2011 and I found him to be an extremely personable, approachable and popular guy.  In an industry filled with nervous and insecure individuals, David is a shining light.  He kindly found time between classes to chat with me about his past, present and future plans.

WOODY: So how did you get into sound originally?

David Stone (L) and Tom McCarthy(R) accepting the Academy Award for Dracula

DAVE: Probably just like you and a million other guys, I know Walter Murch talks about having this experience, I was a kid who knew how to play with tape recorders.  We were lucky enough to have one as a kid.  I would never say that audio technology and recording is a passion of mine, it is not.  It just seemed to be another tool for storytelling.  So I played with tape recorders and my friends and I made little radio plays when we could.  When kids were doing a presentation at school I would offer to prepare a tape to play back with music and sound effects or whatever was needed.  In junior high I fell in with the 8 millimeter filmmakers.  I was always interested in animation and special visual effects.  I thought I’d have a career, if I was lucky.  I got my art degree, and was hoping to get into animation and visual effects.

WOODY:  So your degree was visual arts?

DAVE:  Fine arts, painting sculpture with a major in print making and a minor in art history.

WOODY:  Visual art informed your sound craft?

DAVE:  I feel like I transliterate ideas from print making, which is really all about layering areas of color in composition.  I transliterate that thinking into audio.  I think intuitively about layering sound in my sound effects. Everything having to do with the architecture of layered sound, my print making background comes into play.  Even though it’s slightly different language, the principles are the same.  In college I worked part time in a print shop preparing graphics for printing presses.  Commercial art which I had not learned in school.  The principles of commercial art also apply to sound effects editing.

WOODY:  Did you continue to pursue the visual arts as you were working in sound or did that transform more into sound exclusively?

DAVE:  My official transformation from animation to sound editor was a very specific incident.  I was working at Hanna Barbera.  This was in 1976 or 1977.  I was working as an “in-betweener.” An in-betweener is the bottom rung of the animation ladder. I was drawing the less important in-between drawings that the assistant animators provided.  I was in the bottom there with hundreds of others who were drawing on those horrid Saturday morning cartoons.  Because I had interest in tape recorders and helped making backyard films with buddies I took breaks with the sound editors down the hall.  We had a lot of rapport and I was interested in their sound effects and was interested in what they did.  I also had a deep understanding of the esthetics of sound effects in the Warner Bros cartoons that Treg Brown edited.  So we used to talk about that stuff a lot and in not too much time the guy who was in charge of that department asked me if I wanted to apprentice there instead of in animation.  I moved over there and very quickly had to learn sound editing skills.  Like rewinding three thousand foot of mag, working with Moviolas and all the editing bench skills.  I had to learn them fast.

WOODY:  This is at Hanna?

DAVE:  Yes, at Hanna.  In the basement on Cahuenga in the middle of the Cahuenga pass.

WOODY:  So the shows that you were working on back then were – Scooby Do and re-dos of The Flintstones and Popeye too right?

Hanna Barbera Studio

DAVE:  Yes.  The Popeye’s were a particular offense to real animation fans.  We knew they would be.  I infamously put out a gag memo.  If you saw it today you’d think it was something that would have come from the Onion.  I heard a rumor from suits upstairs that they were thinking about doing Popeye at Hanna. Any hardcore animation fan who appreciates the Max Fleisher and Dave Fleisher Popeye’s, with animators like Irv Spence would not be happy.  So it was offensive culturally and I wrote this joke memo – I stole some letterhead from Hanna Barbera, I still have a copy of it around somewhere, it basically explained how Hanna was going to do Popeye but they were going to make some changes.  To please the network they needed to change a few things – like Popeye and Bluto were not going to fight, they were just going to argue.  Olive Oil needed to be filled out because she was too skinny and they had to determine who were the parents of Sweet Pea.  A gag just intended to be an office memo.  A couple of months later we started doing the Popeyes and they were being animated in Australia in a place that Bill Hanna had invested in.  They were beautifully animated actually for television, we didn’t expect them to be well animated, but I was right about the stories and the ridiculous changes that came from the network TV interference.  Trying to make everything relevant and less violent.  Popeyes were probably the worst choice for updating.  In this case my satire turned out to be prophetic.

WOODY:  Isn’t that usually the case?

DAVE:  Absolutely!  I didn’t work on the Popeyes that often, I worked on Scooby Do’s Laff-A-Lympics, Captain Caveman, Dinky Dog – I can’t even remember all the stuff we did.  I generally asked for and was given the funnier cartoon animal shows as opposed to superhero cartoons.  My bosses knew that I would get bored and upset pretty quickly if I had to do stuff like Super Friends.  You know that stuff was pretty dreadful.  So I tried to stick to the Saturday morning cartoons that were at least inspired by classic theatrical shorts.  There was a better overall quality and I had more fun doing those.

WOODY:  Animation is different than live action since it has no sound and everyting must be created, and all animated programs have such distinct audio characteristics per show, were there specific sound libraries while you were at Hanna to pull from?  And also were there guidelines so that – this show used these effects but – this show used only those effects and so on?

DAVE:  Absolutely.  When a new show was established there were a small handful of sound effects that became signature for the show.  Partly because in limited animation for TV there are certain pieces of animation that get used over again, a certain run or zip off-screen and so forth.  One of the reasons that limited animation works for TV is the ability to engineer repeated craftsmanship.  Scooby walks on from right to left, that becomes a library of animated movement.  Likewise that affects a library of sound effects that you apply to each show.  When the show is new the editors have fun because they are establishing that all for the first time.  Incidentally the same thing happens with music, they couldn’t score those cartoons straight through so they would score, say, the first six episodes and the main titles.  Then everything was tracked from the music cues that were built for the first few shows.  Music editors would do the whole rest of the series based on the library of cues that came from those first shows.

Dave Stone cutting mag - notice the "asset management" on racks

We’d do the same thing in sound effects. Within the first few episodes you could guess what the bits were that the characters were going to do over and over again.  For instance, Captain Caveman launching himself into flying or whatever it was he did.   [Laughs]  So when you create sound effects in that milieu in terms of the workflow, what you are really doing is layering five six seven eight mono sound effects in a sequence that matches the animation right?   So since you didn’t do pre-dubs at Hanna Barbera cartoons back in the 70’s you would get a reprint of the effects track from the mix and keep that reprint as a loop that said “after Caveman Launch” or “Superman landing.”  You had a loop of those mono sound effects mixed together for any action that you knew was going to be used infinitum.   Once they were approved by the producer or show runner you knew you were safe to use them over and over again.  So you don’t create effects from scratch, you create these from those that are in the library.

WOODY:  What was the management of those assets back then?  Today we create a folder on a drive and drop them in!

DAVE:  I’m sure it was the same way at Filmation and at DePatie/Freling, all the other animation shops in town were set up this way.  There were individual cutting rooms, which an editor would occupy, if he was employed there frequently, he could make it kind of his own room.  In those rooms you had a film rack and some shelves you could keep your favorite mini library version of the overall library  in there while you were doing a show.  Every cutting room had shelves with rolls of mag on them that contained those sound effects.  For instance, one of the running footstep sound effects would be called “dull thuds in 12’s” Every cartoon character that ran in those days had “dull thuds” which was a sort of an innocuous footstep impact.  You used them for running not for walking.  They were printed in 12’s, 10’s, 8’s, 6’s and 4’s.  Meaning – that many frames for the repeat of the sound.  So a run cycle of 12 that an animator does, as soon as you sync up the first footstep no matter how much he runs, he’s running on that same rhythm.  So if you have a loop that says dull thuds in 12’s, you can have the assistant, and I was the assistant, go up to the transfer department and say I need a thousand feet of this.  So he puts up the loop, prints a thousand feet, that’s ten minutes, endlessly looped running footsteps in the rhythm of 12’s.  So one of the rolls that you keep on your rack is “dull thuds in 12’s.”  Then you see some new animation and you say, “oh I see, he’s running in 12’s” then you throw that in and sync up the first step.  That’s sound editing much in the spirit of sewing, not very creative but it pays the bills.

So the main library, outside of everyone’s cutting room, at Hanna anyway, was in the common hallway that all the cutting rooms shared.   In that hallway, in that space, were a line of film racks where hundreds and hundreds of these rolls sat.  I don’t know – maybe there were 2 or 3 hundred rolls of these sound effects that everyone used commonly.  If I needed some machine gun fire I could walk to the rack that had them and grab what’s left of that thousand foot roll and take them into my room, cut some machine gun and then put the roll back.  The apprentice would watch the size of those rolls and as they diminished to the point that the rolls would fall through the steel rods of the racks then he or she would know that it was time to print some more.  Then they would go back to the library, pull the loop out of the files, take the loop to the transfer room and order another thousand feet.

Now I’d like to tell you about some of the interesting folklore that has to do with cartoon sound effects.  It has to do with the workflow and it is the cause of how some of the effects are named.  Hanna Barbera eventually created commercial CDs of the library.  First of all there is corruption in the creation of the CDs.  Stuff was put together in units and rolls for the CDs was nothing like the way it was configured in real life.  There is some reconfiguration in the CDs that throws everything off.  The equivalent of this in the music world would be if there was a new “Best of John Coltrane” album  and you had a couple of pieces that were in the same order that they were on one of the well known records  and there were also several pieces that had no  connection to it or were recorded under different circumstances. Recorded with a different band of musicians or recorded at a very different part of his life’s work and his style had changed.  Then all of a sudden they were on the same album and you would go nuts!  This is what they’ve done to mess up the sound effects.

I’d also like to discuss the naming of the effects.  When the assistants got transfers made onto rolls from the original loops, the way that they would identify them was with a white paper or cloth tape on the outside of the mag roll and a sharpie to identify the name of the effect.  Sometimes when the prints were being made by transfer or the apprentice, or assistant they would misspell or miswrite the name of the sound effect.  Pretty logical, human error right?  So here is a good example of that – there was an effect called “ear’s splutz” it was a particular type of squishy comical sound.  Comedy sounds would have these funny onomatopoetic names.  My favorite one was “crab quacks.”

WOODY:  Crap wax?

DAVE:  [Laughs]  “Crab quacks.”  My sister was an English professor, she would visit me and she would see these names and she would go nuts because she loved the folklore of it.  The folklore was really interesting.  So anyway someone misspelled – “ear’s splutz.”  We know that there are splutzes and squiches and squniches and sqooshes and they all sound different, it takes the newcomer a lot of time to learn what those are because they are onomatopoetic names.

Hanna and Barbera at work

So how did it come to be named “ear’s splutz”?  In this particular instance my understanding is that “ear” should have been “Earl.” The L gets left out on one fine day and forever after they are copying it as “ear’s.”  Because someone was in a hurry and they left the L out of Earl.  And so now it is called “ear’s splutz” – forever! That’s how some of these things got named.  And many quite incorrectly but it’s become a sort of argot folklore.  And Earl by the way, I believe, was before my time at Hanna.  There were some legendary sound effects editors.  One of them was a guy who was in Spike Jones original comedy jazz band – and that was Earl.

WOODY:  So he designed that sound.

DAVE:  Yes.  And a lot of sound effects were… today we say designed… and that seems to imply an awful lot of deliberate creation.  Often in the old days, because you didn’t have the ability to tweak sounds as well, many of the sounds were “created” by sound editors simply doing what I described before – cutting five or six tracks for a moment in the animation and then those tracks were mixed together.  That mix down was then called a new sound effect.  An example of that would be a sound effect in that collection that is called “Dinky digs”.  That was something that I made, it was never intended for posterity.  I had a series of cartoons called Dinky Dog, and he was a giant dog and he was cute and when he dug a hole in the yard, which was usually big enough to swallow a car we had a fast cut digging and shoveling sound.  I made it by having a few tracks of digging sound effects that I had to cut very fast.  I had to shorten them and get the rhythm that was in the animation. When I saw that it was going to be a repeated action over several episodes  I made sure to keep a mix down of that.  I then made a loop out of it and called it “Dinky digs.”  Not being the least bit poetic about it.  So that ends up in the library and guys use it every time they need a fast cut digging sound.  It’s perfect for that particular type of animation.

I think sqinches and squashes often were often the result of accidents in the process of transferring from tape or from mag to mag.  When a mag recorder is speeding up or slowing down or the recorder is on and the playback is speeding up or down.  Before they get up to speed, you get these sometimes hilariously funny alterations of speed and pitch just at the beginning as it’s running up to to speed. So sometimes guys would have a funny kind of squash sound with like mud, comical mud sounds, percussive but mushy and if, at the end of one of the rolls, there happened to be one of these aberrations the change of speed and pitch it would make them incredibly funny.  So when these accidents happened a guy would keep these sound effects and put a funny name on them and they would proliferate in the library.

WOODY:  You and many of your colleagues have gone on to greater acclaim from those days at Hanna.  You were working with Mark Mangini at the time?

DAVE:  Mangini, who is ten years younger than me, starting working there the same time as me.  We started the same week. I was in sound editing starting out as an assistant and he had been hired directly into the track reading room.  [Laughs]  I guess we’ll have to explain what that is…

WOODY:  Yes!

DAVE:  Mark is so smart and has such a good ear, he got a job reading track.  Reading track means – for animators to make lip sync dialog they have to have someone analyze the recorded dialog on mag on a synchronizer and write out a chart of what syllables and phonemes occur at a particular foot and frame.  So every cartoon piece of dialog would go through a synchronizer.  Someone would scroll through with their thumb and then say “Oh the ‘m’ is at 3 feet 8 frames… “o – t- h – “ we’re going to spell Mother… “ the ‘th’ is at 3 feet 18 frames and then the ‘r’ finishes at 3 feet 22 frames.”  So then all of this is then put on a chart.  Phonetics meets film feet and frame timing.  Otherwise the animators can’t draw sync.  That’s how you get sync dialog back then for animation.

WOODY:  Amazing…

DAVE:  So the track room was filled with hard working young people.  We used to use the Sennheisers with the little foam ear pads, so you could hear someone if they were talking to you but you could also clearly hear the sound.  They were amplified by these horrid squawk boxes.

WOODY:  I remember them well.

DAVE:  Oh my God Woody, you know what they were like… 90 percent noise…

WOODY:  Yes, I had completely forgotten about them.

DAVE:  The track reader is looking at a recording script, listening to recorded 35mm track, and writing a chart that the animators are going to see that shows them the timing.  Mark was so good at that he very quickly eclipsed the output and accuracy of a room full of people.  Many of whom were older than him.  Many had been there a long time and weren’t advancing.  Probably because they were half his ear and his brains.  So he rocketed through that job pretty quickly because of his talent.  So then, this is really weird Woody but, we had a pretty smart boss at the time.  Mark was advanced from the track room to become a rookie sound effects editor, and I was advanced from apprentice to a rookie sound editor at the same time.  Our boss could see that we were young and ambitious but we also really had a passion for the work.  It’s not like we were ambitious for power, it was just that we were really good at this work and he advanced us at the same time.  If memory serves we were both given a chance to cut reels as an audition to see if we could become editors.   Now, we were lucky too because at that time they needed more guys, they were doing a lot of shows.  They wanted to bring people up whenever possible from their own farm system rather than pull in editors who had only worked in live action TV and films.  We had a talent for animation which is something you really can’t teach.

Mouth shapes for animation

WOODY:  Animation sound effects is a very specific skill.  You just have to be able to think that way.  Someone who’s mind hears a blender when a whirling wisp of wind goes by or something…  You have to think that way – or you don’t.

DAVE:  Exactly Woody.  I know some remarkably talented sound designers, mixers and sound editors who just don’t get animation.  I really think it’s got something in common with jazz.  There are musicians who have enormous virtuosity playing an instrument but they can’t swing.  With animation sound effects you either swing intuitively or you don’t. The way that people think in animation sound, when they are doing a gag not something realistic – often it’s a sonic non-sequitur – listen to Treg Brown and listen how he takes sound effects from the real world that have nothing connected to the image – rather a theatre of the absurd and somehow – he always got it right.  You either have a penchant for an animation sound gag or you don’t.

WOODY:  The Academy offers these wonderful events on filmmaking and I remember one that you presented on called “Now Hear This.” Would you take a moment to discuss that evening?  There were some wonderful distinctions made about the evolution of animated sound.

DAVE:  I’ve been a part of two of these evenings, the more recent one was on horror movies and the one you attended was the year prior.  It was called “Sound Behind the Image 2.”  The Academy had approached Mark Mangini to create the evening and he kindly asked me to participate by speaking on Treg Brown.  The way that Mark organized it he wanted to talk about three different aspects of animation sound.  The first section was performance – the history of the first sound for animation was Steamboat Willie – and everything was based on performance to picture playback.  Disney and his guys rehearsed and performed the sound effects and the music live.  Mark tells a story about that – how they hung up a sheet in one of their offices and invited wives and family in to experiment.  Disney wanted to have an audience to help determine whether they could make the connection of the the sounds with the cartoon together and accept the illusion.  That’s how far back we were going conceptually.

So Mark structured the evening very smartly I think.  Performance continued through Jimmy MacDonald’s invention of mechanical props that made either funny or naturalistic sounds that were controllable to picture playback in the studio.  Much as a Foley artist walks the performance of the actor in order to capture the right rhythms and nuances as if you recorded the actor’s feet on set.  MacDonald had figured out that if you wanted to control wind and surf and rain to match the picture he would have to build mechanical gimmicks that would make sounds where you could control the speed or the pitch of in front of a microphone in the controlled atmosphere of a studio. That’s why Jimmy’s props are so important.  For any who hadn’t seen the evening – for instance – Jimmy would create the sound of a frog croak by bowing a taut string connected to a coffee can.  He excelled at creating these kinds of mechanical creations – he was an engineer and a drummer.  He thought in both rhythm and in mechanical technique to make sound.  Traditionally, we would never have Foley in cartoons.  Now it’s done for feature animation, modern animation has Foley, just as much as modern live action films.

Foley book written by Vanessa Ament

For TV animation you never had Foley in those days at all.   In my view Foley gives you a realistic texture and has nothing to do, unless you are Jimmy MacDonald from the 30’s and 40’s, nothing you can do on a Foley stage that has a comical qualities that you want for cartoon work.  When doing a film like Beauty and the Beast, I used Foley to anchor when the narrative part of the story calls for realism, when the cartoon characters are being like people.  That’s when I want to hear footsteps or the nuances of their cloth movement, the kind of thing that you would hear from a live action movie.  When it is dramatic and not comical I would emphasize Foley.  I would shoot more Foley and I would tell the mixers where I want to hear it.  When it is being funny then it is about the cut sound effects –the hard effects.  Cats Don’t Dance and Beauty and the Beast and A Goofy Movie are three of my jobs that I think fit that model very well.  You are not aware of Foley unless the characters are acting like people in drama. And when they are being funny, you don’t rely on Foley, you go to the hard effects where you can be silly, broad and over the top.  Although in Beauty and the Beast John Roesch created some funny sound effects on the Foley stage but that is an exception to the rule.  Vanessa Ament did footsteps for them and just treated the characters like people. Every movie is different but that is a general rule of thumb. So performance in animation sound was the first thing that Mark dealt with.

WOODY:  In the evening at the Academy you and Mark did a fascinating experiment, could you tell us a bit about that?

DAVE:  Yes, here’s what we did, it was Steve Lee’s idea – Steve Lee is a great character who has been around animation lore.  In fact I first learned about Jimmy MacDonald from Steve.  So Steve says to Mark “wouldn’t it be funny to hear a bit of a Treg Brown cartoon with Hanna Barbera sound effects on it or live action sound from sound editors.”  It would be a great illustration to see the brilliant non-sequitur choices that Treg Brown makes for sound effects.  Mark got a hold of the M&E for Zoom and Bored, a roadrunner cartoon and we took a minute or so section.  We had the music and I cut Hanna Barbera library sound effects, and I know their style so well that I was able to do it as if it was cut in the Hanna Barbera sound editing rooms.  Of course it was totally awful that way!  [Laughs]  They are the wrong sorts of sounds for the cartoon.  Then I did a version as a prosaic, live action sound effects editor who only worked on movies and didn’t understand animation.

WOODY:  I remember that, it sort of fell flat…  [Both laugh]

DAVE:  Yes, the magic juice of animation humor was not invested in the sound effects.  And that is what happens.

Sound Behind the Image - Motion Picture Academy

WOODY:  So “performance,” as Mark saw it, was one category of animation sound.  I think he broke it into several sections for the evening…

DAVE:  Yes, the first part was performance and then “interpretation” was next.  That section was where he asked me to talk about Treg Brown.  The idea was that, as Ben Burtt pointed out in one of the clips, Treg Brown was the first guy to handle animation sound effects with live action sound effects from the Warner Bros. Movies, cut inappropriately for the wrong things.  Does that make sense?

WOODY:  He juxtaposed – took the seeming wrong sounds – to create comic moments…

DAVE:  Yes, exactly.  And he was a master at doing this.  As Ben pointed out, and this is why this is the category of “interpretation”, instead of just trying to find funny sounds, Treg Brown took sound effects from the complete library.   So – Elmer Fudd is running and skidding to a stop but the skid may have come from an early 30’s gangster film at Warner Bros., just stuff that they had in the library.  So a guy falls out of a window and is falling and Treg Brown would cut in the sound of a fighter plane or a bi-plane from World War 1.  He is making analogies and metaphors with the sound, drawing comedy from associations that people have with certain real sounds but applying them in the cartoon realm.

David plays a short clip from the evening, “Now Hear This.”  It is Ben Burtt discussing Treg Brown’s use of sound in animation.

“BEN BURTT:  Usually the sound effects that you heard were  sound effects used by musical instruments…. but with Treg Brown he would bring sounds in from the Warner Library…. it was this imposition of realistic sounds into this fantasy world of cartoons which gave them comic impact.”

DAVE:  Yeah, now you can’t say it better than that Woody.  Now we’ve had a guest in the interview!  [Both laugh]  Rounding out the evening Mark designated “storytelling” as the third evolution in animated sound.  So it’s performance, interpretation and storytelling.  Then he introduced us to Randy Thom and played the very impressive piece from The Polar Express.  Randy is wonderful and I love his work on The Incredibles.

The Incredibles Poster

WOODY:  Amazing! I am a huge fan of all of his work.

DAVE:  Incredibles knows when to do comic and when to do Foley.  It is so important that you buy that these animated people live in our world, in the real contemporary world, so when the guy is at his job in his office and his job is to deny people insurance claims and it’s so gray and dismal we have to have Foley because Foley grounds us to the real world.  Foley is about the friction of dramatic characters as they live in the real world.  It’s very important.  That’s why we use it.  It isn’t necessarily useful to come up with a comical sound it’s about performing live.  They did a good balance of that in The Incredibles, in all of the Brad Bird movies, they know when to sound realistic and when to sound comical.  Brad Bird is consistently good that way.

WOODY:  That was a wonderful evening for the public offered by the Academy.  I often speak with students and new filmmakers and I always encourage them to attend meetings like this that are open to the public.  That night I had the marvelous opportunity to see you, Randy Thom, Mark Mangini and others show and tell the sound work from the inside and it’s rare and invaluable.

Alright Dave, let’s move to some of your other work.  You’ve had the opportunity to work with world class filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Tim Burton, John Hughes, you won an Oscar for your work with Francis Ford Coppola.  These artists create such a wide range of types of films – I loved The Dead Zone but it was nothing like Oceans 12 or Beetlejuice – I would imagine that each of these directors take a different approach to sound.  Would you take a moment and touch on working with some of these different directors?

DAVE:  There were plenty of jobs that I am associated with where I was just a part of the crew and I never worked directly with the Director.  On jobs where I was the supervisor you can bet I worked with the director and have strong opinions about them.  I do have some favorites that are on the top of my list because they were good people and knew how to be a team player and appreciated everyone’s contribution to their show.  I’ve been asked this before and I will tell you the top three of terrific directors, well I’ll have to add Soderbergh and make it four – Leonard Nimoy who I was just on a crew with, Mark Mangini was the supervisor, Leonard and Mark worked much more directly.  I was just a cutter but I spent weeks on the dub stage with Leonard directly, sometimes it’s a line producer on top of the dub but Leonard was there himself, and he’s just a good man.

Star Trek IV poster

WOODY:  That was Star Trek 4?

DAVE:  Star Trek 4, yes.  He’s an intellectual and he’s is very appreciative of everyone’s skills and their specialty which makes his films better.  You know?  So he is on my list.  Another great one is Billy Crystal.  I did the sequel to “City Slickers” and Billy was not the titular director he was the executive producer.  He hired a director to be behind the camera but Billy had input everywhere and was on the dub stage every day.  He was very hands on and very appreciative and very much of a “small d” democrat!  If he was the first guy at the dub he would make the coffee!

WOODY:  I’ve heard stories over the years like that about him.

DAVE:  I was back in the machine room winding down footage and I couldn’t get a phone call.  He was alone on the dub stage, he picked up the phone, took a message for me and walked all the way back to me and say “Hey Dave – Vanessa’s on the line”.  He was such a good man and a mensch.  So he’s on my list.  The third guy on my list is Nick Castle who a lot of people don’t know about.  He made a picture called “Tap” with Gregory Hines and he was the director and creator of the movie.  It’s not the best motion picture in the world but it served its purpose which was a very noble one, to capture in a sort of vehicle drama almost like the old school movie dramas with a great star in a sort of stupid story.  It captured the great art of African American hoofers, tap dancers, a vehicle not only for Gregory Hines but also a showcase to display the work of his very, very elders.  All these old guys who have passed now.  Finally captured on film courtesy of Greg Hines and Nick Castle.  Nick was very egalitarian in his style as a director.  It wasn’t about “audio” it was about – you know what to do to make my movie sound great.  I’ll give you what you need to make my movie sound great.  Explain to me what you are doing and I’ll learn something.   That’s a real director if you ask me.

WOODY:  Absolutely.

DAVE:  Finally, of course Soderbergh, he has a good enough ear that he could have been a sound editor or mixer himself.  His supervising sound editor is usually Larry Blake and Larry would hire me to work on Sex Lies and Videotape, Oceans 11 & 12.  The craftsmanship and architecture is really between Steven and Larry.  Steven is a great guy and I think may be the great American director at the moment.  He’s given us a body of work in a short time that many people don’t achieve over a long career.

WOODY:  Yes, he’s had such a wide range from absurdist sorts of things like Schizopolis to a real masterpiece like Traffic.

DAVE:  One thing that Steven has always done is to defer to the style that movie needs to be.  Like any great artist he is not imposing his thumbprint or his personal style on the movie.  Too many guys go to film school and try to show off on every shot to show how clever they are.  He wouldn’t do that.  It’s what I call invisibility.  Steven is very invisible.  I just saw Thirteen Assassins and I thought that Japanese director was very invisible.  Steven is very skilled that way plus he’s a really good man.  Just as a human being.  I have real admiration and respect for him and he’s very funny.  Like a lot of intelligent people.

WOODY:  I heard that Soderbergh will do everything to minimize the need for ADR (dialog replacement).  That he takes a hands on approach to the set recordings quality, which is not always on a directors agenda!  [Both laugh]

Oceans 12 poster

DAVE:  We did very little on Oceans 11 and on Ocean’s 12 we only did two lines and it was because they decided to change the pronunciation of a proper name.  They had pronounced it in the shoot – both George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones pronounced it a certain way and then in post Steven thought it should be pronounced a different way.  Probably the correct way, and so we did one line of ADR for George and one for Catherine.

Now this is how clever these guys are, you can blame this on Larry Blake.  Larry did a “non” studio ADR recording of George doing his line, it was in the sequence where he is walking across the street to Amsterdam with Brad Pitt and the camera is not close to him.  Larry set him up with the edited dialog from the scene and a pair of headphones and sent a recording rig with no picture.  They went outside of George and Steven’s office on Warner Bros. Lot, you know, with Olive Avenue in the background.  They recorded the line as audio only ADR.  And it was absolutely perfect.  It just laid right in.  I mixed that stuff, Larry let me do the dialog predubs, on that show and also on Oceans 11.  It’s my only mixing experience; I owe Larry for that big time.  I don’t think it was credited but I learned a lot doing the dialog predubs myself.  And I was the lead dialog editor I’m proud to say so I knew where all the skeletons were buried in all the dialog tracks.  So, that was a non-picture ADR, we had to re-do Catherine’s pronunciation, I think Larry did it himself, because she was very close-up when she said that word and that was the only instance on that show that an actor spent time in an ADR booth – on that entire movie!

We teach this to our students here at SCAD, and let me mention that SCAD sound design majors are the best prepared college students to work in the industry.  They are starting to work now and they are great.  They don’t get thrown because we are preparing them so well.  One of the things they learn is to try and collar the filmmakers from our film school and they go out and scout locations to scout for audio locations as well as visual locations.  So they don’t get that beautiful shot under the freeway…

WOODY:  Pointing a mic at the street [Both laugh]

DAVE:  Yes!  On Star Trek 4 in the Klingon Space Ship where the good guys were there is a floor prop, a prop on the corridor floor that was kind of like a plastic sheet that you would put over a fluorescent light… it looked perfect… but they would walk down the corridor and while recording all of this wide shot dialog, these plastic sheets were rattling like crazy.  It absolutely ruined all of the recordings.  So the production mixer, I can’t remember whether it was Gene Cantamessa or Jim Webb, [it was Cantamessa] it was one of those guys, and he said to Leonard “ I can’t get you any useful dialog with this crap on the floor” and Leonard stopped production long enough to have the floor redone into something quiet. And he got beautiful stuff.  A good director understands that it’s part of the filmmaking – it’s not something that you fix in post.

WOODY:  So – Nimoy, Crystal, Castle, and Soderbergh.

DAVE:  I almost forgot Joe Dante.

WOODY:  What did you work with him on?

DAVE:  I was never a supervising sound editor for him, but I was a lead editor under Mangini  on “Gremlins,” on “Innerspace” and “Explorers” and “Looney Tunes: Back In Action.” I can’t remember them all.

WOODY:  So let’s talk about Joe Dante.

DAVE:  I found a real affinity with him. In another life, I would have wanted to be his supervising sound editor. But it was Mangini—and that was perfectly fine with me. Because we think alike—we’re all three of us, very knowledgeable animation fans. Mark and I, as I  explained, worked together in animation in the early parts of our careers. I felt some affinity for Joe as I got to know him a little bit, just working under him as a sound editor and being on the dub stage with him many times. Because we’re the same age, and he grew up, I think, in South Jersey. I was in suburban Philly. And at some point, we put together that, as kids, we watched the same local television broadcasts where we were exposed to the same 16mm prints of The Thing, and The Invisible Man, and the Warners cartoons , you know, in rotation when there were three broadcast TV stations for a major city. It’s a pretty good bet that the smart 12-year-old boys are all watching the science fiction and horror when it goes down on TV. We would have seen the same prints with the same unintentional splices in them. We were both shaped by that part of popular culture, and Joe turned it into a career. Also because he had been, I think, an editor at Roger Corman’s. He was part of a tribe of baby boomers who basically went to film elementary school by working at Roger Corman’s.

Roger Corman

WOODY:  I had forgotten that he was part of that. What an amazing group of people—including Francis Ford Coppola.

DAVE:  Was he involved in Corman?

WOODY:  Yes, his first movie was Dementia 13, produced by Roger Corman.

DAVE:  Oh my god.

WOODY:  Scorsese too.  I think every major filmmaker from those days, somewhere along the line, touched Corman.

DAVE:  Corman was the godfather of so many, especially the baby boomers who worked like slaves on his films. But that was their real film school. Tina Hirsch, who cut Gremlins; Bobby Kaiser, who’s been a top ADR  editor for 40 years, John Sayles was part of that crowd too, I think. That was really—that was to roll-up-your-sleeves filmmakers and editors and writers – kind of what Harvard Business School used to be to  Wall Street. It was a great learning thing.

For sound editing—a lot of people I knew grew up at Gomillion Sound which was—

WOODY:  You spell it the way it sounds—go million?

DAVE:  Yes, it was a proper name. The guy’s name was Ted Gomillion.  Flick worked there, and I think Richard Anderson worked there. My ex-wife Vanessa [Ament] worked there doing Foley—so many people I know learned post-production sound work at Gomillion. David Yewdall did, of course.  They were kind of a low-budget place, but everybody learned a lot of craftsmanship—how to do a lot of work in a hurry.  Gomillion was, for sound editors and Foley artists—those of us on the sound side – as Corman was for writers and editors and future directors.

Dementia 13

WOODY:  Tell me about Joe Dante.

DAVE:  This impressed me. When Steven Spielberg was a young god,  Joe Dante was his peer and not one of his subjects.  I never imagined that someone would speak truth to such power—Steven was producing I guess it was Gremlins for Joe and he had just finished Indiana Jones 2.  The buzz was that Indiana Jones 2 was, what we used to call, an “E Ticket Ride” at Disneyland. You know, it was theme park—it was just – one shot led to another, and they were all linked to physical gags. It was tremendously funny; just as you thought you were safe from sliding over the precipice,  something else comes to endanger you, right? And it was beautifully put together that way—very well conceived, and Steven adopted a very fast editing style. And he was kind of high on that style.

He and Michael Khan had recut a scene of Joe’s movie in that fast editing style.  I remember Steven coming to the dub stage—we were working on some pre-dubs—and they were discussing this. And I remember Joe saying, in his high thin voice, very boldly, “You can’t cut it like that, Steven—it’s a different kind of material.” And I thought people were all going be kissing Steven’s ass, but what impressed me was how very much those two guys were equals and worked together and talked like any other two peers at a job.

Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws

WOODY:  Steven Spielberg accepted it as a peer?

DAVE:  Yes, like criticism from any peer—they were brothers.

DAVE:    So, they [Gremlins and Indiana Jones 2] come out the same year, and they’re in various stages of post-production when they have that conversation. And that was on Warner Hollywood Stage D where Vanessa and I got married.

WOODY:  You got married on the lot?

DAVE:   We got married on that stage—yep.

WOODY:  Between shifts?

DAVE:  On a Sunday. They rented it to me for a dollar.

WOODY:  Awesome.

DAVE:  Instead of a religious altar, we had the two giant VU meters behind us. Talk about an industry wedding—we used the editing change room to change our clothes.

WOODY:  How many people came?

DAVE:  Oh, it was only about fifteen, something like that, very small – friends and family. We couldn’t afford much for the party after. But it was very sweet of Don Rogers who ran post sound at Warner Hollywood before he ran the sound department at Warner Burbank, he rented it to me for a dollar.

WOODY:  We haven’t spoken yet about your experience on Dracula, for which you won an Academy Award shared with Tom McCarthy.  Was that the only picture you did with Coppola?

DAVE:  Yes, it is. And it wasn’t supposed to be me. Understand that I was the utility player that they brought in when they couldn’t get the big-name guys they wanted.

WOODY:  Who were they looking for?

DAVE:  It was supposed to be Richard Beggs. Richard Beggs is a San Francisco-area sound designer who goes back to Apocalypse and that period of Coppola’s.   Mark Berger, the mixer; Doug Hemphill, who’s now a mixer, who was a great field-recording guy for years; Jerry Ross, who’s a great, wonderful sound editor. They were all young dudes on Apocalypse, and this whole gang of guys more or less taught themselves how to do multi-channel, high-quality sound layering and mixing pretty much for Apocalypse. I mean, it took them forever, but they did it all right.

Dave Stone and Steve Borne at Coppola's Vineyard

Richard Beggs was one of that crowd of guys, pretty much always worked in the San Francisco area. I don’t know that he spent much time in Hollywood. He’s got a great ear.   I don’t know if he cuts, but he was supposed to be the supervising sound editor for Coppola because he worked for him before. But, Richard got a picture called Toys, and he committed to that. So, as much as he wanted to do Dracula, he couldn’t.  They hired Leslie Shatz. Leslie Shatz is also a brilliant mixer and San Francisco-area sound designer type guy. And I had worked with him once or twice. He did a lovely job suping War Of The Roses—I think was the last time I had worked with him.

Now, Leslie is not a San Francisco—I think he’s a Los Angeles guy by birth, but he spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and he knew a lot of the post-production sound community. He worked, I think, as a studio mixer up there and stuff. Not really that sure about his background, but he was known to work a little bit in Hollywood and a little more often in San Francisco, which is still the case. He just did a lovely job on a very arty picture that just came out that they’re calling the first feminist Western, which is called Meek’s Cutoff, – Leslie suped that. Again, it was a low-budget independent artistic feature film with probably a very small sound crew. Leslie is really good at the kind of stuff—kind of high-art sound supervising. So, he was supposed to do it—he was the brand name in San Francisco and was a pinch-hitter for Richard Beggs.

Dracula

Now it gets complicated.  [Laughs]  There was some deal with Sony Pictures where Francis was supposed to be doing Dracula as a big-studio, money-making picture—not an art picture. And although I don’t know the historical details—and I’m only just reporting what I saw from the trenches—but my impression was that—it’s similar to the way in which Orson Welles was lured back from Europe to do one last money-making project.  That was “Touch Of Evil.”  One last time he had to cope with the studios to do Touch Of Evil. He wasn’t supposed to turn it into an artistic film—it was supposed to make money as a film-noir picture. And of course, he turns it into another Orson Welles masterpiece.  It reminds me of how Francis was supposed to come and make a big studio picture like he did with The Godfather, and make them some money. Consequently, there was pressure on post-production to figure out how to share the wealth and expenses of post-production. So, a deal was made somehow—I was not in on this when I got hired, by the way—I’m just figuring this out post-mortem. Francis could have part of the mix—he could have final dub, and he could have part of the sound-supervision, sound-design team. But Sony Pictures was going to have an in-house sound-editing crew, and do the pre-dubs on the Sony lot. So, Tom McCarthy Jr. was the Vice President of Post Production Sound, and an old buddy of mine. We’d worked together many, many times in the past, so he called me up and said, “How’d you like to do a horror picture?” And this was right on the heels of my being upset that I had missed out on a couple of other good titles where I didn’t get on the crew. “So, it’s a horror picture—what have ya got?” He says, “Oh, they’re doing  Dracula.” I go, “Okay, fine.” And he said, “And you know who’s directing it?” I said, “No.” And he says, “Francis Ford Coppola.”

Tommy was supposed to represent and provide the functional, pragmatic editing of sound work and the preparation of pre-dubs. Then we were supposed to bring them up to Francis’s place and mix them in his attic mixing room above the winery office, which I think is where they mixed Apocalypse. So, that is what we did—we put a crew together and I was supposed to be like the liaison between San Francisco high-art sound design and Hollywood pragmatic sound editing. And I thought that Tommy was right to think of me. I filled that role perfectly because I had worked a little up north and a lot down south. And I understood there was a cultural difference, at the time, between the way guys did their work up north and the way they did it down south. And there was some political mismatch—the style of how people approached their work was different.  I was supposed to be both a manager and a diplomat, and make that all work.  Leslie Shatz, who is a sound designer/editor/mixer/supervising sound editor, was going to be the sound designer, and ultimately the final mixer. He didn’t get involved—he was busy with something – until we actually did the final mix, so you could say that he and his co-mixer Marian Wallace were just the final re-recording mixers. And also he brought a friend from San Francisco—Christensen…

WOODY:  Kim Christensen?

DAVE:  Yes, he brought sound effects, and added them in through keyboards and what-not. It was kind of an extra tweak while we mixed.  My job was to handle a crew of guys that Tommy had semi-regularly employed on the Sony lot. They were young—a lot of young sound-effects guys with great ideas who had not worked on any feature films pretty much. Or they had worked on B features and television. And I was supposed to wrangle them into a team that could do some high-falutin’ sound effects work on moviolas and on Cyber Frames. Then we also had a slightly older, more experienced crew doing dialogue at Sony that was run by Dave Cohn. He was like the lead dialogue guy. I was the supervising sound editor, along with Tommy McCarthy, who was the head of the department. It was an interesting job, Woody, because it was a hybrid of technologies. We cut the Foley and the dialogue on Cyber Frame, and then laid that onto 24-track for pre-dubs and then made 35mm pre-dubs from those 24 tracks.

WOODY:  Did you say Cyber Frame?  Was that a system at the time?

DAVE:  Yes. Very big before Pro Tools came in. Then the other end of it was moviolas. We cut a whole lot of sound effects on moviolas. And then we made special sound effects. I would audition sound—let’s say, I’d audition a bunch of animal effects on a moviola, and ask the young Cyber Frame sound-design geniuses— at the time, Cyber Frame—if you wanted to make new sound effects, it had a double boot system, and you would boot it up as an Audio Frame, which is a totally different animal. If you booted it up as an Audio Frame, you had yourself an MS DOS non-graphic platform, which would allow you to combine sampled sounds and make what I guess what you would call a wave editor, but not a track editor. It would be like Sound Forge.

Dracula Sound and Picture editing crew in Napa

So, the guys would load sounds—you know, lions and tigers and bears in 35mm, they would send those to transfer. Transfer department would transfer those 35mm sound effects onto magneto optical media, [MO] which is what the Cyber Frame reads. It would take those MOs, which were like early versions of CD-ROMs, I guess you’d say, and it would read those into the system. Then they would boot the system as an Audio Frame, not a Cyber Frame, and while it was in Audio Frame mode, these guys would design new combined, mixed sound effects. They would then go over to Cyber Frame to be sunk up and spun out onto 24-track, so we could make our 35mm pre-dubs. Now if that isn’t a hybrid, I don’t know what is. [Both laugh]   ’Cause it went from 35mm—dusty old library sound effects from the old MGM sound-effects library—it went to the digital realm where sounds were combined, and then laid up as tracks and spun out onto two-inch tape, and then mixed back down to 35mm in pre-dub. So, we went a long way around from 35 to 35, going through digital. That’s as hybrid as it’s ever gotten in my understanding.  We had some very clever young fellows—Sanford Ponder and Chris Aud and Dave Van Slyke.  Bunch of very clever guys who are still in the rackets. Well, not Ponder. Ponder went to work for a young software company up in the Northwest, when it was just starting out. It was called Micro . . . soft. [Laughs] And after a couple of years, I think he cashed in his stock options and retired. [Laughs]

WOODY:  The American Dream.  Well, God bless him.

DAVE:  God bless him, indeed. Sanford had a great ear, and was a true designer, and has always made—even back in those days—made electronic music of his own compositions. So, he’s an artist. I have a couple of his CDs—sort of ambient, electro, spacey, meditative music. I really like it.

Tom McCarthy

WOODY:  Tom McCarthy is still at Sony today.

DAVE:  Yes, back then I don’t think he had the VP title then, but he was the head of sound editing.  Parallel to what CeCe Hall did at Paramount. So, they ran the editing shops for sound, and they—Tommy and CeCe, I believe, had salaried positions, but everybody else who worked in the cutting rooms for them was on a weekly wage for the union. So, Tommy was Sony Pictures’ sound editing. Everybody who had a job at Sony Pictures in sound editing or Foley knew Tommy or was put in their position by Tommy. On Dracula his role was really to represent the studio, and make sure we were on time and on budget.

WOODY:  Had he already started Dracula by the time he involved you?

DAVE:  No.  We went to the very first meetings together in Francis’s office. We went up to San Francisco—Tommy and I and Dave Cohn and a couple of other guys went to Francis’s office at Zoetrope in downtown San Francisco to have an initial meeting about it.  We hadn’t seen any footage yet, at that point, and I think before we left San Fran, somebody showed us some rough cuts of a few scenes. Then we went back to Hollywood and set up cutting rooms, and waited for the picture to arrive.

WOODY:  What kind of time did you have for the design and edit, and then how much time did you have for the dubs?

DAVE:  I have no idea! [Laughs] I have complete amnesia about the period. I don’t know if it was six months or three weeks, Woody.  I have a friend who’s working for Francis now who called me up and asked, “Is this normal when you work for Francis that you don’t know how long you’re gonna be there and you lose all sense of time?” [Laughs] It’s like—it’s like you’ve gone away to this strange island, and time just stops until the picture’s over. I could, I suppose, research it and figure it out, but I don’t have a clue! I’m gonna guess it was maybe four months all together—which is long for post, but Francis kept changing the picture.

Let me go back and re-emphasize something. That was part of San Francisco filmmaking—I’m sure it’s not true any more, it’s a whole different world now——because now you have Pixar, and however things are done at Lucasfilm from job to job—it’s not the same old story.  But in those days, I think a lot of the post-production sound people in the San Francisco Bay area must have thought, or may have thought, that we in Hollywood were just grinding out sausages without much thought to art. Which is a very insulting way of looking at what we do. On the other hand–on the other side of that geographical, cultural bias would be the Hollywood editor who thinks people in San Francisco have all the time in the world to fiddle around with their movies to get them perfectly right, and don’t have big-studio suits breathing down  their necks. So, both of those things are terrible biases, and they’re not true. Somewhere in the middle there are various shades of gray and truth.

(L to R) with endless cue sheet - David Stone, David B. Cohn-Lead ADR editor, Cindy Marty-Foley editor, Linda Folk-ADR editor

I’m sure much of that must have started with Apocalypse Now taking fifteen years in post. [Laughs] Whatever it took. It did take a long time in post, but they gave us the whole legacy of how to do a lot of the processes having to do with split-surround movies. And so they were almost like a research-and-development farm for some of what has become standard practices.  So, that was very important. On the other hand, we Hollywood editors, I’ve always felt, had much more skill at editing production dialogue and mixing it to sound realistic without relying on a lot of ADR. And we had other skills with sound effects and with working efficiently that did not take place in the San Francisco area. In fact, I’d venture to say our Foley artists developed workflow methods on their own in Hollywood, since the earliest days of regular Foley or Foley being done on every feature film, which may not have always been practiced in the San Francisco Bay area because those people didn’t know how to do it that way. So a lot of their Foley in the 70s and 80s was really not so much Foley as clusters of sound effects recorded on the Foley stage. And recorded beautifully, by the way. So, their emphasis—it was a totally different style of work, their emphasis was more on getting the individual sound effects recorded well in front of the picture while our Foley artist developed ways of getting through longer movements in reel, and getting through them well. And since they basically worked with headphones up north, and most of the Hollywood people didn’t work with headphones on—they were too interested in getting the movement right. It’s different—so, there was a big cultural difference, and part of the job for Tommy McCarthy and I was to keep those differences minimized and work collaboratively and get the best possible effect out of everybody’s skills.

So, while I knew for instance, in terms of special effects sound design, I had great material from my young lads—Chris and Dave and Sanford.  It was a huge crew. I had original sound effects made by them on the Audio Frame, and we knew that Leslie and his San Francisco friends were gonna have some original sound effects available to us only at the final. So, we had stuff you had to put into the pre-dubs. You couldn’t do it all in the final. And I also thought we ought to have our own Hollywood-based special sound-effects design guy, so I thought of Alan Howarth, who is a genius at that stuff.  We hired Alan to custom design a handful of effects which I assigned him. I figured out—we will need an ambience for the canyon outside the castle; we need castle walls; desiccated, decayed sounds; we need Dracula-floats-across-the-floor sounds; we need some scary breathing stuff—you know, we need backwards drips, we need a lot of stuff. I had like a shopping list to turn over to Alan Howarth because he has always doing this kind of stuff for everybody I knew who was suping tracks in Hollywood: Rich Anderson and Steve Flick and Mangini. Alan had been on the first Star Trek, I think, with those guys, so he knew them from that movie. Alan was great at the interpretive design sort of special effects. We had a bunch of stuff from him too, and so everything you hear on the final track—there are mundane sound effects which were edited, I think artistically, by my crew; there are Alan Howarth sounds blended into that; there are original sounds made by the sound-effects editing crew by guys at Sony on the Audio Frame machine; and then there are final-dub additions that Leslie spun in on the fly during the final dub.

EMU Emulator - List price circa 1980 $10,000

Kim Christensen sat with Leslie and Marion. They had a little—what was the big thing in those days—a little emulator thing, a little mini-keyboard with a sampler. Leslie wanted to send in these vocal improvisations from Diamanda Galas,  the singer, with her doing these like ululations and kind of weird soprano singing. So, that’s all in there—it’s all mixed up. What always gets overlooked is how the Sony mixers who did the pre-dubs—how hard they worked—for very little glitz and glamour. Guys like Greg Watkins—I forget the other ones—Gary Bourgeois maybe. These were really, really strong everyday mixers on the Sony lot. And we gave them piles and piles of material to get through on our pre-dubs.

WOODY:  Neither of those guys are credited.

DAVE:  That’s typical on a deal like this. A lot of guys do the set-up work—it’s not fair, but it’s the way it is sometimes. Regular, everyday mixers who do whatever you put in front of them on the lot. We had tons and tons of mags that we schlepped up to Napa in order to do those mixes.

WOODY: Were there moments during the re-recording on the dub stage that you go, “Damn, this thing’s pretty darn good … we may win something?”

DAVE:  Nah, man, you don’t think about the World Series—you just try to get through the next game against the White Sox. [Laughs] You know how it is Woody, you’re so in the moment—you’re much more concerned with “Can I have this particular problem solved by the next hour and a half?”

WOODY:  So, you were nominated and then won, what is that like? What do you go through then?

DAVE:  That’s a little weird because one of the competition was my dear friend Mark Mangini, who had just done Aladdin, which was brilliant, and a huge job, and a very creative job.

I’m sitting in the audience with my wife, and Mangini and his son Matthew. And then the other guys we competed against.  We all knew each other, of course, and we had all been to the nominees’ luncheon together. But Mangini and I were such old pals that it was weird to be competing—and to be competing with such different material. Now, had it been today, an animated feature might have been taken more seriously, and he could have maybe won. But just being animated was a mark against them winning that year.

WOODY:  It’s crazy, isn’t it?

DAVE:  Mark and I both thought we had a good chance against them, for reasons only that the voters get sick and tired of the same old same old on these action films, right? He thought he had a chance because it was this unusual and creative animation job on an animated musical.   I had a Coppola picture which had artistic cache, and was thought by everybody to be very artistically done. So, we thought the Steven Seagal guys didn’t have a chance. It was good craftsmanship, but we’re talking about the politics in the Academy. There are some years when those kinds of pictures win, and some where they don’t.  I think we fell into a time when voters were looking for artistic stuff.

WOODY:  Having spent a career in sound effects, specifically— you did hop around. You did dialogue editing and various—in fact, you mentioned that you did dialogue dubbing on one of the pictures we talked about.

DAVE:  That would have to be Ocean’s Eleven.

WOODY:  Larry Blake gave you that opportunity to do that?

Mark Mangini, Larry Blake, Mike Minkler, Myron Nettinga

DAVE:  He wanted to teach me. I knew he didn’t want to give me credit for it. I don’t think he ever meant to, but he taught me some great stuff. And so I had some real satisfaction mixing those pre-dubs. It  came at a good time for me too in my career, because I felt like one more big challenge before I throw it all away and start teaching. [Both laugh] Let me just say this about the differences between dialogue editing and sound-effects editing and supervising sound editing. I just see it all as a continuum.  I think different people have a stronger talent in one specific flavor of sound editing than another, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t experience both, and I feel like to be a supervisor you damn well ought to be excellent at each of those specific kinds of sound editing. I don’t like to be supervised by somebody who isn’t a great dialogue editor themselves—’cause they don’t know the job!  I don’t want to hire a dialogue editor who can’t cut sound effects. They may not be my favorite sound-effects editor, but what happens when the second baseman breaks his toe and I gotta bring in the guy from left field and have him play a couple of games?

WOODY:  Jackie Johnson, who I use a lot for dialogue editing, can do anything. I’ve hired her to do music editing for me, I’ve hired her to do sound-effects editing for me, and each time she’ll say, “Oh Woody, I don’t really do that.” And I’m like, “Jackie, you cut!” She’s more concerned about it than I am!

DAVE:  You just reminded me of something I heard that Roman Polanski said – some directors plan the shot and then figure out how to fit the actors into the shot. And he said, “I start with the actors and I let the actors rehearse the action before I figure out where I want to put the camera.” And he said, “Not doing it that way is like a tailor who makes a suit and then looks all around for a man that fits into it.” [Both laugh]

WOODY:  Right!

DAVE:  I love that idea. So, with sound editing, even in the highly specialized specialty of sound-effects editing, I used to have some favorites. Sometimes I thought one guy’s good at car chases, one guy’s good at gun battles, one guy’s good with military stuff—and so you sort of subdivide the specialty. But that doesn’t mean everybody should be painted into a little corner. I worked on a picture about Jerry Lee Lewis called Great Balls Of Fire.

WOODY:  With Dennis Quaid, right?

DAVE:  Yes and a young Winona Ryder. She was I think 15, playing 13.   The supervisor was a woman—supervising sound editor—and there was another sound editor who was a woman, and then two guys. So, you had a cutting supe and three editors. And she decided on the first day—she said, “Guess what, guys. You guys are gonna cut the dialogue, and the girls are gonna cut the muscle cars. We wanna cut the sound effects. We’re tired of people thinking girls can’t cut cars.” ’Cause it’s a guy thing. So she said to the other editor—who was Gary Wright—and I, “You guys don’t mind cutting dialogue? And we said, “Shit, we’d love it.” So, men cut dialogue and women cut the cars and all the sound effects, and of course, they did a great job. They’re great editors. You don’t have to have a penis to cut car sound effects!

Great Balls of Fire

WOODY:  Kimberly Harris, Julia Evershade?

DAVE:  Julia was the supe, and Kimberly Harris is a great editor—she’s still a great editor. I don’t think Julia’s in the racket any more. Gary Wright always got pissed off because people said, “Sing ‘Dream Weaver’ for me.” That was the name of the guy who had the hit record. Gary Wright’s a fine editor—I’ve known him for years. And Kimberly Harris. It was a small crew. We did a great job. I still enjoy seeing that movie.

WOODY:  You have any sort of secrets or tricks you could divulge?

DAVE:  Well, the most fundamental secret that I can think of on the sound-effects side, almost every good sounding piece of sound-effects element is made of two or three layers. You can’t always do that. You can’t layer a car rev or a car idle with another one, because it’ll sound like two cars. But in many cases, with sound effects, you can build character into them by layering two or three things together. And almost everyone does that anyway. That’s not a trade secret—that’s just basic craftsmanship. But dialogue—I was a great dialogue editor because I listened to every single foot of every take we had available before I started cutting. I’d study the material twice as long as other people on the crew before I made a single cut. And I would plan my tracks on paper before I cut them.

WOODY:  It’s really  just as simple as being a good craftsman – in any trade. You just gotta work hard and know your business.

DAVE:  You’re making me remember an old thought – “measure twice, cut once.”

WOODY:  Right.

DAVE:  And I think that’s the way I approach dialogue all the time. Very careful carpentry—measure twice, cut once. You have to listen to everything—I tell our students at SCAD that—you gotta listen to everything, listen to everything on every take from slate to slate. And the wild tracks to get to know what’s available. Don’t wait to find out there was a great alternate take until after you’ve cut and slavishly tried to make it sound good. And then do what students frequently do, which is revert to the sort of travesty of trying to EQ smoothness into it, when it didn’t cut right in the first place—and then suddenly find out there’s an alternate take you forgot to listen to—that’s stupid.

WOODY:  I think that’s the secret weapon of dialogue editing, for sure. I just can’t believe how many people don’t go back to the tapes. I’ll get an ADR list, and I’ll be, like, this is insane—we don’t have anything to cover all of this?

DAVE:  Very often the ADR editor, if they specialize, they don’t know that much about what you can save in production, and then on commercial jobs, and sometimes we see this on student films, somebody else like the director decides on the ADR list, and it’s all wrong—it’s all stuff he didn’t need to ADR. Unless, of course, the director wants a different performance or wants to re-voice a character or something. Typically, during my career, we would meet with ADR editors on a show—at the beginning, they’d have a big, huge, humongous list of everything that was conceivably, possibly vulnerable in production. And we’d have that list before we cut the production. After we cut the production, we would re-meet with them, and say, “You don’t need this line or this line or this line if you did it for the reasons I think you did it for.” And by the time they got the actor in front of the microphone, 80 or 90% of those lines on paper got omitted.  It was always for a very important ritual for us—I don’t know how it’s been for you in your career—but we would always wait for the omit list and happily greet it when it had lots and lots of omits written through the ADR script. We were happy to see that. But you couldn’t get that done until there had been a lot of stuff cut.

WOODY:  Let’s move into your new career at SCAD. So, were you teaching at DePaul first? Was that sort of an opportunity that came your way, or was that a purposeful shift of moving from Hollywood into the educational realm?

DAVE:  It was both. Vanessa, my ex, and I had been talking about teaching as a third act of our professional lives for years before I had an opportunity to do it. We talked about it, I think, even before our son was born 21 years ago. So, we just knew that we both enjoyed campus life, and she’s a deeply intellectual person. She really enjoys studying and research. I don’t. [Laughs] And she already had a master’s degree in another field—not film—and very close to finishing her Ph.D. work in cinema studies now. So, for me, it was a matter of teaching not theory so much as production. I wanted to teach about stuff I had learned working professionally in sound. And it wasn’t going to be an easy opportunity for me, as I didn’t have a master’s degree, and I think that in Southern California it’s very easy for the colleges to get adjuncts from the industry to work—teach a class for peanuts on Wednesday nights, you know.  I didn’t want to do that. An opportunity came up to go to Chicago and teach full time, so I jumped on it.

WOODY:  This is without a master’s degree?

DAVE:  Yeah, without a master’s. At that time—the suits have since changed their mind—but at the time, they had an agenda to hire professionals out of the industry and bring some of that panache to their school. At least they had a flirtation with doing that. At SCAD, it’s a more well-ingrained principle, and they have always been great at balancing the professionals from the arts with academics from around the arts. You get the right blend of that at SCAD—it works really well.

WOODY:  You have a very impressive faculty over there. So, you are officially titled the Chair of Sound Design?

Savannah College of Art and Design

DAVE:  Yes. Professor, Chair Sound Design.

WOODY:  I’d like to get a better understanding of the hierarchy of that in terms of your daily work. So, you’re the head of the sound-design program—you develop the curriculum? I’ve got a book you know…[Laughs]

DAVE:  The Academic Program for Sound Design Majors in the School of Film and Digital Media and Performing Arts is what I’m running. We have a school—I don’t know how many schools SCAD has—but our school, which is run by my dean Peter Weishar, our school is the School of Film and Digital Media and Performing Arts.  In that school, you got your animation, your motion media, your visual effects, your performing arts, your film, your sound design, and I forget what else—oh, your equestrian art. We’re a big school within SCAD—I don’t know if you call it a school or a college.

WOODY:  How long have you been there now?

DAVE:  This will be my fourth academic year starting next month—next week—two weeks.  My third year as chair, my fourth year of teaching there.

WOODY:  Are there further goals for you as an educator in terms of SCAD, or president of the college, or start your own school—? [Both laugh]

DAVE:  The only ambitions I have are to learn to be a better teacher, which will probably take me the rest of my life.

WOODY:  So, you teach classes as well?  What courses?

David Stone

DAVE:  To make a long story short, we have lots of different courses, and as a chair, I don’t get to teach the full load of courses that the other folks teach. I can only teach two or in the past we when we’ve been busy with administrative stuff, only one course. But it’s probably going be two now. I have my favorites. We have a sound effects and Foley class. I have a class called the History of Sound and Media, which is lecture only—which I enjoy. I’m supposed to teach that, and Intro to Sound Design, this fall. And I’d like to develop a new class about the industry— about how to get work and how the workflow works in the industry. My favorite, so far, has been post-production, where I teach students how to be a supervising sound editor—how to run a crew of the other people doing the editing and recording and mixing and stuff.

WOODY: Learn from the  master!

DAVE:  One of the things I’m trying to push for in the next couple of years—it’s really hard to change—make new courses and re-fit the old ones to match. But one of the things we’re trying to do is have sound effects and dialogue editing—separating it out from sound effects, Foley and ADR dialogue editing. Very complicated—but we’re trying to shift things around a little bit. I want to learn to be a better teacher. The other ambition I have is to study film and do more writing about the sound in other people’s movies- stuff from before I was born. I’d like to do some more historical writing, analyzing how people have used sound in movies over the years. I’m very interested in that. I’m not a scholar, but I take a deep interest in it.

WOODY:  And  you’ve got a book in you regarding the early cartoon animated sound too.

DAVE:  I guess I might. I’m awfully interested in this stuff, and anybody who teaches really enjoys their work in the classroom, and enjoys passing on the knowledge to students. Because of the way SCAD is, we have so many professionals in all of the arts teaching kids, everybody consciously tries to be a teacher and not just tell war stories. For what people are paying for tuition, they have the right to be mentored and empowered to learn a bunch of stuff, and not just stand there and watching the show where you tell stories about movies they’ve never even heard of. I think everybody’s very good at doing that at SCAD. It’s one reason I’m very comfortable here—that we all are driven to teach, and we’re proud of our accomplishments, but there’s no way we’re trying to teach the next generation to be us. We’re just trying to teach them how to think, and using movies because everybody loves movies—using movies as a spoonful of sugar so they can learn critical thinking.

WOODY:  What advice do you give to your students regarding pursuing a career?

DAVE:  To network with their peers. Because the structure of the industry that they want to work for will change much faster than we can prepare them with specifics, and to also have a really broad knowledge of how—everything in post sound for movies, or sound for games, or sound art—to have the broadest possible knowledge of what goes on in those fields, even beyond your own specialty or talent. Because you can’t anticipate what the world will be when you’re out there working. Maybe there will be no more movies. Maybe there will be video games that are so integrated into our biology that there’s not even a mechanism to play them with. We don’t know what the future will be, but the principles of telling a dramatic story or leading an entertainment audience with sound—those principles won’t change. They haven’t changed since we sat around campfires and made mouth noises while we told stories.

WOODY:  The tools have changed, but you still have a slate, some type of recorder and a microphone. We may not use Pro Tools in a decade, but we’ll still do it the same.

DAVE:  Yes. Craftsmanship isn’t the tools. If you’re a carpenter, do you really care if your hammer has a green handle or a red handle?

WOODY:  Exactly. As long as it’ll hammer a nail. Let’s take one final diversion.  Now we talked earlier about your actual whole entrée into audio was the fact that you’re a visual artist, and you were interested in animation as an animator as opposed to a sound professional. And you did give me a copy of your book, which I loved, The Tao of Sh*t. So, other than this book do you still pursue the visual arts? How did that particular project start?

The Tao Of Sh*t

DAVE:  One of my childhood friends, Jonathan Wolff, is a very spiritual guy, and is an educator—an educational consultant—he works primarily for the Montessori School. He holds workshops with their faculty and stuff. He’s a very deep thinker, but he also has a hilariously earthy sense of humor. We grew up listening to comedy records together, and he’s a very funny guy. You’d never know it when I described his job. He holds sort of highly psychological and spiritual workshops for Montessori teachers. He has done a lot of spiritual study from back in the 70s when we were pretty young, and several years ago he came up with these little koans that he had written that incorporated the idea of shit in the figurative sense—shit as in psychological baggage or work you have to do—shit in the figurative sense, not in the scatological sense. And he wrote all these cute little koans about shit, as we like to say. And he printed it up, with very pretty type, and gave it to a few friends. At some point, either he asked me to illustrate it, or I offered to illustrate it over dinner, or something—I can’t even remember now. But I said it really ought to have these sort of faux Japanese and Chinese and Indian—Asian—art to it. And he said, “Can you do that?” And I said, “Well, I minored in art history, and I can probably illustrate it.  So, let’s do that.”

WOODY:  I really enjoyed that book. I had a fun time flying home to LA from Savannah reading that.

Dec 2010 (David Stone)

DAVE:  I like to draw, and about every two or three years, I get inspired to draw a magazine cartoon, which I never submit. Or something funny, which I never get done. I enjoy fooling around with Photoshop. I’ll occasionally do a gag Photoshop picture on Facebook.  I still have the impulse to draw funny stuff. I have a project I started in the 70s sitting in yellowed old pieces of paper in a portfolio somewhere that I’d love to revive and finish up. Which was a mock do-it-yourself project book. I’d love to revive that. But first things first—gotta mow the lawn, pay the bills.

WOODY:  That’s your retirement project.

DAVE:  I don’t wanna retire.

WOODY:  Anybody I’ve ever met who retired I didn’t meet again.

DAVE:  That’s right—they usually drop dead.

WOODY:  That’s what I’m saying.

DAVE:  If they bust me out of the chair’s office, and I still stay employed just teaching and not chairing, then I can get some of those projects done. Because administering takes a lot of extra time—and I enjoy it.  I do get my rocks off playing around with the typography and stuff.

WOODY:  Thanks David, this has been a wonderful conversation.  Looking forward to hearing your movies and enjoying your satire.

May 2009 (David Stone)

DAVE: It was my pleasure Woody.

WOODY: You are mostly considered a “supervising sound editor” how do you describe what that means?

GENDLER: It’s the person who is in charge of the effects, sound design, voice replacement, ADR, the Foley, the background, all of the sounds it takes to put you into a picture.  It’s fair to say that the supervising sound editor is the boss of the sound editing team. The supervising sound editor puts together the team.  If you have a team you like, you try and use them because there’s a shorthand that you use together. There’s a trust factor. You know they’ll give you what you want.

When you begin you start with the script, the director, editors and the producers.  The postproduction supervisor is the one who tells you “these are the dreams for the sound, but this is the reality of the budget. How do we make it all work?”

The idea is to look at all the sound that is needed for the film excluding the music which is usually the music editor working with the composer and the director. What I like to do while I’m creating sounds is to give them samples of what I’m making, and just say, I’m going for these registers. Is this gonna be OK with what you’re doing? Because a lot of the time the music is playing through a scene and we’re going to hit on certain specific moments and all of the sound elements have to work together.

WOODY: How involved do you get with the postproduction supervisor?

GENDLER: We’ll talk about budget and scheduling. I submit a budget for what the deal costs, how many weeks the editors will be on for, and make contingencies if something happens – where we’ll need to work overtime or they change the picture edit the day before the temp mix all of this goes through the post-supervisor. Sometimes you have to be very creative to fix the problems. The post-supervisor becomes more like the line producer for post.

I make a budget list from the budget information that they give me. I explain where I see the money going. How many weeks of dialogue editing we’re going to need, how many weeks of effects editing, how many weeks of ADR, whatever, we will have this lump sum of money for the editorial section.

The post-supervisor doesn’t usually get involved in my day to day, unless it involves a mixing facility stage. If we’re on an ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement) stage he’ll make sure we got everything we needed for each actor and makes sure that the actors won’t have to come back and go into an overtime situation.  The post-supervisor is who I need to talk to if there’s a bump in the road.

WOODY:  When they are making a feature at what point in the process are you hired?

GENDLER: Usually while the picture is still being cut usually, but it’s always different. It’s gone both ways. Sometimes I come on board even before they’ve started shooting. It’s great if you can get on board while they’re shooting because every picture has something very, very special about it. It could be a specific car that is different from other cars than you have in your sound effects library. It could be doing different maneuvers than what you would usually have. In that case, it’s great if you can get it on set and get the actual car if they have it there. That way you can personally record it and get everything you need for it. It makes it smooth from going to the effects sound of the car in production.

It helps sometimes if you know that there’s a location that’s special. How many times do you go on films and say, Man, I wish I could’ve had somebody down there just to record the sound effects of that swamp or something.  I was very lucky on some films that I’ve been on where they had big crowd scenes. I was very lucky that they gave me five minutes at the end of the day of shooting to work the crowd for a bit to get big sounds from them that were specific for the film. That was great.

I look at the script and say, I think this would be really great if we could bring my sound recorders down to the set. Sometimes you get that opportunity. When it works, it’s fantastic. They let me do that on Stargate and on Independence Day.

WOODY: What software do you typically use for your work?

GENDLER: I mostly work in ProTools; We use various plug-ins.  I used to work a little bit on Control 24 mixing console. They are incredibly useful. It really helps, especially if you have a good monitoring system.  I started in mag, [magnetic sprocket audio tape] but now I’m in Pro Tools.

WOODY: Pro Tools is what most of us seem to use here in Hollywood.  What’s a typical time frame on a feature from when you start to the final mix?

GENDLER: Depends on the needs of the show. For a DGA [Directors Guild of America] film, the director usually gets 10 weeks to do his picture cut. I’ll usually come on after 8 weeks (8 weeks after the shoot has ended). Typically the reason that they put me on is because the director doesn’t want to show it to anyone without some sound things behind it.

For example if the door closes you’ll want to hear a sound for it. That way it doesn’t seem like a on – set door. If I come in early, I just start pulling sound effects. It’s a lot easier nowadays for other people to access it with the abundance of servers and SFX libraries today.

I spend a lot of time making sure that things are consistent through the film: I’ll make sure the hero’s car has a certain feel.  If there are firearms involved I will find the sounds for the hero’s gun. You want to make sure that the principle sounds in the film are consistent.  I like to get involved in the sound design in order to give the director and producers some samples.  That way I can get input from them. I also like to be involved so that I’m not shocked or surprised when we watch the temp mix in the screening and the director says, What is that?

Let’s say there are two weeks before the temp, then there’s usually there are at least 4 weeks of sound editorial. It could be more. They may have a couple of previews but you won’t be able to get through all of it.

Then there are also the pre-dubs. The length of the pre-dubs depends on the budget and the complexity of material as well. It could be a few days or it could be a couple of weeks.  ADR can be time-consuming, recording and then trying to work the ADR and get it to match and not sound like ADR.  But generally on a small budget, it’s usually 6 weeks until we get to the mixing stage. I’ve done it for less.

WOODY:  ADR can take some time.  Newer directors can be a bit cavalier about “we’ll just get it later in ADR.”  They may not quite realize that besides getting the right performance and the correct lip-sync, takes will have to be auditioned and chosen and then those will have to be finessed in a mix to match the production recordings it is being cut with.

GENDLER:  When I did Muppets in Space, there was a lot of ADR. They used drop down lav mics for the actors during the shooting of that picture. When we did the ADR, I went and got those mic contraptions that the puppeteers used during production so that it would match or at least get as close as we could to the production residence of the voice.

WOODY: So tell me, how did you get involved in sound?

GENDLER: I was a picture editor. At the time, it just seemed a lot less political to be involved in sound. You know, it gets really political on the cutting room floor. I helped with sound while I was in school, and I liked it. It was very straightforward and not as political.  I haven’t touched picture in the longest time, years and years and years.

WOODY: A sound guy who’s not a musician?

GENDLER: No, not a musician.  I can strum a little bit [laughs], but no, not a musician.

WOODY: No more picture editing?

GENDLER: No, I haven’t touched picture in the longest time.

WOODY: I remember digging through bins for frame numbers, I was an assistant film editor for my first job when I came to LA. A friend of mine was a feature editor cutting film on a flatbed.  He said I can get you a job, probably only about 5 dollars an hour, to dig through the trims and find me frames to put back in.  Then I started working with the mag and the grease pencils and it fascinated me.

GENDLER:  So you know what a synchronizer is?  [Laughs]

WOODY: Absolutely.  I mean it’s such a completely different world now with Pro Tools and computers and digital world.  The stuff you can do with a firewire drive and a laptop these days is just incredible.  What I tell my interns these days is to buy a four track recorder and a microphone, because you need to learn the real thing.  With computers what happens is you end up with crashes, conflicts with drivers, plug-ins and operating systems that need updating and you end up getting stuck there and not making audio.  The fastest way to learn audio is to get out there with a recorder and a microphone, that’s how you’re going to learn this stuff.

GENDLER: You know it.

WOODY: So I see that you’ve worked with some directors on a regular basis, for instance Roland Emmerich. I’ve also noticed that you’ve done a lot of action type movies going back as far as Charles Bronson and Stephen Segal, Van Damme, and Chuck Norris.  Now those I would imagine are very audio intensive, certainly in terms of the foley and fighting and gun fire etc.  What type of particular challenges do you have when doing action movies?

GENDLER:  It depends on the script. One tip – You want the guns to sound big and bad, but you want the hero’s gun to sound better than the bad guys guns. You have to ask yourself, why do people want to watch the car crashes at the Indy 500? They want to hear all these visceral thrills, the impacts and skids.  It helps to put you into the action.

The thing is that you are really only there to serve the narrative, I mean I’ve also worked on quieter films like say two people talking in the kitchen about a relationship.  You want to make sure whatever you are doing serves the narrative.

The thing about an action film is that it will be big and loud; everybody wants that. But it’s much harder when there is nothing there.  You have to create mood.  You can use a colder air with a little bit of whistle in it or whatever is needed to create the reality of that world.  You want to give what will help, whatever supports the narrative.

WOODY: Have you found that because you’ve worked on so many action films that you are like a go to guy for action?

GENDLER: [Laughs] Get me Gendler.

WOODY: [Laughs] Right!  I got crashes, I need Gendler.

You’ve worked on Oscar award winning films as well like Blind Side or Independence Day, Field of Dreams, Crash, and those kinds of features.

GENDLER: Yeah Crash, for the most part, is a quieter film, and mainly just dialogue.  You really want to make sure that the dialogue is clean, but even there we do something that tries to help the mood.  When the father, the locksmith played by Michael Pena, comes home and sees his little daughter hiding under the bed because she’s afraid, we wanted to make it almost like a church in there.  We played the recordings of Ave Maria and mixed them into the air, just subtly there, so that it almost feels like she was praying.  You probably wouldn’t notice, but we wanted to make it real subtle, just to create that ambience.

WOODY: That’s a great technique. Do you use that on a lot of quieter film like say The Blind Side?

GENDLER: Well I was just the effects editor, on Blind Side, I wasn’t the supervising, Jon Johnson was the supervising on that. I cut the football sequences and I put a lot just to make the impacts of our star, Michael Ore, really big.  I always cut explosions into the impacts so it would make it that much bigger.  What you’re looking to do, especially in a lot of these actions films, is you’re always looking for the jaws effect. You’re expecting to see the shark and expecting it to be so big, so big that it scares you.  I try to do that with sound sometimes, you expect it to be so big and then I make it even bigger so that you get a punch on it.

WOODY: When you’re doing a picture like that, these Oscar winning movies, do you have a sense of that when you are working on it?

GENDLER: It’s hard to say. Some movies are very special when you’re working on them, and you hope they do well. Sometimes they get discovered and sometimes they don’t. But you work just as hard on every film. It’s not that you work harder on any of these films; you just work the best you can because everybody’s got a lot riding on them, so you do your best.  Some films we knew were going to be big  you felt like, Wow this film really works – I hope one of these is catching.  But, I don’t think you can predict ahead of time what it’s going to be.

WOODY:  That’s just sort of the way it is, there’s a lot of stuff out there and some of it gets attention and some of it doesn’t.

GENDLER:  Some of it’s really good and for whatever reason.

WOODY: just falls through the cracks.  Even stuff with a name actor, I’m sure if you look up Al Pacino there’s fifteen pictures on there you’ve never heard of, never seen.

GENDLER: There are always different reasons; maybe they weren’t correctly marketed, wrong timing, whatever the reasons are.

WOODY:  I just heard that Jackass 3 was such a huge hit they’ve ordered three more.

GENDLER:  It cost them 20 million and the first week they were in profits.

WOODY:  Yeah it’s a good business if you’ve got a hit!  Do you have favorite moments from projects that you’ve worked on?

GENDLER: Oh gosh you know, I love a lot of the movies I’ve worked on.  They were fun to do.  We’ve done some crazy stuff just trying to record things. You used to be able to go out in Palm Dale and record vehicles on this one road that had gravel right out on the side of it and you could get tires on rock, dirt and asphalt.

We had this school bus on I think it was Universal Soldier that Jean Claude Van Damme is being transported in, and the driver gets shot while the bus is going off the road. We tried to mimic this shot, so we were in a car following the yellow school bus. It gets pretty wacky. We even had police coming down after us, and we didn’t have permits. But it sounded great!

There are moments in a lot of projects that are just really fun.  The nice thing about SFX is that it’s like a candy – an instant gratification. You know right away if it works or not. The hardest things are the subtlest.  It was difficult in the Field of Dreams to create the voice that he hears. We went through a lot of different processes treating different reverbs on parts with different pitches, the repeat on the higher and lower parts.  The director didn’t like any of it until we finally nailed it, but that was a looooong process and we went through a lot of permutations.

I learned a lot though. It’s almost like every project you work on is like a term paper; you become an expert about one specific thing by the time it’s done.  I think most sound editors are like that; they really need to get deep into things.

WOODY:  I know you’ve done so many shows, is there one or two that stand out as a real highlight for you, as a career moment?

GENDLER: Well I’ve really enjoyed the latest.

WOODY:  What’s your latest project?

GENDLER: The last one I’ve worked on is Battle of Los Angeles, which will be coming out in March (I think).

WOODY: Another action picture?

GENDLER: It’s an action picture. I was just the sound editor on it.  I supervised the Foley and backing up the stage on it, because there were so many changes coming down the pipe I was trying to keep up with that.  That is a great movie.

The one picture I really liked a lot is the film Stargate – that would probably be my favorite.

WOODY: On what level?  Just loved the movie or the experience?

GENDLER: I loved the experience and the satisfaction with the work. It just felt like we nailed everything that we set out to do.

WOODY: So is Battle of Los Angeles the latest thing that you have coming out?

GENDLER: I did another small little thing that I did right after Battle of Los Angeles called The Chosen One, which I did the sound design for.

I did another small film with Jeff Bridges in it that for whatever reason never saw the light of day.  Another recent film was The Amateurs. It was just such a sweet movie. I really enjoyed working on it.  Jeff Bridges leads a really great cast.

WOODY: Yeah, you know I saw that on your IMDB and what a great cast – Bridges, Tim Blake Nelson, Fichtner, Danson.  It was totally off the radar, I had never even heard of that movie.

GENDLER: It only opened in two cities, Los Angeles for one week and Dallas.  They only spent like a dollar fifty for publicity on it, but it was a really sweet movie.  I really enjoyed the process working on that movie.

WOODY:  I’ll look for it.

GENDLER: Yeah, for some reason it just never caught the waves.  Jeff Bridges is great in it, he is really just incredible and a pleasure to work with.

WOODY:  Do you have any favorite actors that you’ve worked with?

GENDLER: Well he would be up there, but there are a lot of really good actors.  The thing is with actors, what they do is amazing.  I am so amazed at what they do.  How they are able to convince us of their emotions and what they’re doing and thinking.  How sometimes with the slightest movement or slightest variation they really change the meaning of something.  It’s just amazing.

WOODY: I see you’ve done a lot of projects with supervising sound editor Jon Johnson.  A lot of mixers work in teams.  Is it sort of like that in the editing aspect as well?

GENDLER: Yeah, you just know that you can rely on each other. You create shorthand. You know you can be creative and work well together and communicate with each other. We feel that it is always in the best interest of the project to do a good job and have fun while doing it.

WOODY: So what would you tell an intern or somebody who is just learning sound editing?  Do you have any career advice for them?

GENDLER: I would say to meet as many people as possible. Make sure they know you’re available. It’s an old thing of looking for a job while you’re not looking.  I don’t know why it is, but people for whatever reason get nervous if someone is too hungry for work. Try to learn as much as you can from everybody, but understand that it is a work situation and not school. They can’t answer every question. Pay attention and you can learn, do your job, and do it well. Be curious and try to learn as much as you can about everything.  Then – go back to law school.  [laughs]

WOODY: Do you have any particular approaches to working with directors and getting the sound edit done?

GENDLER: A lot of times some directors aren’t sound savvy. They know the visual and music, but sound they are not always really involved in.  You need to specifically ask them what they are trying to do or looking at the cut this is what I’m thinking.  Is that in the right direction?  Do you want to add something here?  Some of the things you can do sometimes can help directors expand their vision. It’s like they only had money for four people on the set, but if you somehow want to convey that there is a lot of activity you can do that with rooms and backgrounds.  You can coax it out of people.  One of my favorite director lines was from Roland Emmerich. I want it to sound like something I’ve never heard before and I said, Well, can you explain that and he said, No, I’ve never heard it before. [Laughs]

WOODY: Do you have any advice that you would give a new director to improve sound for their projects?

GENDLER: Definitely listening to their production mixer that is probably telling them when they can’t shoot. There are a dozen things going on the set that they can’t even begin to fathom like they are losing light or they only have the location for so long and they need to shoot 5 more pages of the script.  So there tends to be this fix it in post mentality.

Get the room tone with everybody in the scene still; it will sound different without the people. Hire a good production mixer; it will save you a lot of money on the back end. There is a magic that happens when the cameras are rolling, the actors just feel it. It’s always hard to get back to that with ADR. If they have a line that they think is questionable, get a wild track on set and we can generally piece together a pretty good sync of everything.  It saved having to loop it later.

I like to work with new filmmakers too because their stuff is just edgy and great. But there are always a slew of problems on their projects that can’t be fixed. No matter what the budget is, there is still a certain amount of work that has to be done there has to be Foley, there has to be ADR, there has to be sound effects, backgrounds, and it all has to be mixed.

The question is often how to be creative and stretch the budget. Sometimes you can do a lot. Balancing everything against each other. If there isn’t money for predubbing, you can do a lot of the predubs in the box while you’re in the edit.

WOODY: Final Words? Something we didn’t cover?

GENDLER: To aspiring filmmakers: Sound is 50 percent of your movie so pay attention to it.

WOODY:  I hope people hear that!  Thanks Sandy, I appreciate your time.

GENDLER: Let’s go make some movies.

WOODY:  Great idea!

Jeff Toyne is a composer whose oeuvre includes feature films, many shorts — including two nominated for Academy Awards, composer for “The Two Coreys” on A&E and is renowned for his extensive orchestrations for Hollywood features such as District 9 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  He splits his time between Vancouver and the States; back in December of 2008, we met up at his Los Angeles studio to discuss his career and insights into composing music for the moving image.

WOODY: How did you get started in music?

JEFF: I was thinking about music as a career in high school.  What solidified it for me was the summer I spent at Interlochen in Michigan, which is a wonderful music and arts camp.  At school, I did well in most subjects, but music really challenged me.  I wasn’t a prodigy by any stretch of the imagination, but I played the piano well, so I went to university with piano as my instrument.  I started on a music education track, which allowed me to learn the basics of many orchestral instruments, but my secret desire was to switch over to piano performance.  I had a wonderful piano teacher who was actually one of the only students that Horowitz ever admitted to teaching, and he was a great pianist and a really great guy.  Previous teachers had allowed me to develop some bad technical habits that I was always able to overcome, but the only way for me to get to the top level of repertoire would be to stop everything, go back to basics and rebuild my technique from the ground up.  That would take a year or two, but I needed to perform a recital at the end of every semester.  There was just no way to go all the way back again unless I took a year or two off.  So performing fell away as a possibility for me, and at the same time I took more advanced theory and composition courses, for which I showed aptitude.  I became more interested writing music, so I did a Masters in Composition.

WOODY: What were some of the first compositions you worked on?

JEFF: Growing up taking piano lessons, I’d improvise something and my teacher would say “you should write that down.”  One of my first experiences writing was in high school.  I put together an R&B band that had a horn section, but the players didn’t play by ear, so I transcribed and arranged the horn charts for them.  In retrospect, that was a really good exercise to fuel my interest in composing. The last year of my undergrad I did my first film score, which was a feature that I recorded with a 13-piece big band and an eight-piece chamber ensemble.  I had no sequencing software; I wrote it in Finale.  And that’s how I was synching to picture; I was playing back in Finale and pressing play on my VCR.  When I came to USC I was so ready for that course because I had actually scored a film, not knowing how to do it.  So I had all the questions.

WOODY: What made you decide to go into film composing instead of focusing on other types of work?

JEFF: By the time I was in my third or fourth year of undergrad, I saw the music that I wrote and the kinds of composition that I was interested in, had a place in film.  I was interested in aleatoric composition, pandiatonic stuff…  The serial stuff wasn’t really where I wanted to go; even the new tonality was interesting to me, minimalism as well, and all these things had places in film.  I’m not just a “classical music” guy, I had experience in Jazz, Blues and Rock as well.  I struggle now as a film composer to find a hole that people can niche me into, but I came to film because of eclecticism.  I imagined that I could actually make a living – get paid to write music and have orchestras record this music.  This seemed like the way to go.

WOODY: That sounds like a good way to come about a career where you get paid for it, and you work with world-class musicians and sync it to the film, and it becomes an emotional experience for people and their understanding of your music.

JEFF: I really believe that Wagner’s idea of gesamtkunstwerk is alive in film today.  I think films represent his idea of total artworks.  They bring together artists from every field to completely envelop an audience in every sense and involve them in the story.  If I have a score that’s attached to a film, that’s the way to reach the most people.  The Beatles or Madonna may reach more people, but I think a couple of people saw Star Wars!  So I’m really happy to be involved.  One of the reasons that I think directors like to work with well-known performing artists, is because of the idea that you’re bringing in people who are experts from other fields.  If you come in and you’ve already sold a couple of million records, then maybe we should listen to your idea before we tell you how it’s going to be.  They have something they can offer, something they can bring to the film.

WOODY: So you’ve worked with Ed Shearmur on a couple of things.  Tell me a little bit about the collaboration between the two of you and what you did for him and also the value that you’ve taken out of it as a composer.

JEFF: I started working for Ed straight out of school as an assistant.  I was really lucky to be recommended to him.  I’d just graduated USC, and he was looking for a new assistant.  I think they recommended three or four people based on the software he was using and the kind of things he was looking for. So I started off getting tea and making sure lunch happened at 1 o’clock and making sure the couch didn’t go anywhere.  He was really linear about the responsibility that he doled out, but it began very much in the technical arena.  Some of my first tasks were sorting out word clock issues and making sure samples were organized and loaded.  After assisting him for a month or two, my first musical job was cutting together piano takes for K-PAX.  He was really searching for the right piano sound for K-PAX.  Giga piano was new at that time, so he had a pass done with that, and he went to Capital Records and he recorded on Nat King Cole’s piano.  He recorded a Disklavier and he wasn’t completely happy with any one of them.  He wanted to be able to A, B, C any pass at any one time, so he had me go in and slice those performances to match each other.  So that was my first slightly musical job. Then at some point, I think on The Sweetest Thing, I did some music copying.  After a year or so I got a chance to orchestrate a couple of cues on Reign of Fire, which was a big opportunity, and then I started doing more orchestrations for films after that.  I worked for him for about three years full time.

WOODY: What were you able to take from that, now yourself as a composer, having worked with someone like that?

JEFF: One of my USC instructors said that if you’re an assistant, you can see how a composer does his job; how he interacts with the director, producers, engineers, musicians; and you’re right next to the heat, but it’s not your heat.  That’s a really great place to be.  You’re a fly on the wall.  You’re assisting someone who’s working at the highest level for A-list Hollywood films and you can see how they’re doing it and you’re involved.  You’ll inevitably make some mistakes as you’re learning.  But that’s his career that you’re making your mistakes and learning on.  So that’s a really valuable chance to be given – to cut your chops on somebody else’s dime, in a way.  I’m really grateful for that experience.  Ed is an uncannily gifted musician and film composer.  He’s just a force to be reckoned with.  Here’s a guy who has amazing classical chops, concert pianist skills and rock ‘n’ roll credentials to boot.  He brings those two together.  And he’s one of those people that will never ask you to do anything that he couldn’t do himself.  It was quite intimidating to work for someone so talented.  In addition to the musical component, he was adept at understanding the drama and getting inside the structure of the movie and the interaction of the characters.  His ability to get to the heart of what the filmmakers were trying to do dramatically and how the music may affect them — that was really impressive.  It’s one thing to write a beautiful piece of music, but it’s another thing to have that beautiful piece of music be the right tone and start at the right time and be the right emotional variant that makes sense dramatically.  He was very good at that.

WOODY: Tell us about the process of composing a film.  When do you get involved, and how do you start the process with the director?

JEFF: I like to be involved as early as possible, even to the point where I’m reading the script and having conversations with the director before they shoot to discuss themes and what the sonic landscape might be like.  And having that kind of time takes away some of the pressure, especially on a lower budget movie.  As a filmmaker, you can give a composer all of this time in lieu of the fact that you can’t pay them very much, but you still want it to be really good.  I’ve found that if I’m able to be brought in really early it’s nice to have that in the back of your mind somewhere just fermenting and having conversations, thinking about how it might go and maybe even putting down some material that the director can have on set or they can at least be thinking about.  So, I’d like to be brought in as early as possible, but generally the real work starts to happen once they have a cut to look at.  One of the main goalposts in the production schedule is the spotting session, when the filmmakers have an edit and they’re ready to start thinking seriously about the sound.  So they come in, and we watch the film.  Spotting always takes longer than we think it’s going to take, at least eight hours for a feature, sometimes more.  We talk in detail about where each piece of music is going to start and, if there is a temp score, where it is starting and where it should start and what it does and what it’s supposed to do.  These discussions can really become quite protracted and abstract.  It’s an important step of the process.

WOODY: How do you approach the work when a director comes to you with a temp score?

JEFF: I don’t have a problem with temporary score.  I think a temp score is a good way to have both of us point at something and talk about it objectively.  Composers will generally say that they want directors to talk not in musical terms, but in dramatic terms.  They want them to talk about character and emotion and mood and feeling; how they want the audience to react; as opposed to, “Oh, I think this should be an oboe or cello.”  What a temp score can do is it can allow you both to say, “Okay that music there, I don’t know what it is, but it works with this scene at this moment for some reason.”  Or, “Here I don’t like it, there’s something that is not right.”  And at least it allows you to very quickly say, “Yeah, this is a great place for music to come in, this is a great place for music to come out and this mood is kind of what I was going for.”  So in that regard a temp score is a useful tool.  And we can’t deny that they are absolutely necessary when the directors need to show their film to other people and get finishing funds or to submit to festivals or get distribution.  They need to show the film in the best light they possibly can.  There’s going to be a temp score in there whether you as a composer listen to it or not.  Where the problem generally comes in is when they’ve spent a lot of time with the temp score and are having a really hard time getting away from the temp score or are not really interested in trying a new approach.

WOODY: How do you combat that when a director is really attached to a piece in their temp score and they feel that you the composer are not getting what they want?

JEFF: You have to pick your battles.  Depending on the situation, as a last ditch effort, if it seems there’s nothing else that you can possibly do, you can suggest they try to license the piece.  “If I’m not going to replace this, you should really license this.”  The last film I did, I went around a couple of times with the director who was having trouble getting away from the temp.  He had a song at the end of the film that when we first started I could tell he loved, and they were supposed to be able to license it.  So I said, “You know what, if you’re going to license this song, I will take the melodic motive from this song and I will weave this into the rest of the film.”  Music can offer this to a film: unity and diversity.  So we’ll have this little motive that will tie everything together and after we’ve heard these little fragments, then at the end of the film we’ll hear the full song and it’ll feel familiar and satisfying and everything will be great.  And so we did this and a week before they were going to mix the film they said, “You know what, it turns out that we can’t really get this song unless we pay another “x” dollars, can you replace the song?”  And I thought, “Can I replace this song that you’ve been living with in an edit for two years, that you’ve had in your record collection for five years before that, and when you were writing the film were probably listening to this song?  Can I replace this?  Of course I can, no problem.”  I did kind of drag my heels for a few days, saying, “Are you sure,” giving them time to flip-flop back.  Finally he said, “We’re really sure,” so I finally did it and I spent another two or three days on it.  And I thought I had come up with something.  Then a couple days later they said, “you know what, we decided to pay the extra money and get the song.”  So that’s a situation where I can’t say that I won or lost.  The film got made, the filmmaker got what he wanted and the lesson there is that people will always find the time and money to do what they really want to do.  Sometimes the way a song is of its time suggests not only the meanings of the song, but also the meaning of the situation that the filmmaker was in when he first heard it and the things that were going on in the world.  But at the end of the day, I keep in mind that we’re all working towards having a good film that affects audiences.  I basically have a can-do attitude about it.  I’m not super precious about the music.  There’s a push and pull between the needs of the film and our need for artistic integrity.

WOODY: I go through that all the time as a sound designer and mixer because the choices made ultimately are not mine.

JEFF: Exactly.  But that being said, nine times out of ten the filmmakers have really good reasons for the choices that they make.

WOODY: Absolutely.

JEFF: Their ability to see the film from beginning to end in one vista is amazing.  I definitely get myopic sometimes.  In the same way that they have to trust me to deliver their score on time and on budget and do a good job and get what their story’s about, I have to trust them that they’ve been living with this a whole lot longer than I have.

WOODY: Do you set the cue points, the director or both?

JEFF: The last couple of films that I’ve done there’s been a temp score.  Either an editor (ideally a music editor, but usually the picture editor) or the director have already kind of gone through a couple of times, at least for themselves, to see where music might go.  Often, as in Shadow in the Trees, we may come to a couple of points in the film where there isn’t temp music and I think we might try having a cue.  I generally leave it with, “Let me try something and if I think it’s working I’ll show it to you, and if I don’t think it’s working I won’t.”  That gives me options. We have these kinds of conversations about whether or not we think this should be here or there, and if so, why.  And then we’re into it, we’re starting to do show and tells, (what we call the meetings after the spotting session), where usually a director is coming over to my studio, or I am occasionally sending QuickTime movies over the internet or sometimes mp3’s for them to slide into their timeline.

WOODY: And these are sort of sketches or demos even though it may be an orchestrated piece?

JEFF: Nowadays, demos are expected to be pretty detailed.  If it’s a director that I have worked with before, and we both have confidence in their ability to extrapolate from a sketch, then I don’t need to spend as much time on the demos, and can spend more of my time writing.  If they’re really nervous about how it’s going to go, then I’ll make the demo more fleshed out and more “convincing.”

WOODY: What kind of timeframe are we talking about from your spotting session to really having fleshed out cues?

JEFF: Well, a composer is supposed to be able to crank out anywhere from 3-5 minutes a day.  That’s really smokin’.  The big boys do that.  They’ll do fully realized, big orchestral demos like that, 3 minutes a day for sure.  So if you’ve got a schedule where you’re scoring a film and you have six weeks to do it, and there’s 60 minutes of music in the film…it starts to just play out.  You need to be showing the director every couple of days a certain amount of music so that they’ve seen everything and you have time for notes, changes, music prep, recording, mixing and everything like that.  I heard that Danny Elfman usually has two parties when he gets a job.  One’s a going away party, and one’s a welcome back party when he’s done.

WOODY: Let’s talk more about the process for you.  Do you find that you are generally the composer, the performer, the recordist and the mixer?  How do you break that out?

JEFF: Yes, but at every opportunity I will hand off a job to an expert. I’m delighted to have a mixing engineer at least mix my music.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of time, there isn’t enough time to get files over to somebody and back or to have somebody come in.  In terms of performing, to be honest with you, I would really rather have somebody else play.  The piano part I can go in and tweak the midi, but we have a beautiful grand piano out there (in the tracking room of my studio).  I’d rather bring in a pianist with great touch. I remember one time I had a violinist come in and she was trying to play along with the demo and for some reason it just wasn’t happening.  After a couple of takes, I asked her to play with a little more vibrato and a little more portamento.  And she said, “Oh, I was trying to get it to sound exactly like the demo.”  I said, “No, no, I want you to play like a human being.  The reason I brought you in is because the demo sounds like that.  I don’t want it to sound like that!”  When somebody’s interpreting your music, there’s another level of musicality going on there.  I tend to write for instruments in a way that they’ll sound the best.  And I really try to avoid situations where I am trying to do something with samples.  If I know I’m going to be doing a synth score, then it won’t be an orchestral sound.  And if I’m using orchestra stuff, then I’ll try and write in a way that’s idiomatic for the instruments. I really do believe that this is a collaborative art form, and I’m happy to not be here by myself all day.  I’m delighted to have someone come in and music edit, someone come in and do the copying and bring in any performers I possibly can.  But the best experience is to record with an orchestra. That’s the juice for the composers.

WOODY: Have you been thrown for a loop on shows?

JEFF: This is where the spotting session comes in and you kind of have to know your audience, as small as it is.  I’ve worked with Steve McLaughlin and one of his big successes was with Badly Drawn Boy for the score for About a Boy.  He said that a film composer only has an audience of one.  You only have to convince a director that your music is good, sometimes with a producer or a little committee.  But even at best you’re convincing 15 guys or girls that this is good music as opposed to someone who goes out and tours their album and convinces a hundred thousand people that their music is good.

WOODY: Have you found yourself in a situation where you’ve had a spotting session and you thought you were on the same page and you’re presenting cues, yet they’re scratching their head going that’s not really right?  Or has the temp score sort of solved that and you understand what they want?

JEFF: I’ve definitely been in situations where I’ve just missed the mark and there are different reasons that happened.  As a student there was one film that was supposed to have authentic Japanese kabuki theater music. Under time pressure I just fired up the sampler and put anything remotely Asian on there.  The director came back and said, “No that’s Chinese, and that’s a Thai gong, and that’s Korean, that is Japanese, but it’s not kabuki and I really need this to be authentic kabuki theater music.”  So that was a huge miss and a failure to listen carefully to what the director had already said. Film music can occasionally give a composer the opportunity to dive into unfamiliar territory, and explore exotic instruments and musical styles. This is an opportunity and a risk. It helps to be a quick study, but more importantly to hear what your director is telling you.

WOODY: When you’re creating a score what sort of problems arise?

JEFF: There’s occasionally a conversation that kind of goes around when the demos and samples don’t really show the score very well, but you know it will sound great when played by live players.  There’s only so much of that that a director, especially one without a lot of experience, can really take.  So sometimes I have to go back and spend more time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend polishing a demo that’s going to have many elements replaced by recorded live players.  On indie films, it’s a soul-crushing conversation to have to say we don’t have the time to spend this level of detail on every single cue because we’ll just run out of the amount of time and money that is available for this movie. So what happens is directors often on indie films have to wear producer’s hats, and I often have to wear my agent’s hat.  They’re trying to get the best for their film, and I have to somehow be gently realistic saying, “You need to understand that I really want your film to be great, and I want to do a good job for your film, but we don’t have unlimited time and money.”  Unfortunately, especially when they’re doing it for the first time, they’re doing everything at a low-budget level so they don’t really know, necessarily, what things actually cost.  Composers like to be problem solvers.  We like to find creative ways to solve problems and our number one problem is often they don’t have enough time or enough money.

WOODY: Do you have any kind of theory for composing or do you have a way of working in terms of the creation of the music?  Or is it just really inspired by the picture and the story?

JEFF: Every project is different.  I tend to try and find something that I can use as a starting point and often it might be an instrument that makes sense as a voice that relates somehow to the characters in the story.  I’m usually driven by points in the story that we can take and extrapolate out into musical references. Usually films are thematic and they generally fall into either one theme for the whole movie or themes for individual characters and/or ideas.  When they have themes for individual characters and ideas, they start to resemble more classical opera forms.  Most of the films I find myself working on as the orchestrator or the composer, you say, “Oh this guy is on the screen and he’s doing this and there’s his theme.”  It’s a pretty accepted practice.  In film, melody is king and we’re generally writing melodies that have significance that we can attach to dramatic ideas.

WOODY: How do you go about getting work?

JEFF: When I was just starting out as a student at USC, I went down to the film school to put a poster up that said “Composer Available,” next to the poster that said “Composer Wanted.”  I did a lot of student films.  My main kind of networking has been just to stay in touch with the directors that I met when they were students.  I also get a lot of work from friends of mine that are composers.  A lot of work.  My first student film in LA was from a friend that couldn’t do it.  And he said, “Why don’t you get my buddy to do it, he can do a good job.”  My first television show was from a friend who was a composer who couldn’t do that show because they needed specifically a Canadian composer, and he only knew one Canadian composer, so he said, “You should call Jeff, he’s Canadian.”  It’s funny, I remember reading a marketing how-to and it said make to sure that people know what it is that you want to do.  So, just tell your friends and family, “This is what I want to do,” you never know who they’re going to run into that is looking for something like that.

WOODY: On a different note, tell us about your composition “No Fanfare” for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

JEFF: “No Fanfare” was a commission from the Vancouver Symphony.  When Vancouver was successful for the 2010 Winter Olympics bid, the Symphony decided to commission young composers to write short, 3-minute works on Olympic inspired themes.  They specifically said not to write fanfares because there are already so many great ones out there.  And so, the title of my piece is “No Fanfare”.  I thought if I said it’s not a fanfare, if it sounds a little fanfare-like then you can’t blame me, it says right in the title it’s not a fanfare.  But it also made sense with what I was interested in exploring musically.  I was interested in exploring musically some of the emotional landscape of the athletes that compete and don’t really do well by gold, silver and bronze standards.  If you compete and you place 76th, yes you’re proud that you went to the Olympics, but I wondered what that was like. I wanted to have a piece that was exciting for the audience, so I imagined a race where there were people racing at the same time, not against the clock.  If you start the race and freeze-frame somewhere in the middle, then consider all the possibilities that expand forth in separate timelines, nobody has won and nobody has lost yet and everything is still possible.  At that moment everyone is a potential winner and everyone is a potential loser and that’s the most exciting part of the race, when it’s actually happening.  Musically this had nice tie-ins to the Winter Olympics because you’re thinking of freezing things, flash-freezing a moment, and you have reflections in ice and things like this, so that’s kind of how I got into it musically.

WOODY: And that was played when exactly?

JEFF: The Vancouver Symphony performed it a couple of times in 2005, and now they have it in their repertoire.  I haven’t really spent a lot of energy pushing it further into the classical concert world, but that was a very blank page: writing a piece of concert music after being in film for a couple of years.  I have been exploring that side of music further.

WOODY: What advice would give a new or first time director in terms of collaboration with a composer?

JEFF: I think one of the bigger pet peeves is that music comes as an afterthought, that directors start to think about music really late in the process.  Maybe they’re thinking about sound late in the process, but this is half of the experience.  People are taking in the film through their eyes and their ears.  Directors have so much to think about, I know they do, to make a film.  There are so many different parts that go into it, but you can get a lot more out of your composer (or any crew member) if they feel that their job is valued and their contribution is valued because you’re thinking about the music early.  My advice to a director would be to think about the sound and music when they’re writing their script, when they’re doing their prep, when they’re shooting. Begin talking and thinking about music even at that early stage.  There’s nothing more stressful than being out of money and out of time and having to come to somebody and say, “Can you drop everything and do this?”  That’s really, really difficult to do.  And I really don’t want to have to say no to somebody.  Part of my job is to go on a journey and figure out what it is that this movie is supposed to be.  But films don’t get made overnight.  If you have a conversation while you’re in pre-production then you’ve got plenty of time to think about what it might be.

WOODY: How long have you been a music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: Going on 5 years last month.

WOODY: What was your first project? Was that a film or tv show?

DOMINIQUE: Actually it was a short film, The Spin Cycle which had a pretty good festival run. My wife was the screenwriter and our production company co-produced it with director Chris Ohlson of 824 Pictures..  At the time I was more active in my music publishing. I had this background of music licensing and that kind of activity and music supervision, at that time, wasn’t even on my mind. And then we went through a screening of the 1st cut with the director and the editor. The editor had picked the song It Must Be Love by Don Williams. And the song fit perfect but we needed to clear the rights to it. And that right there is the genesis of my music supervision. I went into it with the, I’m a publisher, I know what to do. It just was a different side of music licensing and I was so intrigued. I immediately started looking for other films to work on and it grew from there. Publishing faded to the background. Our catalog slowly diminished as the reversion clauses were coming due and everything was reverting back to the songwriters. I just didn’t have the time to deal with the publishing. I was just overwhelmed with films and licensing. That was the moment – in the editing room.

WOODY: So your background was as a music publisher. What did that work entail?

DOMINIQUE: I would get submissions from songwriters and bands looking to get their songs cut by other artists. I would listen to the music that they would send me. I would make the decision whether I would become publisher of their song and pitch to the A&R departments at RCA and Sony and various artists in hopes to get the song cut by one of these big country stars up and coming in the community. That was the gist of my publishing experience at the time. That was a very difficult and competitive venture for me because I was an unknown music producer in the Round Rock Austin area. In the Nashville area publishers were walking right up to the A&R dept at Mercury and Sony and others. It was discouraging. So when music supervision came into my vision it was something positive, something that I could do that didn’t involve someone else’s career and I gravitated to that. The publishing companies are still active; in fact, they are like a sister company to the film production company we have. If we need someone to write specific music to one of our films that we work on then our publishing company will handle the publishing and the administration of the songs, but that is a very tiny part of the business.

WOODY: Are you a composer or musician yourself?

DOMINIQUE: I have been songwriting and playing instruments since I was a child, and when I was in my late 20′s I really wanted to take my songwriting to the next level. I bought a $2000 keyboard and a 4-track recorder and I just started taking years and years of wanting to write music to the forefront of my life. I started writing music and lyrics, and putting them together and, sadly enough [LAUGHS], performing the vocals on [the compositions]. My excuse was, It was just to get the idea across, I was not bragging that I was a singer. But I had a couple of songs played on the radio in San Antonio in 1989, so I honestly wanted to be somebody, not as an artist but as a songwriter. I wanted my songs to be recorded by other artists. I would send my songs to publishers just like writers do to me, but this was back in the late 80s and early 90s.

WOODY: So this was prior to you getting into publishing yourself?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah. Well, what happened was I ended up moving to Nashville, back in 1993 and I was there for eight years. I left San Antonio, and went to Germany to visit my brother for four months, and when I came back to the states I didn’t have anywhere to go. I wanted to start somewhere new and I told my self I would either go to New York or Nashville. And in my decision I figured that Nashville would be more my scene, so I moved to Nashville and shortly after that I was working on music row at Mercury Records. There I would just immerse myself in what the A&R folks were doing and try to learn as much as I could, and I learned a lot about how the record industry works from the inside, from the Mercury Records point of view. Shortly after that, across the street was Acuff-Rose Publishing and I ended up getting a job over there working in the copyright department. I was fascinated by the phone calls and faxes that would come in from film production companies wanting to license music from their enormous catalog. That germinated in my head for about four years until finally in about 2002 I moved back to Texas, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to pursue publishing and I started two publishing companies, one affiliated with ASCAP and one affiliated with BMI. And that’s how that launched. But my own music writing kind of fell to the wayside when I was in Nashville. I had a roommate, who was an artist trying to make it and I saw what he was going through and the doors closing on him – and he was leagues ahead of me. I thought, There is no way I’m gonna make it as a songwriter. But I still write lyrics to myself right now, when things come to mind I have this box that is just full of lyrics and I’ll jot things down. I figure one day, when I get older [LAUGHS], I’m going to get me another studio just for my own pleasure.

WOODY: The urge to write music doesn’t go away. I started out as a songwriter and musician, and came to Hollywood for all that, too. Twenty-five years later I’m not going to be discovered, but you know, maybe one of my songs will.

DOMINIQUE: Exactly, and that was my whole point there, I didn’t want to be the famous guy, I just wanted someone to record my songs. Back then, Billboard magazine was like my Bible. I would always look at who the songwriters were on the charts, and think to myself, one day my name is going to be up the in the parenthesis – right there as songwriter. So, that gleam was in my eye.

WOODY: So let’s talk about what happens once you have been brought on board a feature film. What steps at that point happen for you as a music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: Well, it really depends on what point I come on board. There’s pre-production, there’s production when they are actually shooting the film, and post-production. Some directors have no musical vision, and some are very music savvy. So that also plays into what my role will be. If I come in, for example, in pre-production, I’ll get a copy of the script. I love reading the script, and then highlighting certain scenes where I feel that, a song needs to be here, or score here. Find out, not necessarily what song needs to be where, but just that, a song needs to be there, and then I will compile it on my worksheet. When I have a meeting with the director we’ll share notes and we go through that. Then as the film is being edited and the scenes that should have music are actually ready to view, that makes it much easier to make a decision what song will actually fit each clip because you can actually see it. You get a feel for the characters and how the dialog is delivered. So the process just goes on until post-production, and usually the songs, if they are actually picked, go to the editor. The editor then drops songs in on the scenes and then once the editor puts together a rough cut then we can all sit down together and take a look at it. I usually run with that copy and try to make decisions with the director. And usually right off the bat I’ll say, This song is a great song, but with the music budget you’ve given me, there’s not enough money to license that song, so we are going to have to find a replacement. Then I go out to all my music resources and say, This is the song that we have in the scene, this is the scene, I need something that we can afford that is comparable to – whatever song we had originally chosen. And I get bombarded with submissions and I filter through them and I find two or three that I feel that the director might like. I will cut them into the scene myself, send a Quicktime to the director and editor and then have them take a look at it and if they like it then the editor will get a copy of the song. I am not an editor I just do the best I can to get the musical idea across in the scene. So that is if I come in during pre-production.

WOODY: It must be a difficult process if you come in and they have already temped the music, because I have worked with people and they bring in their film and they are using Blur, and the Rolling Stones and the first thing I say is, what are you going to do about these music tracks? Because you are going to have to get the rights to these songs? But they always think that everything is fine, and then they sell their film and they come back and say, We have to find new music, and I say yup.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, that is the frustrating part for me. Because immediately, what you just said is exactly what goes through my head and what comes out of my mouth, and then I get the look on their face, and I know, Oh boy, we’re in trouble now. So there are times when I try to convince them, You know, this is the prime time now to place the song, before we get to that point where we are back peddling, struggling, and stressed out. I have even found replacement songs for a film I am doing right now for a song that I think is not going to make it in the final distribution process. I know that they are going to come back to me, and I don’t have time to be stressed out, I have got a ton of other projects. So when I get some free time, I will go through those tons of CD’s I have, and go through Myspace, so that when that time comes I am ahead of the game. The worst situation for me is, I get a call, email, or I meet someone at a networking mixer and they say, Yeah man, we’ve got like two weeks to get these songs cleared, and one of my biggest questions is, Why did you wait? Then I negotiate my fee, and I get the information from them, and the majority of the time they still don’t make the deadline. Because the publishers are not going to rush for one specific film.

WOODY: For a festival clearance, or something like that?

DOMINIQUE: Right.

WOODY: So ideally you would like to get involved with them with a script in pre-production, would that be right?

DOMINIQUE: For me, that would be the ideal situation. Because I am there at the very beginning, I can make suggestions early on, and especially in the case where they have on camera performances where I have to clear the song before they even shoot the scene. So getting involved early on makes my life easier, it makes my job easier, and it makes things less stressful for the directors and the producers etc., and I like it more from a creative standpoint.

WOODY: Since the movie process takes so long – from script to screen can take an unbelievable amount of time do you have a variable fee schedule for that? Like if you got involved in a project and you were there all the way through versus getting involved in a project a month before they finish?

DOMINIQUE: I have been in both situations. I have film right now, Conflict of Interest, which I think back in March of 2008 I came on, script in hand, started reading the script, and listed out requests for particular tracks that I thought would work. The entire film was shot, and the executive producer wanted the entire film to be complete by the Presidential election, because it was a political thriller. We were in post a month before the election, and it was just, completely, not right. And they decided that they were not going to release it yet, and keep working on it. They went on a three month hiatus, hired another director who re-shot 79 pages of an 84 page script, and we just had a test screening last Thursday. They interweaved the new footage with several scenes of the old footage. I had all the license agreements for the music ready to go out for signatures, but I didn’t send them out because I didn’t know what songs were going to remain in the film. Well, none of the songs that I found remained in the film. So I am pretty much starting over. So to answer your question about my fee structure, sometimes it varies, but I try to do either half up front and half upon completion of my job, or one-third in pre production, one third in production and when I finish it’s the final third. On this film, I was looking at my Quickbooks last night, and the one for Conflict of Interest is going on 294 days from the day I sent out the original invoice. I also did the Overbook Brothers. I met with the director and one of the producers and they said, We’ve got 30 days to clear all this music and it was like, Bam, bam, bam, every day. We hit the deadline, 30 days and it was done, in and out. And those are good. I like those.

WOODY: I was going to say, that’s probably better.

DOMINIQUE: The director had already picked the songs, but he had put some forethought into it. He didn’t go for the top tier artists, or the top ten songs, he found Indie artists on Myspace. So when I came onboard I saw a couple of them were upper tier indie artists, but I was still able to negotiate. In fact I came in with, I think, $250 dollars to spare on budget. There was a lot of negotiating and working with artist management, and the artists themselves. But it worked out great, everyone was happy. The director was happy because he didn’t have to go out and find more money and he had his songs in the film. One song we couldn’t use, they were hard balling us, and we did find a quick replacement for it and it was a done deal. 30 days.

Conflict Of Inte

WOODY: If someone finds a few tracks for a production are they then the “music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: That’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions out there, and it’s getting worse in my opinion. People think that because they find a song that works well in a film that they are a music supervisor. And that is, to me, a music provider, someone who has provided music. I have a blog myself, and I wrote about the real role of the music supervisor, and the bottom line is, about 30% of [a music supervisors job] is the song selection, the creative side. The administrative side takes up about 70%, and sometimes more. So a music editor usually has a great ear, and finds a great song, pops it in there, and the director likes it. But they don’t have the relationships with the publishers and the record labels to get in there and do the negotiating, the licensing and the clearing; all of the administrative side to music supervising. The music supervisor brings the whole pie to the table, and anyone else who just finds music is only bringing a slice of the pie to the table.

WOODY: I would like you to go into the 70% a bit more deeply, because in a way I always thing of the music supervisor as a music producer. Not in the sense of a record producer, but a producer in the film sense of a producer. In that context, you are fulfilling all the producing functions for that music, you are finding the music, contracting the music, budgeting the music. People have a misunderstanding about music supervision, they don’t have a firm understanding that a great portion of the job is contracting, and negotiations, and budgeting, and clearance and so on. Can you elaborate on that?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah definitely, and before you even get to that point of negotiating etc., you have to find out who even owns the music. In today’s music world, it has been so diluted that you can’t even go to ASCAP and look up a song and see who actually owns it because it might say, Bob’s Music Publishing. Well, Bob’s Music Publishing is administered by Universal Music Publishing Group. So you have to dig down until you get to the company that administers 100% on behalf of all the other music publishers. So just getting to the right person, that can give you the contact information, that you can send your license request form to is a big hunt. And it’s not always right there in plain sight. A lot of people will go on ASCAP and BMI and see that publisher name right there and think that that’s who they have to deal with and a lot of times it’s not. Even sometimes, where the songwriter is from the UK and you have a US production going on, it might say Warner Chapel Music Ltd. and they are in the Performing Rights Society in the UK; plus you still go through Warner Chapel here in America and they do the approval through their sister company in the UK.

So there are a lot of things that you have to know before you start negotiating and get the ball rolling, and once you have identified who is the proper copyright holder for the sync rights and the napster rights, that’s when you do your license request form. That contains the production company information, the composition, composition title, the songwriters, publishers, how are you using the song, if it is going to be background vocal, background instrumental, how much of the song you are going to use– 10 seconds, a minute, the entire length, and what rights you want– America, worldwide, what media– DVD, TV, theatrical, and term also– one year only? So all these things you have to piece together, they all have be gathered up and together on one concise form, sent off, and then the clock is ticking. How long is it going to take for them to get back? You have to follow-ups many times until you get a quote. And if you have got a full $5,000 in your music budget, and you get a quote for one song on the publishing side for $5,000, then you are in negotiation mode. And right there, if you don’t have a relationship with that publisher, chances are slim to none that you are going to get that $5,000 down anywhere near what it needs to be for you to be able to license any of the rest of the songs. So having relationships with the publishers and the labels and the people that you have to deal with is key. If you do get your fee negotiated down to a favorable amount, that will allow you to have money left over for the rest of your songs.

Then if it is a major publisher they will most likely draft a license for that song, if it is an independent they will say, Can you draft a license for us? So if you don’t have the proper experience to draft a proper license, it’s not one of the forms you just download off the Internet and fill in the blanks. You have to know what’s in there, because every licensing deal is different. So that’s the next step, and once the licenses are all done, and the tracks are cut for the music the cue sheet comes into play. And putting the proper information in the cue sheet is key because the songwriters and publishers rely on that cue sheet to get performance royalties down the road. So that’s pretty much the process from the song conception to the cue sheet.

WOODY: Could you just detail a little bit the different sorts of rights that people need to acquire for a motion picture?

DOMINIQUE: Sure, you know it really depends on what their plan is from the start. If someone is going to shoot a film, and it is going to go straight to DVD, well, pretty much the only rights that they need to deal with are home video DVD rights. But if they are looking for a broad release I always try to get “all media worldwide in perpetuity, that way their distribution options are unlimited. However, it does cause the fee to go up. So you have to balance how much money you can afford for licensing these songs and that’s when you have to chisel your rights down unless you get a step deal, which is something completely of a different topic. I usually ask the director or producer or whoever is going to be in charge of the distribution plan, What are your plans? Are you just going theatrical or are you going to TV? and once I know that I’ll know how I’ll gear the rights that I request. If they are only planning on having it broadcast in the United States, or North America, then I just request the US only, or if they have an actor who is big in Germany I will ask US only, and Germany. Just to specify the rights according to how the production plans on releasing the film.

WOODY: So if they have some success, and their distribution model changes, then the contracts have to change as well. If this was supposed to be a DVD only release, they get a bite and all of a sudden Universal says, Hey we’re going to pick it up and run it in sixteen cities, then you have to go back and renegotiate those rights?

She Pedals Fast

DOMINIQUE: That is correct. Go back to the table, present the new rights, and get a new quote and hope that either the distributor will pick up the additional costs for the music, otherwise the production company has to somehow come up with the extra money. We then revise the license agreements, we cut the new checks and then they’re good to go with the new distribution model.

WOODY: For those that don’t know, can you talk about the synchronization rights and other types of specific rights that have to be enabled for you to be able to use the music track?

DOMINIQUE: The sync rights are basically the publishing rights to the actual composition. If a song is being used in your film, synchronization rights have to be obtained. You don’t have to have the master rights, because you can do a cover song. Basically, you need permission to record that new song from the songwriter, or the artist who recorded it and licensed it to the production, or it was a work for hire and the production company might want master rights. So, the publishing rights, or synchronization rights, are something that you have to have regardless. The master rights usually belong to the record label or whoever owns the specific master recording rights. There can be many master recordings to a single composition, so whichever master recording you are using in your film, you have to find the label or owner of that specific recording. 99% of the time, publishers are your synch rights, or publishing rights holders, and most of the time record labels are the owners to your master rights holders.

WOODY: Do you recommend a certain percentage amount in terms of an overall production budget for the music clearance rights?

DOMINIQUE: I really never recommend a percentage. Usually they will know what they want to put aside for music. Once I see that number it tells me where I can shop for music or tell them what they can and can’t have based on what is in their temp tracks. There are rules of thumb out there that I’ve heard, 10% of your production budget, and stuff like that but I have yet to see that work. It’s usually the other way around. You just tell yourself, Ok I can put $10,000 on music. And that’s what you use to go shop for music. Of course music is composition, preexisting songs and it’s your composer, your music supervisor and sometimes your music editor. All of that falls under that one line item so you have to factor that in. And then once you pay the crew, how much do you have left over for the music itself?

WOODY: Do you work with first time filmmakers?

DOMINIQUE: Yes. Several times.

WOODY: And have they been surprised when you explain to them how much money it’s going to take for them to secure the rights for the music?

DOMINIQUE: Yes. They’re surprised only in the fact that now it’s reality to them. They have heard the horror stories from other people. A lot of those stories are like the AC/DC songs, the Rolling Stones songs, the ridiculous $100,000, million dollar deals. Because they hear those stories, when the small little artist where everyone knows them but they’ve never had a big song, and still his songs are demanding $5000 or in that ballpark, it is an eye opener. But still the whole world of music clearance is just baffling to most people.

WOODY:I did a picture where the filmmaker got the rights from Beck to use a song for the opening scene of his film for film festivals only. And if it sold then he would have to renegotiate the rights. He did end up selling it and was not able to secure the rights at that point and had to replace it.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, that’s exactly what happened to another film that I worked on, Yesterday with a Lie. They locked the film and only had festival rights. And they had the composer as the

Yesterday Was A L

music supervisor. It got to the point where they were getting broad rights for 4 songs, on average, it was about $20,000 per song in order for them to get the rights after the festival rights. So I came on board and told them that, I would try to get it down, but I didn’t think I would.

All four songs were cover songs, so I only had to deal with the publishers. I couldn’t get them down except on the one key song. But one of the artists did not want a cover version of her song used in the final film that was going out theatrically and she wanted her version in there. And as much as I tried and tried and tried, the use was denied. So they had to open up the film, pull the song out, and have another song recorded. So that is another frequent mistake made by the filmmakers.

WOODY: What advice would you have for a band, a singer/songwriter, or someone who had tracks of their own that they wanted to have placed in films but they didn’t know where to go? How would they find someone like you?

DOMINIQUE: Well, the best way is to get on the Internet and do a search on song placement, music placement. Some people don’t even know the term music supervisor, so just plug in whatever term you know. They have to do a little research and use a little diligence because it is their career in hand, and they should learn as much as they can about licensing music. The more they dig in, the more they will find terms and names and people who do what it is they need done to get their music out there. Then send an email make a phone call and inquire. Say, I have some music that I feel is very good, and I think it could be used in a movie, what do I do? I get a lot of emails. I send out a lot. In fact I have an email template, and I get these emails from either a songwriter who wants to get their music placed, or someone that wants to be a music supervisor. I just copy and paste an email and say, Hey, this is what I have been sending out, and give them some highlights and pointers to let them know what it is that they need to do to get their songs into films. And one of the important things that I always stress with songwriters is to get the administrative side of their business together. Get registered with ASCAP or BMI or whatever performance rights society is in their area. I’d like for them to get their music copyrighted. Take care of the business side so that when they get the call from me and I say, Hey I just listened to your song on Myspace and I want to use it in a film, and I need you to clear this today, we don’t have to go through all the paperwork and other stuff on their end to get their song ready. They should have their splits figured out with their co-writer – all of that side of their work should be done.

WOODY: That is terrific advice. So then they should already have their own music publishing company in place?

DOMINIQUE: They can, and it’s a choice. If they want to handle all of their own publishing and want 100% of their publishing rights they can. If they want someone else to champion their music and jockey it out there to the world and try to get placement and do a 50/50 split publishing deal then it’s their prerogative. The big thing these days is for the artists and songwriters to maintain as much control to their music as they can. But that is another thing. If you’re going to publish yourself you need to get yourself a publishing company. Get it registered with ASCAP or BMI or whoever you want to affiliate yourself with as a writer and just have your business side taken care of so when you get that phone call or that email you can jump right on the bandwagon and go. Because a lot of times, like when I had that 30 days on the Overbrook Brothers, I didn’t have time for someone to say, Oh, well let me get with my co-writer and see. We don’t even know if we are going to go 50/50 because he did more than I did. So it may be 30/70, and then it is like, move on to the next song. My thing about these new guys is to get your business together, and then get out there and learn how to get yourself played. Learn as much as you can so you can communicate with someone like me. When we start talking about sync, and Napster and cue sheet, you need to know what I’m talking about so we can have a professional conversation.

WOODY: What do you think of these song placement services out there, are they useful for you and the songwriters?

DOMINIQUE: There are places – Barry Coughlin has a company, musicsupervisor.com and I have been there. I know Barry, in fact he invited me to a panel at SXSW back in March, so I have been on their site looking for stuff. They put together some playlists for me to listen to. There are a lot of sites out there like that that are very helpful because I already have established relationships with them. They know me and I know them, and I can send them an email asking for some 1940′s era WWII music and then I can move on. Then I get an email just perfectly tailored to what I need. Then I click through, see if anything sounds good, if it does then I’ll put it in a folder for that particular film, and then I go back to it. There is a convenience there, that I don’t have to go listen to 200 songs, I’ve got some creative people on that end that will do that for me.

WOODY: So you don’t think that it is a waste of money for someone who is looking to have their stuff placed?

DOMINIQUE: Well on that side, I think it’s a good idea because you have someone that can expose your music. But the problem with it is that they have so much music that they can’t give your music the time that it needs. That’s why I would recommend that if you don’t, as an artist, have the time or desire to pitch your own music, I would find a publisher or a small music library that can champion your music and say, Hey, I’m going to work for this artist this week and see if I can get some placements. In fact in the FM Pro news group, or list, that was a conversation that they were having, about if anyone had any success using these types of services. Most of the people said no. So for me, I think, take some time and control of your own business and pitch your own music. If you have gigs on Friday and Saturday, let Sunday be your day that you get out there and find films that are in production, find out who their music supervisor is, get in contact, find out what they are looking for, and do it yourself. For me, that is the best route to go.

WOODY: I think you put your finger on it right there – filmmakers have the same problem. They don’t realize the business part of the show, and let that fall by the wayside. They just assume that their movie is going to be found and they are going to be the next Spielberg, or their music is going to be found and they are going to be the next Michael Jackson.

Harmony and Me

I saw a screening of Harmony and Me at the LA Film Festival, and after the screening they had a Q&A, and someone had asked specifically about the music, because the lead character, played by Justin Rice, is a musician himself. There are some live performances throughout the movie. I think some of the music was written by the lead actor, whether it was him performing live within the movie, or whether it was a recorded performance. Can you talk a bit about your involvement in that specific movie and some of the things that you had to deal with?

DOMINIQUE: Sure. First of all, this was another one of those films where I came in after the fact. The music had already been selected, and Bob Byington, the director, was very meticulous about the songs that are in the film. The highlight of everything, for me, was when I came on board I got a copy of the film. I watched it, and immediately I knew there were problems because a song that’s not in the film anymore is Elton John’s song entitled, Harmony. It was a perfect song for the film, but it was going to cost $100 per side to license it. Universal ended up denying the use because it was just wasted their time. The budget that we had available would not cover it, so that was the first song to get scrapped. The good thing is that a lot of the music in the film is by Justin Rice, who is the lead actor. You even see him performing, and you see a lot of musical performances in there. He and Bob Schneider did his song Changing in Mind.

WOODY: Is that in the wedding scene?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, the wedding scene where they are at the piano together. Then Bob did the romantic performance to the bride. Bob Schneider has been working with Bob Byington on Bob’s songs. I did a short film, and I liked some of Justin’s music back in 2006. So Justin and I have had somewhat of a relationship prior to Harmony and Me. That is how he and Bob and I built our relationship and it made using all of his compositions, which is a majority of the film, a lot easier to work with. He is very easy going when it comes to licensing his music in these small films, especially the ones that he has a role in. That made it easier, but the bigger songs have been a struggle. The one thing that I preached to them, like I do to all the other directors or producers, is, I am playing the Devil’s advocate here, I am telling you the truth. I am not going to water it down and tell you that you might get this song. It is your job to take the truth and come back to me with a solution that I can take to the publishers and the record labels and try to make it happen. I am not I charge of your money, and I can only negotiate based upon what you have given me to work with.

WOODY: Right. Now if someone came up to you and said, Hey, I want to do what you do, I would love to be a music supervisor. What advice would you give them?

DOMINIQUE: Study! I would tell them to go on the Internet and Google music supervisor. There are books out there that they can read to give them the basics of everything that a music supervisor does from A-Z. There are websites that give a description of what a music supervisor does, on how to clear songs, what’s a sync license is, what a master license is. So if they really want to be a music supervisor then they are going to make the effort to learn as much as they can. Once they get a grip on the entire concept of what a music supervisor does, I would suggest going to a local mixer where people are getting together, talk to some people and find out who is shooting a film at a really low budget to bring you on. They probably don’t have any money to pay you, but you just want the experience, and you go and try to find a local band with the same situation. One with a few gigs every month and they want to get their songs in a film and they don’t care about getting a licensing fee. But, the thing about it is, what you’ll learn, is that you still have to follow procedure. Just because someone says, Yeah, you can use my song, and I won’t charge you and fee, you don’t just throw the song in the film and move on. You still have to do the paperwork. You have to do a licensing agreement. You state the in the compensation paragraph what the compensation is, and of course it has to be at least a dollar. Do the paperwork. That’s the only way you’re going to learn it.

WOODY: You go into this in some detail on your own blog.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, I have several postings on my blog. One is specifically named, So You Want to Be a Music Supervisor, and in there I go into detail about what you need to do, what you need to learn, and it points to a couple of different references that will help you to get one step closer. There are a lot of things that I have written about in my blog from three angles, from the music supervisor’s point of view, from the filmmaker’s point of view, and from the songwriter/musician’s point of view. Basically, the common thread throughout my blog, is – doing the right thing. Regardless of what side of the licensing deal you are on – just learn about it. Learn how it works so when you are in the midst of a licensing deal you know the language; you know what needs to be done. Then as a filmmaker or a musician/songwriter, if you’re in a deal and you hear something that doesn’t sound right, that knowledge that you’ve learned will cue you to say, Hey wait a minute, that’s not how it’s done. If you don’t do your homework and learn, that will go right past you and you won’t know that something happened that shouldn’t have happened.

WOODY: Let’s talk about the distinction about the music rights that you would cover versus the score, which generally is the composer. He’s been hired for the movie and is adding a dramatic through-line according to the picture edit and you are dealing more with songs that already exist. What sort of relationship do you have with the score composer?

DOMINIQUE: The director has a closer relationship with the composer during the scoring of the film because the director has his vision and knows where he wants the score to be dramatic, orchestral or something more subtle so they create that landscape together. Where I come in is I am the liaison – if the composer has an issue. He may come to me and say, Hey I’ve been talking to the producer or director about my contract, or, I haven’t been paid yet, or something like that. So on the non-creative side that I am there for the composer. On the creative side I might be looking at the film saying, Oh that montage. I’ve got a perfect song for that. And the director has just told the composer he wants that to be a very soft orchestral score to go over that scene. So we have to communicate so we know what I’m going to do versus what they are going to do so there is no overlap.

WOODY: So I would think that the director is the person you spend the most time with. When a director is deciding on the DP for instance they may go over the lighting in photographs or the style of some paintings to see that they are thinking along the same lines. Do you work in a similar fashion when meeting with a director on a project?

Year At Dang

DOMINIQUE: Definitely, particularly if it’s time to do a song replacement. If the director already has all the music that he desires, but we can’t license the songs, basically we’ll talk about alternate bands and he’ll mention someone. I might suggest such and such band; they are a great band here in Austin very similar to what you have in the movie. And if he hasn’t heard them before I’ll get him an mp3 and have him listen to them. He’ll tell me some things, I’ll take notes, and I’ll go out on the internet and try to find that band’s music and immediately do a quick clearance check to see who owns the rights to it. I make sure that we are not going into the same problem that we had before. We do sort of paint a picture for each other musically about what her/she feels could be the right song. We listen to some things until we decide which is the best song(s) for that scene and try different songs with the scene to see which one works best.

WOODY: What do you think that filmmakers misunderstand about music supervision?

DOMINIQUE: A lot of things. [LAUGHS] Probably the one thing that really gets me is the fact that they think that the music supervisor’s job is to find music. Especially when I am looking for a job they say, Oh we’ve already found all of our music. That’s when I ask them who’s doing the clearance, who’s negotiating the deals, the licensing, who is making the music cue sheets? Their eyes light up and they say, Hmmm, gee, I didn’t think of all that! So the role of the music supervisor, period, is just misunderstood in the film industry. And of course the biggest misunderstanding is of what it really costs to license a song and all of the work that goes into it. The whole idea of not knowing that we don’t just go finding songs is probably the number one misconception.

WOODY: And probably just the idea that things need to be cleared in the first place!

DOMINIQUE: Documentary filmmakers often don”t understand this. They’ll ask if I’m just going to use a few seconds of a song do I still have to clear it? Or in a corporate presentation do I have to clear it. I try to get detailed information out there about all of this.

WOODY: So tell me what you love about what you do.

DOMINIQUE: I love it from A to Z. Even when it gets complicated I see that I can come up with a solution that will make everybody happy on the film side and also on the music side. I will say that the one thing I really enjoy about being a music supervisor is getting the call or email from someone who wants me to be onboard. If they are in early pre-production and they give me a script and I go home, I read the script and my mind is focused on what a good song for the various scenes would be. Then I just take that to the end and then finally I’m sitting there with the rest of the crew and I remember the day that I found that one song. It’s the whole process from beginning to end – and all of the ups and downs to get to the end and how it all works out .

WOODY: What is it that you don’t like about what you do?

DOMINIQUE: Oh, things that frustrate me. This one film comes to mind, I just don’t like it when I have to struggle with the director. I am trying to educate the director, and they want the song no matter what, and I have already exhausted my efforts with the publishers. I don’t want to look unprofessional in the publisher’s eyes, as if I don’t know what music clearance is all about, because often the director wants me to do things that just go beyond the norm. So, the struggle with the directors is probably the least enjoyable part of dealing with what I do.

WOODY: Struggle defined how?

DOMINIQUE: An example of a struggle is when I tell the director that I have already negotiated the song that they want from $10,000 to $5,000 for the rights they are requesting, if they want it to go down anymore we will have to reduce the rights. They say, No we have to have these rights and this is all the money I have. Go back and try to get the price down more. And I say, I have already brought a 50% reduction on it. I’ll go back, but I am going to let them know that I understand their position but I have the director breathing down my neck and he wants to bring this thing down. Is there any way we can’t work something out? And when their reply comes back, No, this is the lowest we can go, we have already brought it down $5,000. And the director is still not happy with it.

So it is just stubbornness and an inability to accept the fact that what has been laid on the table is the final offer, a take it or leave it deal. It is beyond my control, and I have already put my expertise and my relationships on the line, and I have to reach a point where I don’t want my relationships to be tarnished because the director wants me to do what is beyond what has already been done. So I have to protect myself because I will be working with these record labels and publishers time and time again and almost every day I am back and forth with them with one project or another. As for the filmmaker, I might never work with them again. So I have to reach a point in my career where is say, I have done the best I can, I am not going to tarnish my relationships just to make this one deal work, when I have hundreds of deals going on right now. That is, for me, the most frustrating and difficult part of the job.

The King Of Texas

WOODY: Is there anything that I missed that you still want to cover?

DOMINIQUE: The one thing that I might add is to underline what I said earlier – that the creative side is about 30% and the administrative side is about 70%. I have become interested in Twitter. I like to see what the other music supervisors out there are tweeting about, as far as the bands that they like, and who they are listening to, because I look up to them. They are doing big TV series and the big films and the films that come in on the weekend box office that make $30-40 million. So I like to listen to what they are listening to, and get a feel for their interest in music. And sometimes I’ll watch their shows and see what music they select. That is a learning experience for me, but it’s just interesting to see. A lot of times I will listen to a link that they put up. I will go to a band website that they just listened to and like, and I’ll make my own personal assessment and say, Wow, if I would have had that song when I was working in that film it would have worked great over certain scenes. So it’s interesting to see what the other music supervisors are doing. It is kind of refreshing, and I aspire to be in their shoes, and have the experience that they have.

WOODY: Well, this has really been great. Thanks for your time, thoughts and expertise.

WOODY: How did you get into post-production audio?

CHUCK: Music editing.  That was my first and only jump into post-production audio, right into music editing.  My wife was a music editor and my  career as a musician was coming to an end so she suggested becoming a music editor like herself.  She trained me, and once she became too pregnant to music edit anymore, I took over her job at Hanna Barbera.

WOODY: So you are a musician and composer?

CHUCK: Musician and I consider myself -slightly – a composer.  I played guitar, made a living doing that for 10 years.

WOODY: Music as a sole means of financial support?

CHUCK: Yes. Started a solo career in a restaurant playing guitar and singing, and then playing in a band in various bars in the Newport Beach area, then going into touring with Juice Newton in the early 80s.

WOODY: When you got into the Juice Newton thing, were you also a session player?

CHUCK: No…I never learned to read music.  For Juice’s albums, the Producers felt more comfortable using ‘real guys.’  The touring band didn’t really record on any of the albums, although I did get to do a guitar solo because I was used to playing it live all the time.

WOODY: What venues did you play?

CHUCK:  Universal Amphitheater which is now called the Gibson Amphitheater.  A lot of arenas across the country.  We did a tour with Alabama…played at a couple stadiums.

WOODY: Have you worked in other areas of post?  Or just music editing from the start?

Back row, left to right: Jim Harrison, Julia Quinn (office manager), Andy Dorfman, Tanya Hill. Front, left to right: Jeff Carson, Chuck Martin.

CHUCK: Music editing from the start.

WOODY: Most people probably have no idea what a music editor does.  What is the primary function of the music editor?

CHUCK: Number one is to serve the emotional needs of a film.  That is broken up into two phases: One is the temp phase and the second phase is the final, where you are working with a composer.  Even when you are working with the composer, you are still doing the number one function, which is to serve the emotional needs of the film.

In the phase called temp, that is when you consider yourself the first composer on the film.  We look at the film, and with or without the director/editor, figure out where music should be, and what kind of music should go into those scenes.  The music editors start picking pieces of music, and that could be from any score, any composer that we want to use.

WOODY:  Just to get the emotional quality of the scenes?

CHUCK: Exactly.  Is it tense?  Is it romantic?  Is it full of action?  Then you go to the scores that work best for those scenes and for the film itself.  If you know the final score is going to be by a certain composer, if you can find music from that composer’s catalog that at least helps because there is a language already being spoken that the composer knows.

WOODY:  You can do this temp process without the director?

CHUCK: Absolutely.  I’m working on a movie right now where all they did was send me the movie, and I start sending them music.  I’ve been doing this for so long and working with various directors and picture editors for so long, they trust me that I will find the right spots and put the right music in.

The picture editors are the first line of defense before it gets to the director.  They sometimes send changes to me before they show it to the director.  There are a lot of film editors that don’t want to deal with music and there’s a lot of film editors that consider themselves music experts and put in music before the music editor even comes on.  Other editors bring us on immediately, even while still shooting the movie.  We can give them music for scenes; post production supervisors complain about that, but in the end it pays because you end up with a proper temp score.  We do know our business.  We are concentrating completely on one thing.  More often than not, for a temp, I don’t spot the movie with the director.  Trust me to figure out the right spots.

WOODY:   Do you find yourself going to music libraries as much as contemporary releases?

CHUCK: We have at our company over 2000 soundtracks of actual released movies rather than a production music library.  We find very little value in production libraries, just because of the nature of the quality.  Most of those are usually not large orchestras (if they get to use real orchestras) or they are synthesizers which don’t give the quality that we want.  A large majority are from “name any composer.”

WOODY: Obviously you have a long history of doing this work.  At this point there are specific composers that hire you or bring you on?

CHUCK: Personally, I only have worked recently (steadily) with Randy Edelman and whenever possibly Joel McNeely. Some other editors work exclusively with a particular composer.  I have a bigger relationship with directors and film editors, that’s who usually comes to me.

WOODY: You are probably brought on even before they chose a composer?

CHUCK: That happens maybe about 50% of the time. The one I am working on now they already had a composer lined up and he’s done several films with this director.  He uses his own music editor so I am only going to cover the temp part of this movie.  Which is fine.  If I come onto a movie with Randy Edelman and if there is a temp editor I will take over.  So it goes both ways.

WOODY: Tell me about the process after the temp, the actual collaboration between you, the editing team and the composer?

CHUCK: When the composer does finally come on, if I’m staying on the project, then we will definitely have a spotting session and go over all the places that we’ve covered in the temps, and if there’s any new ideas by the composer.  It will get more specific and that’s when the music editor becomes bit of a secretary taking exact notes of where each cue will start, so that the composer, when he gets our summary of all these cues, knows exactly what he’s doing and how many minutes he or she has to record.  During the final process we try to get the director involved with the composer; listening to demos, going to the composer’s studio and going over individual cues; as many as possible before it gets to the scoring stage where there will be no surprises for the director; he can pretty much improve as many cues as possible before it gets in front of an orchestra.

It is nice when you have a relationship with the sound effects people, or the sound editors, because there are moments in the temp where a sound effect, whether a car driving or explosion or even sound of wind, if that is played an emotional part of the scene or it just takes over and there is no reason for the composer to do much, then it’s nice to know that in the final there won’t be any kind of battles on the dubbing stage between music and effects.  As a music editor, number one is serving the emotional needs of the film.  If that means taking music out because the silence is more powerful, then so be it.  Even if a composer has written music for it, don’t fight the picture.  If it’s not serving the needs of the movie, as much as maybe someone’s bit of dialog or some creaky windmill, there’s cooperation and coordination between the sound effects and the music people that’s very important.

WOODY: So besides choosing and cutting in the temp music tracks do you also edit the final recorded score?

CHUCK: The music is represented fully by the music editor all the way through, whether it’s the temp guy or the temp guy becoming the final guy, working with the composer, the music editor brings the composer’s freshly scored and mixed music to the final dubbing stage. We protect the music all the way through the end.

WOODY: On a technical level, are you in charge of doing the music cue sheets and/or are you involved in any of the licensing of outside materials?

CHUCK: In the actual licensing of songs, or pieces of source music, other than from the composer, that comes from either the music department of the studio or an independent music supervisor.  We are responsible when the movie is completely finished to give the details of the title of the cue and how long it plays and the usage of it (whether it’s just playing in the background or if someone is singing in the foreground, then a visual and vocal cue) so we give a preliminary music cue sheet for the legal department in whatever production company you are working with.  You turn over those times and lengths and names of cues and how they are used, then they’ll do the final cue sheet, because they’ll have all the other information, like the writers of the songs, publishers, all that stuff.

WOODY: What seems like a grey area to many is the distinction between a music supervisor versus a music editor; I know a lot of people juxtapose the two. Would it be correct to say that the music editor is in charge of score elements where as a music supervisor is in charge of outside or licensed elements?

CHUCK: Yes, that would be fair, except for the editing. The music supervisor is responsible for bringing the songs to us, and the music editor will take those and edit them.

WOODY: So you are tasked with cutting in all of the music tracks.

CHUCK: Yes. Once we get to the dubbing stage the music editor brings all of the music songs and score.  From another rig (always using Protools pretty much) there’ll be the dialogue and then another rig will be sending sound effects and those will be coming into three separate places on the mixing board where you’ll have two, maybe three mixers up there. There used to be three mixers.  It used to always be a music mixer, a dialogue mixer, and an effects mixer, but as you probably know now a days there’s pretty much a dialogue mixer that switches over and mixes the music, and the sound effects person who deals pretty much just with sound effects. So those are the guys that receive all these different elements and those are the ones that make it into the final elements combination.

WOODY: Tell me about your company Liquid Music. How did that come about?

CHUCK: Well for 17 years I was a part of Segue Music which was probably the biggest music editing company in town for a long time. One of my bosses, Jeff Carson, he and I started Liquid music about 5 years ago, and that happened because Segue Music was purchased years ago by Zomba Records who saw a benefit of having a music editing company within their own record company. Then Zomba Records was bought by BMG publishing – that was over 5 years ago – and BMG was just a huge, huge company and they just had no idea what a music editing company did and for a company as small as us compared to all the other companies that they owned it just didn’t mean anything so they folded the company. That’s when Jeff came to me and said ‘hey, I still like this idea of how we work. Would you like to start up another company?” And we picked three music editors from the other company and started Liquid Music. And we have a sixth person who does all our bookkeeping and that stuff. So there’s a total 6 people from the outset and we’re still 6 people strong.

WOODY: How long has that been?

CHUCK: Over 5 years.

WOODY: That’s great you were able to turn the situation around.  Tell me about the facility itself do you have Protools bays, or…

CHUCK: We do. We have six offices all looking out at trees, and today there’s a pretty blue sky, and five of those rooms are Protools rooms. Three of them are mobile units so that for dubs, and temp dubs and finals or mixing sessions we could ship any one of or all three of those out if we’re that busy. There are five editors and five Protools stations here.

WOODY: Are any them set up like a mix stage or are they editing stations?

CHUCK: Definitely editing. Each one does have a little 16-track mixer but it’s all very rough mixing against whatever dialogue picture editorial has put into the picture at this point. We get nothing from the sound effects editors unless it goes through picture editorial and they may have some special sound effects that they’re using otherwise we’re just dealing with the music that we cut in and the production dialogue and effects.

WOODY: You have had a long and accomplished career and you’ve worked on some really terrific things. Are there any specific gigs that you’d like to discuss?

CHUCK: There are a lot, but I thought that I’d just jump to three. “American Pie”, mainly because that was the beginning of my relationship with Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, the directors on that. Not to mention the fact that it’s “American Pie”! I love those guys, and they’re great people to work with. The other one that probably not many people know of, and not many people care about is “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”

WOODY: Wasn’t that Streisand?

CHUCK: Very good!

WOODY: I took my mom to see that; she loved it.

CHUCK: Oh! Well fantastic! The main thing about that one was just going to her house to meet her and Marvin Hamlish, and – it’s Barbara Streisand for God sakes! It doesn’t matter what kind of music you like, you know, it’s Barbara Streisand. So I got to work very closely with her at night doing mixes over at what used to be A&M records up till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, just me and her and the operator over there and just having a blast. It was a really fun time. Another one that comes to mind is “Red Dragon.” I worked with Brett Ratner on pretty much all his films from the past 10 years, and “Red Dragon,” that was one where I temped the movie and then Danny Elfman wrote a great score for it.  Actually during the temp music phase the film got previewed, somebody got into the screening and then put up a review on one of the geek websites.  The review said that “Danny Elfman did a great job with a new score for Red Dragon” and didn’t realize that actually I had just temped it. So I got my first review.

WOODY: Review on a temp! Perfect.

CHUCK: Yes. I got a great review for a temp that Danny Elfman supposedly scored. So that was a memorable moment for me.

WOODY: So tell me about – obviously you’re a big fan of Juice Newton, but tell me about other composers or types of music that you enjoy.

CHUCK: I like all types of music. I mean, you know I’m old enough that Motown was a part of my life.

WOODY: I tracked a bunch of songs for Lamont Dozier.

CHUCK: Oh! You did?

WOODY: He’s an amazing guy.

CHUCK: I actually got to meet him last year at the academy when we nominated songs. And he was there, and I mean my god. The credits that guy’s got.  I also like of course the English stuff, Beatles, Stones, all that stuff, as well as the newer stuff…The Killers - my sons bring newer music to me, Animal Collective, I really like. I shut nothing out.

WOODY: So with all the availability now of popular music – you know, the myspaces and that stuff – do you find yourself reaching for that or spending time trolling and looking for that kind of stuff?

CHUCK: Not really. Once we get the film in our hands we just really are focused on scoring the film, temp scoring it.  The stuff we’re looking for is really more score.

WOODY: The other stuff really more the domain of the music supervisor.

CHUCK: They get the upfront credit, so let them troll through everything that exists!

WOODY: Yeah they get the head credit!

CHUCK: Yes they do.

WOODY: So where does the music editor fall within the hierarchy of audio post?

CHUCK: That all depends on where you are in the process. The music editor is the most important person in the world for – several weeks. And then when the credit rolls, we are not that important. So it just depends on what’s going on in the movie and how much trouble it’s in.

[Laughs]

WOODY: Regarding the technology, you’ve worked in the movie business a long time and the gear is always changing.  Obviously today it’s all about computers, Protools and digital audio.  Has this changed your way of working or has it changed the work that you are required to do now?

CHUCK: The work is the same, as far as finding the right music for each scene, but the technology has made it so much easier searching for it.  Before we used to listen to vinyl, LP Soundtracks, 1/2 and 1/4 inch tape of scores that we kept after working on a project.  That was our library, LP and tape, and in some instances audio cassettes.  We would send those out to be transferred to mag, and that could take a whole day turnaround just to get the order in.  Now it’s just at our fingertips.  That has been a huge change.  And of course the editing portion of it is ridiculously good.  No more pops to deal with if you make a bad edit.  There is no such thing as a bad edit because you can always fix it.  The technology has made it a wonderful medium to be in.

WOODY:  And also since the technology has made things easier and more accessible it creates the idea that “Okay, you have a day to turn this thing around.”?

CHUCK:  Absolutely, that has happened for all of us in this industry; the post-production schedules have shrunk as they see it doesn’t take as much time between reels to load at a dubbing stage, same thing at a scoring stage, don’t have to wait for the projectionist to rewind to the beginning of the cue, it’s just instantaneous.  They expect less time for the same amount of work that you used to give them.  Sometimes it puts the pressure on, but at the same time the speedier technology does help us.  I don’t know whether it’s hurt us overall, or not yet. I’m not really 100% sure yet.  After doing this for this long, I still love doing what I’m doing.

WOODY: What is it that you love about the work?

CHUCK: It’s two things. It’s the creativity.  As I said before, we are like the first composers, and the things we can do now with ProTools, rather than just taking, finding some piece of music from a certain score, just tossing it in and making a few edits, we can enhance it with little toys that ProTools provides.  Pitching things so that you can have something from one score laying on top of another piece from another score and if it’s a half step off musically, or a whole step tone-wise, you can pitch one or the other to match the same key and have two different things going on that creates a whole new cue.  So there’s the creativity part of it, the other part of it is working with great people.  I’ve been really lucky over the years to work with great directors and editors and mixers and sound people who are just a pleasure to work with.  Just nice people.  There’s an occasional jerk out there once in a while, but I count myself very lucky to not have to deal with that very often at all.  That’s a big part of it.  And my coworkers here at Liquid Music; I love coming to work with them.  It does not suck.

WOODY:  Is there anything you don’t like about it?

CHUCK: If anything, it’s the politics within the studio or within a project itself.  Just trying to figure out who’s really in charge of the project.  Is it the director, for sure?  Or is a producer that’s really running the show?  Sometimes you just have to balance the two personalities or sometimes someone at the studio is really running the show and neither the producer nor director know it yet.  It’s dealing with the politics sometimes that is a little unpleasant.  It’s finding your way in that forest and making sure you don’t get lost.

WOODY: What qualifies someone as a really great music editor?  What qualities?

CHUCK:  Fortunately when Jeff and I both started the company we both admired each other enough and we both agreed on the three people that we wanted to bring with us.  For their various strengths, which was not only the ability to match the best scores with each scene and temping, but also the ability to get along with just about anyone.  Also the ability to communicate with them, whether they’re the director, producer, other editors, heads of post production, just getting along and communicating with them is a huge part of being a good music editor. We’ve got that with our company.

WOODY: Are they musically inclined or a musician themselves?

CHUCK: What’s really interesting is that three of us are musicians. The other two have no musical background at all. My partner Jeff is not a musician, and he’s been a great music editor for as long as I’ve known him. He has the intuition and the ability to do this work. And he’s really great with people.

WOODY: That’s so key, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter that you know Protools cold. That won’t get you the job.  The social aspects play a huge part in the collaboration of making films. Knowing Protools and knowing how to run a room with a lot of different personalities is not the same thing.

CHUCK: Well I can guarantee you that there are a lot of people out there who know how to operate protools and know how it works way better than I do.  But there are just other things that are more important in the whole picture. You’re absolutely right about that.

That’s what Jeff and I have been trying to do with Liquid Music, and were succeeding at it.  When people call and they ask for me, or ask for Tanya, or Andy to be their music editor, what we’d like them to know all of us during the project, so that when they call they go “is anyone there available” and we are.  Over the five years we’ve been doing this, we’ve really improved that. So that a post production supervisor will call and say ‘is Andy available?”  “If not, then who is, cause I need this temp done now” and that’s really a great thing.  Each one of us represents the company.  The five of us here are it so at least we know who we have to work with and we’re not afraid to send any of them out anywhere.

WOODY: What advice do you offer someone who says “Hey, Chuck, I want to be a music editor. What should I do?”

CHUCK: Wow. That is a good a question. Because of the technology a lot of the jobs that used to get you into music editing are gone. That’s apprenticing and assistant positions. Here we have neither. We have no film to wind up anymore; we have no transfers to go pick up so we don’t even need a driver anymore.

WOODY: There are no fly on the wall opportunities?

CHUCK: Right. There are so many people who want to intern here, once they come to our office and see how cool it is.  We have to unfortunately turn away people who want to work for free because they would just be doing nothing. My advice would be to get in a sound house that can take you in just so you can get your hours and just keep cutting music and tracking things on your own, and get to know post production people. Jeff and I made a concerted effort over the last 5 years to get to know all the new post production people we haven’t worked with before just so they could see what we do here. That might just be an edge that music editors are starting out that we can give them if they’ve got their hours and they’re in the union just to get them going. Just work on your personality. Try to get along with everybody.

WOODY: Do you have any advice for a composer?

CHUCK:   If they’re brand spanking new, let us help them.  Let us help you see what your powers are as a director, as a composer…let us help you avoid political landmines that can happen within a project – between a project and a studio itself, or personalities within the producers or production companies and studios – let us help you get through the process more than telling you how to compose or telling directors how to direct. I think that would be our best advice. It’s on an individual basis, depending on the personalities of the new director or new composer cause that’s always a part of our job and it’s part of Jeff and my strengths – feeling out ‘what is this person like, what is the best way to deal with this person.’

WOODY: Right. The thing I often tell people is don’t discount your sound person. While this might be your second feature film, this may be your sound person’s twentieth.

CHUCK: Exactly.

WOODY: You do music editing everyday. You’ve done it every day for decades, and so the experience level is so vast. To not take advantage of your expertise doesn’t make sense.

CHUCK: That’s the thing. Even working with directors who have been doing this a while, we still have done more movies than they have. We do 3 or 4 films a year, and you add that up with how many a director does it’s not going to come close. But the ones that are really new to it, those are ones you can help if they’re open to it.

WOODY: Thanks Chuck for all the great info.

WOODY:  As a production recordist, what is the scope of your duties on set?

ERIC: The way I look at it is I am responsible for everything audio that happens on the set in order to collect the tracks that need to be put in to the soundtrack of the film.  Whether it’s playback equipment, speakers for audience if need be, whatever it might be audio wise in order to collect those tracks that you know are going to work best in the editing.

WOODY:  So if you’re doing a multi-camera show, and they’ve got audience in there on risers you have to mix for the audience as well?

ERIC: Exactly.  That would be a circumstance where you’d be responsible for the PA (Public Address Playback) or if you had a pseudo-live performance you’d be responsible for that.  Whether you’re doing that or if you have a separate PA mixer it’s still in the scope of your duties to put that team and gear together and make sure it’s right.

WOODY:  So you hire additional crew?

ERIC:  Yeah.  Anytime there’s additional crew I would clear it through the PM (Production Manager) and say “this is what I’ll need, I’ll need a playback person” or “I’ll need a PA system or operator or a PA company”, if it’s that big.  Whatever it takes.

WOODY:  Let’s talk about your location sound recording cart.  What are your pieces of gear and what are your preferences?

ERIC:  The O1V (Yamaha Digital Mixing Desk) would be the heart of it.  I have the 16 in-out AES digital card that feeds both my recorders.  And I can digitally feed external video decks whenever I need to.  I can route anything to what I want.  So it’s the recorder, the desk (O1V), the 2 Comtek DSC 25′s , one for production and one for sound so you can have a private conversation.  And then I also have a full onboard computer.  Not a laptop, but a full computer.  When I was putting the sound cart together for a full sound cart, I had a checklist.  I need video monitors, at least two, I need playback, and also I’ll need to check my email.  And with everything I went, “computer will do that,” “computer will do that,” so I built an IBM based computer that has a four input video card and two tuners.  I can take the wireless feed right off of the camera if they’ve got one, and it also has playback capabilities and I’ve got full editing.  I use Sony Sound Forge and Vegas.  I can also do multi-track record and playback, which I’ve used before for off-camera response and things like that.  And then I’ve got an Lectrasonic 6-pack.  I’ve got six wireless and I normally go wireless boom so I also have two transmitters that plug right into the booms.  So my boom operators can be totally wireless and not have to worry about cable, reposition if they need to, walk along steady-cam and not have to worry about cables at all.

WOODY:  So your crew communications are wireless as well?

ERIC:  Yes.  Absolutely wireless.  I’ve done things where all of a sudden the boom operator at the last second has had to reposition around lights  He just runs over and he’s ready.  No delays, no tripping or other uncomfortable things.  I think that’s everything pretty much.  I my O1V have modified for DC, so I have a 105amp battery that sits in the bottom of my cart and when it’s plugged in it’s constantly charging and it can keep everything going for about eight hours.

WOODY:  What device are you actually recording to?

ERIC:  I go back and forth between my primary and my secondary recorder.  I have a Deva 5 10 track and a Sound Devices 744 4-track.  Eight tracks are digitally sent to my Yamaha 01V digital console, I can put eight tracks digital direct into the Deva and keep that there.  My preference of actual delivery in a recorder is 744.  One really interesting reason I found out just talking with editorial is that when they’re taking dailies the file name Deva gives is basically like a PNO (start ID #) number.  It starts out “one” and increments “two, three, four, five”, so you’ll always have to reference back to the sound report.  It’s just extra steps.  When you input the scene and take information on the Deva 5 it only goes to the Meta data, not as a file name.  In the 744 it goes into the Meta data and it goes into the file name.  So when they drop my disk in is if they need scene 20B take 1, it’s right there in the file name.  The way mine is set up it says “T” between the scene and take number.

WOODY:  And then it does “T1, T2, T2″?

ERIC:  Yes, it’ll continually increment until you change.  If you go from Bravo to Charlie it will go back to “one” again.  I was told on a show that I took over and started using the Deva on that it was putting about two hours extra time into syncing their dailies because of the lag time of having to constantly reference the sound report.

WOODY:  So you find yourself going to the Deva just when you need more than the four tracks that the Sound Devices 744 will give to you?

ERIC:  Pretty much.  Sometimes I might use that as just the extra track machine.  But if I see something that’s always going to be two wireless or radio mics or I can see that this is going to be just a boom and every once in awhile I’ll have to pull out a couple of wireless mics for a shot here and that’s about it, I’m going to go with the 744.  I’ve just found it’s more intuitive and the updates are far fewer in-between, but they always work.

WOODY:  And it’s a fantastic sounding box.

ERIC:  Yes.

WOODY:  What file format are you recording?  Are you recording Wav 48K 16 bit or are you going 96K, 24 bit?

ERIC:  For what I do it’s never 96-24.  That’s only going to be used for effects or music.  If I were to record effects, although most of that’s done by sound designers when I need something specific, they’ll do a high resolution because they’ll need to manipulate it.  So for that reason they’ll do it and for music that’s just the way they do it.  But as far as what I do, I’m either 16 or 24 bit.  I prefer 24 bit, but there’s a lot of places that either can only handle 16 bit and they’ll just truncate it down if I give them 24 bit, which doesn’t do anybody any bit of service, or sometimes you get the people who want it 24 bit and that’s the people, the editors or the editorial supervisor or whoever it is that really is keen on it and then it’s like, yeah, these guys are going to care.  It’s kind of a good feeling.  When you get the 16 [for delivery specs] it’s like, well, that’s the way our equipment’s set up for it so we’re going to do it that way.  That’s just kind of the attitude I get with that.

WOODY:  Boom or a lav?  How do you make a decision between the two?

ERIC:  It’s dictated by the shot, primarily.  Or the genre.  If you’re chasing a bunch of people then you’re going to be wireless, but as far as a dramatic, it’s totally dictated by the shot.  Your preference is [boom] microphone, and there’s different kinds of microphones and patterns of microphones and ways you can hide microphones if you need.  One of my favorite things in the world to do is to hide a microphone in plain sight of the shot.  Whether it’s a press conference and one of those microphones in front of them is your microphone or if you can actually see the microphone but can’t tell what it is, that’s my favorite.  It doesn’t happen all that often, but we look for it.  The preference I think of everybody, for dramatic especially, is a boom microphone.

WOODY:  So when you have a situation like that where you have five or six radio mics out there, are you doing five or six discrete tracks or are you mixing them down to two tracks?  How are you dealing with that?

ERIC:  Primarily, since we have the tracks, I send them the tracks pre-fade (each mic recorded to it’s own discrete track) and I’ll also provide a mixed track.  It all depends on what the editors want, too.  I can do anything.  So whatever they want I can do.  Obviously I do a mix for the context for the people listening on the headsets around video village.  With that many wireless tracks pre-fade, it would take forever for an editor to really weed through it without being on set and knowing what’s going on.  So for expediency on the editorial side, I always give one [of the delivered] channel a mix.  That way they can cut their picture to that and then it can go into sound editorial or if they’re doing their editorial on Avid or Final Cut they can go through [the isolated tracks] if they need to fix stuff if they need.  But I think most of what I gave them today is just as good if not better than if they want to do sound editorial.

WOODY:  Who’s your boss?

ERIC:   On the set the director is the ultimate authority.  But at the same time the producer is the one that signs the check.  And so you’re keeping both of them happy.  And what happens is if the director asks you something that you need something extra for, whether it be extra people or whatever it is that you don’t have with you, I will need to go to the producer and say “this is what we want to do, this is what he wants, so here’s how we can get it done, what do you want to do?”  The financer makes that decision and then the producer talks to the director.  So, in a way they’re both, both the ultimate, the one that you’re trying to help with the vision, is the director.  That’s the one.  They’re going to tell you want they want to do and you can suggest a few things, but they are the ones that are really in charge.  Because they need to be that way.  And then if it gets financial or sticky then you go to the producer and say, “what do you want me to do?”

WOODY:  How closely do you find yourself working with the DP?

ERIC:  As much as possible, for two reasons.  First off, whether I can’t stand them or not, I always get along with them because they can make or break you without even trying.  It’s not worth getting into a pissing match.  It’s gonna be over, and they can make you look a lot worse than you ever could do to them.  You know how it works on the set.  They’re what they are.  I find that some of them have a great rapport, some of them will want to work with you and you always need to give and take.  You give a lot more than you can so that when he really needs something he knows you’re not being a pain in the ass.  [Make them understand] that you’re actually asking because you’ve tried everything else and you just can’t do it any other way.  They’ll help you because they know that you’re not just being a whiner.  That’s really important.  So, it is a give and take situation and I always give first because I take where I need it.  We have a lot more leeway than they do.  You can’t re-light a scene in post.

WOODY:  That’s good advice.   You know, when I’m doing a feature I don’t usually get to talk to the location recordist, but I can know within the first scene what the whole show will sound like.  I can tell by the way they’re handled the tracks, whether something’s on mic or off mic, the recorded levels and so on.  I can immediately see, all these tracks are problematic or instead that this guy’s a good mixer, he was just having a hard day, because all these tracks are good except for this one scene.

ERIC:  Sometimes in features, the entire editorial department may come on when it’s almost wrapped or wrapped, but you’re clearly after wrap cause that’s when pictures lock.  So you’ll never get a chance.  They’ve way moved on.  In doing TV it’s a constant process.  You’re about three episodes in when they start doing the first mix.  So you’re still on while the post [department] is working.

WOODY:  So in those instances, other than your camera log, do you actually get on the horn and talk to editors or post sound people or is it just sort of, I turned it in and it’s been noted in the log.

ERIC:  If I’m doing it serious, I try to go to a mix, the first mix especially, and sit in on that.  Those are the people that are going to be doing it every day and you want to let them know who you are.  And there’s things that they don’t even see, the stuff that’s cut out, they see the final product.  So they don’t see the actress that absolutely doesn’t want you to touch her to put on a radio mic or the great one, the actresses that you’ll put a radio mic on and as soon as you turn your back, they think you don’t know what you’re doing and they’ll take it and put it somewhere else and it just sounds terrible.  And you go, “I just put that in place, that shouldn’t have been that way” and you go back and it’s moved because they, [the actors] know better than you and they’ve ruined the take.

WOODY:  Or they take it into the bathroom and drop it into the toilet.

ERIC:  That’s happened. (Laughs)  A hair dryer on them for about an hour usually brings them back to life.  So they, [the post department] don’t get to see those things.  They don’t know the political things and stuff, and so you can kind of get a rapport with them, otherwise they say “I don’t get why they did this, I don’t see why you couldn’t have put a microphone over here cause this sounds terrible” and once they get the idea of, okay, the DP’s hard-lighting or whatever it is or whatever the political things are, they know.  And also I found places when they’re in the mix that I say, “you know what, I know that track is good if you look”, and I’ll usually remember where it is.  And I’ve done that a couple of times on shows.  And they go back and they drop it in and all of a sudden that thing that they were going to live with is now better.  With TV sometimes, you don’t have the time, you don’t have sound editorial.  They do everything on the Avid and most of the time they don’t even go to those tracks and they just send them to the mix.  The mix sometimes only has five or ten hours, depending on what it is, to do everything and they can’t go searching for everything.

WOODY:  Do you think they’re using your comp mixed track more than they’re reaching for those isolated recordings?

ERIC:  It’s interesting.  The show that I’m finishing up now, editorial actually wants everything split out as much as possible.  They only get two tracks that’s delivered to Final Cut, but if I have two mics they want them on two mics.  So in that case, they’re post-mixed, but they just want more separation.  They want to be able to have more manipulation for whatever they do.  I don’t really know what they use.  I just like to know that I’m not getting a phone call, because it’s all there.  If you had an issue with this, that track’s right there, go for it.  And I know it’s clean.

WOODY:  So what is the personnel of your crew?

ERIC:  Generally myself and a boom operator and a utility sound who is also going to do second boom.  That’s for single camera productions.  If I were to do a four-camera proscenium style, live style show, I would have upwards of six people on the crew, including myself.  It would be a mixer, and what’s called a booth A2 or also known as a recordist who operates the audio recorder but also does other things, then you have two boom operators because you’re covering all angles and they’re on Fischer booms, and generally you’ll have a utility sound technician that pushes the boom as well and also sets mics and will do an additional third or forth boom, which I’ve had happen.  The booms are on wheels and they’ll need to be moved from set to set and often be moved during a shot because of extreme upstage-downstage or even left and right stage action.  You might need to take an entrance that’s fully upstage and so you have to push the boom in because there’s just not that much of a reach for a stage type of show.  That adds up to a pretty good sound crew.

WOODY:  So you’re essentially the crew head?  So does it work that you are hired by the producer as the location recordist, you’re given the scope of the job, and then you turn back to them and say, I’m going to need five people for this show?

ERIC:  A lot of that is known.  Maybe the beginners wouldn’t know.   It depends on the show.  Now if I’m doing a single camera show, I’m rarely going to need more than two other people.  And that’s assumed.  Now if you have a big scene you’re going to need extra people or a playback operator or such, they’ll generally tell you first.  The director will usually figure out I’m going to do this and this and this, it’s a lot of people, we may want to let sound know we may need another boom cause I want to have all this in the shot.  A lot of this stuff is bouncing back and forth in a real time situation.  A lot of times they’ll know that.  It’s rare that I’ll need more than 2 booms, which for the second boom the utility sound technician will take care of.  But as far as hiring, they absolutely don’t care.  They hire me, and I give them a list.

WOODY:  What are some of the challenges of location recording?  Is there a particular story you can tell?

ERIC:  I know I’ve got stories but they’re all in the back of my head buried in places I don’t want to find them.   (Laughs)  The very first thing I do right of the bat is walk around and look for the noise and listen for noise, whether it be fans or humming and where’s it coming from and can we turn it off.  Get every bit of noise, find out where it is and we either get it shut off or if it’s a refrigerator can we have someone on this to turn it on and off.  It’s the very first thing I do when I get on any set, even if it’s on a stage, just listen for noises.  Maybe video assist has noisy computer fans, which is quite often, and they’ll be right next to the set.  It’s like, let’s move you back a bit and put some pads in front of this.  The time you really notices the noises are when everyone finally shuts up when you’re doing a take.  If you can deal with those first thing in the day [is best], because maybe they need to find somebody with a key to go unlock something to be able to get to fan control or something.  So it’s the very first thing.  Reel the carts in, look for the noises and any potential noises – this is a hardwood floor, do we have any hard shoes – whatever could possibly happen, that’s the first thing.

WOODY:  Do you also deal with reverberant spaces?

ERIC:   Oh yeah.  Sometimes I get my furniture pads out if I can and I’ll spread them out on the floor.  You can spread those all over a floor or get some C-stands and clip them along walls.  Usually the floor is the easiest because it’s usually the most reverberant part.  And at least if you can dampen one or two walls you’ll cut your reflections down immensely because it’s going to stop after one or two reflections instead of going on and on and on.  That’s what really kills you.  And sometimes if it’s too live, you have go to two wireless mics just for that.  Or what I’ll do is I’ll boom it, but we’ll also wire them.  So when you’re sitting in a quiet room and you’re trying to do your edits and your reverb is overlapping or it’s just too much, you can always go to the wireless mics in your backup [track deliveries].  It’s one thing that the multi-track has given us is being able to present options.  We prefer to use the boom, but if we’re not too sold on the sound of it, but we don’t really want to go with wires in case maybe the room works well, so we’ll give you that option.  We’ll give you a boom on your dialog track, and then just sitting on tracks will also be their wireless tracks.   The other challenges, other than the obvious, are what are your shots and just trying to keep up with that.

I started [working on] a stage based [television] show, and the producer said, “I don’t really want to do this, but we have an exterior that we need to shoot.”  I hate starting a show off in the exterior right off the bat, but they’re forcing me into it.  So we’re going to shoot it outside the stage on the Disney lot right up against that wall on the west.   So I go out there and as soon as I turn the corner to it, I hear what sounds like a jet plane getting ready to take off.  We are two hundred feet from the central air conditioning plant for the entire [Disney Studio] lot where it runs 24/7, 365, it does not shut off.  And I walked back and said, “you can’t shoot out there.  You’re right next to the thing.”  “Oh, I didn’t even think of that.”  We ended up shooting with the idea, I said, “okay, they’re in a car, if we have all the windows closed, that’s fine.  You’ll still hear it, but you can bury it, it’s fine.”  Well then, not only did the DP want the windows open for the cross shot, but he also took the windshield off and the car was facing that.  So, our very first shot on a show that never has [had any] ADR (automated dialog replacement) was ADR’d.

WOODY:  What kind of advice would you give to a first time director of a feature film regarding your job and what they should know about location recording?

ERIC:  I think the main thing is, what I said before about when you’re doing your location surveys, listen.  It looks quite pretty.  I did some stuff for some first time directors who were doing a series of one-minute films.  They found this great location where they wanted to have a stalled out car out in the middle of absolutely nowhere where you can see in the distance for miles.  Just nothing there.  Just mountains and trees and a big cavernous canyon.  They found the greatest location.  I drove about an hour plus to get to this place, and I parked and they said this is where we’re going to shoot.  I said okay and we have the 15 freeway on a grade about 5,000 feet away and I said, “are you going to see the freeway?”  And they said no.  And I said, “cause you’re going to hear it.”  And we’re talking loud just to talk over the [noise of the] freeway.  Trucks are at low gear, high whine and on the other side they’re braking.  Well, it’s what you’re going to hear.  And they’re like, oh, we didn’t think of that.  So it’s the same thing – listen.

WOODY:  That’s the best advice.

ERIC:  I shot for a first time director, it actually collapsed after the first day, but it was a Sunday morning.  They were supposed to be in there five or six o’clock to this restaurant where he had access.  And we’re shooting upstairs in what was supposed to be a desolate bar in Harlem.  Where we’re shooting, which was the bar area of this restaurant was a mezzanine of a big huge family style restaurant that only had a thick curtain between the bar and that.  The idea was the kitchen staff would get there about 1 o’clock and they opened about 4 o’clock for dinner.  Well we didn’t get the first shot off until noon.  The DP just lit and lit and lit and so by the time we finished up, we had a full family restaurant with kids screaming, dishes clattering, an open air kitchen down below, it was like, none of this is going to be used.  None of it.  And the guy kind of realized it and realized he had made a mistake with the DP.  It ended up collapsing and he realized he had to re-think it.  He realized he wasn’t ready.

WOODY:  What is your background?  How did you get started?

ERIC:   I started playing with tape recorders as a little kid.  I discovered public radio when I was a junior in high school so I just rode my bicycle down to the local college station and got my [radio] license and started doing broadcast.  Not as a personality, but I would engineer for other people, do taped and live shows, sometimes voiceover station ID.  But pretty much just keep the station running.  I did a lot of weekends where you’d start off with your taped programming or you’d send live or something that had just been recorded, go into some other taped programming, someone would come in and do a two hour show and you’d engineer for them and that kind of thing.  And that was kind of it because I didn’t know you could make any money doing sound.  The only thing I knew was radio and I know there were concerts.  And I tried the radio, I couldn’t get a paying job anywhere, I didn’t know anything about concerts, and it never ever dawned on me that anyone was making a living or had a job in sound on movies and television.  And I ended up getting a job for a company called AudioTech, which was a small company split off from a company called Burn-Shoker Audio.  And they were a PA company, a sound reinforcement company that was geared towards television.  And the very first thing they did was they took me NBC who was a client and showed me around to where I’d be delivering things and picking up things.  And I looked around and I remember that day clearly because I was in such shock.  I saw people walking around carrying microphones and cables and operating consoles and it never ever dawned on me [that people did sound for that].  So from there I just kept working and meeting people in television and film and kept learning and doing different things.

WOODY:  Any advice regarding location sound for budding directors?

ERIC:  One thing I’d like to say to budding filmmakers and directors is try not to let the technology get in the way of the story.  More and more directors are relying on video assists.  I’ve actually seen productions come to an absolute standstill because there’s been a problem with the video assist where they [the directors] can’t shoot unless they see the frame.  Well, look through the eyepiece, get the idea of the frame, and then trust your operator and your DP.  They made films for 90 years without video assists and they’re some of the greatest films ever made.  Regarding the multitracks and the wireless mics – instead of relying on wiring everybody, you know we have 12 people on a scene, and 12 wireless mics out, you know, stage your shots a bit, don’t just rely on that.  Rely on sticking to your script a bit more.  I’ve just seen people go into things with an idea and “we’ll work it out in the process.”  And either you’ll boom it and half of it’s off mic because everyone’s just shouting out things that come to the top of their head, or you wire everybody and it’s just a wireless nightmare.

WOODY:  What do you love about your job?

ERIC:  I like being involved with the picture making process where you have all these challenges.  I guess that’s one thing, to have a challenge, and to watch it.  To watch the director say “okay, here’s the scene and this is how we want to do it.”  And then the scene plays out and you watch them develop the characters.  I’m in this work because I love movies and I love the process where you see it start from just a bunch of people with a script and then by the time you’re done the characters have direction and they pull things out of the script that you’ve never seen before or [they create] shots that are really cool and really make that scene work.   It’s very satisfying.

WOODY:  We’ll keep an ear out for your work!

WOODY:  How do you define Foley?

MONIQUE:  I sit in a room with a microphone and an engineer records me making sounds for use in television or film.  At a minimum, I cover all of the human sounds, by this I mean footsteps, hand pats and grabs, and props that the folks onscreen handle.  This does not preclude animal sounds, we do animal footsteps and movement as well.  There are sounds that are covered mainly by foley, and others by a sound editor that may be cut from a library.  Who covers what is dictated by:  time, budget and available resources. Sometimes, both Foley and effects will cover a particular sound and the re-recording mixer will use a combination of both.  If it’s a big sound like a car crash, our tendency in Foley is to cover the debris from the crash as opposed to the actual impact, which a sound editor would cut in as a hard effect.  If I have the time I may help the impact along, but I won’t be able to get as large of a sound as an editor can cut in from a library.  We don’t generally do sounds like engines or motorized sounds.

WOODY:  I think most people would be surprised at the amount of Foley that gets done.  How much Foley will you do on a feature?  Do you do all the human sounds?

MONIQUE:  On a standard feature we do all of them.  Some of the Foley “legends” will do far more than just the human sounds.  They will do huge impacts for example,  I heard about a foley artist that covered the sound of a train chugging along and screeching to a halt on the tracks for a film that featured a very long train sequence.  The fact that they covered the train in foley instead of recording an actual train blew me away.  Part of the reason they can do this is because they are very talented, but also it is because they have a stage that affords them a lot of space and a lot of really great large props, also they have the time to experiment and figure out how to create something as involved as that.  They may have a month to do a film, which is generally not the case with me.  Usually I do a feature length project in five days.  I don’t have the time or the resources to experiment with that kind of thing.  But it can go far beyond human sounds if you’ve got time.

WOODY:  When you say “legends” you’re talking about studio Foley artists and large Foley stages like Warner Bros. or Paramount?

MONIQUE:  Exactly.

WOODY: You’re doing the Foley for a full-length feature film in five days?

MONIQUE:  Five to ten is the most I’ve been given.  Budgets have gotten tighter.  ProTools has been really good and bad for the industry.  In some ways it’s been great because you can redo a take very quickly.  In the old days when you were shooting tape everything required a pre-roll.  Back then, to redo the slightest thing took twelve seconds just to prepare for that, whereas now, it’s instantaneous.  If you don’t like it you can very quickly redo it.  But it’s also brought down the budgets because people are doing guerilla Foley in their garages.

WOODY:  Probably also with ProTools you have more and more tracks.  Do you find that, too?

MONIQUE:  Yes, absolutely.  When there were less tracks, we also worked in pairs because that way you could double up on things.  Double up on footsteps for crowd scenes, double up on props, like somebody would get one aspect of a sound while the other person would handle another.  Say it was a dining room scene and if you have very few tracks you could have somebody doing chair creaks of people sitting at the dining room table while somebody else is handling glassware or dishes and you can do it simultaneously.  Now, with so many tracks, you keep everything on it’s own track.  Which is good in some ways but also it’s a lot more for the mixer to contend with.

WOODY: Do you generally work solo or in teams or both?

MONIQUE:  Generally, I work solo.  They still work in teams on the lots at Sony and Warner Bros., but it’s getting to be less and less at your little boutique studios which is where I work.  They tell me they don’t have the budget and they don’t see the value in having two people because they think that someone is just standing around, which isn’t the case at all.  It works really well to have two people doing Foley for a number of reasons.  One is that somebody might be stronger at a certain thing than another.  I recently had to do a film where I had to walk Samuel L. Jackson, and I weigh about 120 pounds, and it’s a struggle for me to sound like a plus 6-foot man.  So if I had a partner that was maybe a bigger person, male or female, they might have been a little bit better at that.  There were some things they did with the EQ and the way I physically hold my feet and do the steps and choices of shoes that help me, but the reality is in having a partner there’s somebody who is going to be better at one thing or the other.  And also it gives you a bit of a break from not having to do every single thing all the time.

WOODY:  I’ve personally never recorded two Foley artists, but I’ve often thought that it could be a really creative atmosphere.

MONIQUE: Yeah.  It’s much more creative because two people, well I don’t want to say two because whoever is recording the Foley has a very heavy influence on the creative process, so having three people in a room coming up with ideas is much better than just two.

WOODY:  So you see the engineer as a partner in the collaboration of the Foley recording?

MONIQUE: Oh absolutely.  I don’t really know how to articulate how important the engineer is in the entire process.  Usually we will have a discussion as to what we are going to cover first or what we think is the most important thing and we will do that first.  Within a reel we won’t necessarily go linearly.  Because we are trying to budget time, we sort of pick what is the most interesting or what relates to the story.  If there is something that is a really key prop that’s used over and over and over again, then that’s something that we really want to establish.  And sometimes we will record that in it’s entirety throughout the film all at once for consistency’s sake.  I recently did a horror film where somebody spends a lot of time with a box over their head with a bunch of locks on it, which is not pleasant, I’m sure, for the person wearing the box.  But anyhow, I could use that wood box with the latches that I have created for the sound, and if I do it over a period of days, I might change the way that I handle that particular prop.  It might be rattling more one day than the other.  So when it’s something like that, we will usually record it all at once just so we get the same sound from it and that my interpretation doesn’t change depending on my mood over the days.

The recordist is huge, huge, huge – on the level of morale for the space that’s created because it is such an intimate space, especially if I’m working by myself and the person on the other side of the glass is my only contact.  There have been many times that I have worked with people that have had such great, great, great ideas that I would not have come up with on my own, and together we build on each other’s ideas and it is an amazing thing.  Also, I don’t always have the best judgment of how the sound is translating through the microphone.  I can be thinking that something is just right on, and if I’m not working with somebody who is really skilled in that awareness of what is working and what’s not, I’ll go back and listen to what we have recorded and it’s not so good.  I can’t always tell how the microphone is picking up what I’m doing and I heavily rely on the recordist’s judgement.  I work with a bunch of different types of engineers.  Some are truly mixers and have taken it to an art form and EQ and modulate and do all sorts of things and others I work with just do straight recording, but are very picky about my interpretation of what I am doing.  I’ve been really blessed and I have avoided situations where I would have to work with someone who either is unpleasant or lacks really, really great judgment.  The people that I work with are really quite incredible.

WOODY:  It’s great to hear that you rely on a real collaboration with the engineer.

MONIQUE:  It’s more important than anything.  It’s more important than the props I have to use, it’s more important than the stage I have to use, it’s more important than the show I’m working on.  I’d have to say it’s singularly the most important thing.

WOODY:  That is very encouraging.  Let’s shift gears a bit – how do you determine what to cover within a scene?

MONIQUE:  That comes from experience and budget and time.  Usually when we start a film we’ll start at the beginning and we’ll work reel by reel.  Let’s say we’ll start with a cloth pass. And that will be the first time that I’ve usually seen the film.  I generally don’t see what I’m working on until the time comes that we are recording [the session].  When I do the cloth pass, I like to wear headphones so I can listen to the production audio so I can hear what the film sounds like.  Because a lot of times we are trying to sound like production so the foley can be used and not pop out in a bad way.  The floor surfaces and shoes need to sound similar so if they replace the production dialogue in a scene with adr the foley matches up.  So I’ll do a cloth pass which involves me close mic’ing manipulation of cloth to emulate the characters’ movements.  I’ll have a variety of types of cloth depending on what the people are wearing.  A denim shirt kind of does it all, it sounds like almost anything, but if someone is wearing a silk blouse, for example, I’ll have a piece of silk handy.  So we’ll do a movement [cloth] pass, which is something I never noticed prior to doing Foley.  Now I hear it being used all the time, even on television.  It’s just an interesting thing that you may not even be aware of on a conscious level until someone tells you about it and you’re like, oh that’s that rustling sound.  So we will start with that and then we’ll do a footsteps pass where we will get all the characters’ footsteps on the various floor surfaces.  A good Foley stage has a cement surface, a wood floor, a dirt pit, a gravel pit, a way to make the sound of grass.  We will do the footstep pass and then we will do a pass of props.  You’ll do a setup for basic hand props and then, depending on the time and the budget, you’ll cover things that maybe the effects people will be covering as well, but since you have the time, you will be able to do that.  But if you don’t have the time and you think it is something the effects guys are going to cover anyhow, then you’ll just skip that.  You pick your battles.

WOODY:  What are the tools of your trade?

MONIQUE:  I’ve got about forty pairs of shoes.  I’ve got a small portable kit that I bring with me.  I have a foley purse with some stuff in it that rattles kind of cool.  I’ve got a lot of metal things, some hinges and wood, glass, plastic and rubber items.  Things are basically categorized into like materials.  I have a backpack with various paper (photos, newspaper, cellophane, wax paper, etc.)  I’ve got some different clothes that I carry with me (a leather jacket, nylon windbreaker).  It’s really great when you can find something that squeaks or creaks.  It’s invaluable stuff to me.  I was at a yard sale and I was looking for a day planner to use as a Foley prop.  So I’m at this yard sale and I’m opening and closing this day planner.  I’ve got it held up to my ear and this guy looks at me, I guess the owner of the day planner, and he said, “it’s only a buck.”  And he thought I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to spend the dollar on his planner for some other reason.  It didn’t sound good, so I didn’t buy it.  My favorite props I think lately, are a couple of pillow cases filled with cornstarch, which I use for snow.  The reason I put the cornstarch in the pillow cases is [that] it contains it so I don’t leave the stage with a nice white powder covering everything.  But cornstarch has a nice screech and creak to it that’s really, really cool.  The crunch sounds like snow.  It also works really well for body falls in animation.  If somebody falls in sand, it’s got a lot of loft to it, and it’s more of an interesting sound than just using sand, for example.  A chamois has been a great friend of mine.  When you get them wet, they make lots of cool dimensional gushes and mushes and things like that.  And I’ve also gotten a lot of mileage out of a pinecone.

WOODY:  Really?  What do you use a pinecone for?

MONIQUE:  I can step on a pinecone and the cracking of it can sound like ice breaking.  If the pinecone is worn down a bit and I manipulate my fingers on it can sound like little bug legs.  It can sound like all sorts of things.  It’s a secret favorite of mine.  I remember telling an engineer I worked with, “don’t tell anybody about the pinecone.”  There are Foley secrets and with the exception of when I was training, I’ve almost always worked alone.  I’ve gotten to have a partner a few times, but the downside to working alone is that there are some Foley secrets that I don’t know – that are only passed on if you’ve worked with someone who knows them.  But I’ve developed some of my own, so I’ll do those for now.  (Laughs)

WOODY:  When you go to a Foley stage or a session, what items do you anticipate they will have there for you?  Obviously you aren’t going to be carrying a car door around with you.

MONIQUE:  Exactly.  A car door is important.  There was a long time where one of the stages I worked at didn’t have a car door and I was trying to use a folding chair.  It was terrible.  Finally one day one of the sound editors took pity on me and went to “pick-a-part” and bought a car door.  A car door is a big one.  A wood chair is nice because nothing sounds quite like a wood chair, especially one that has a little bit of creak to it.  I prefer not to carry dishes and glassware with me, so it’s nice that, even if they don’t have a proper Foley stage, usually the places I work will have a kitchen.  Nothing is sacred or off limits.  I will grab whatever is around the facility.  I won’t break it or anything (usually).

I’m definitely resourceful and I will find things and use them.  Some of the creativity comes from, in my experience, trying to make do.  Working at little boutique studios, they don’t have everything that one needs, literally.  So trying to figure out how to make a wide range of sounds working with very little is, I think, a great part of the creativity.  On the other hand, having done this for 11 or 12 years, a lot of times movies have someone riding a horse.  Not as much in contemporary films, but I did a lot of old movies where I did the Foley.  And I’ve always faked it with some cool leather creaks and some belts I use as reins, but the other day I was somewhere that actually had a saddle and I got to use the saddle for the creaks.  And it sounded so good, I was like, oh my god, I can’t believe I’m finally getting to use this thing!  So it would be a luxury to work somewhere that had all sorts of cool things, but it’s also honed my creativity to not have that option.  If I would have always had the chance to literally use “the thing” then I wouldn’t have grown in the way that I have needing to improvise and make do.  Also, the literal prop does not always sound the best.  It just depends.

There have also been situations where you spend a lot of time compensating for the shortcomings of a room. Say the stage is an ADR stage and there are no Foley pits, there is no dirt or gravel or grass area, you can still make do, as long as you have a decent concrete surface, which can be used for tile, cement, or asphalt.  For dirt footsteps,  you can throw a carpet down and throw some dirt on the carpet and walk on that but you have to walk much softer so you don’t reveal the floor underneath and there are other things you have to do to try to pull that off.  You can do it.  It doesn’t sound as good, but you can get away with just about anything as long as the room is quiet and it doesn’t have weird bounce.  I’m not an acoustician, but there have been times that in working in makeshift rooms there’s weird bounce that happens from all of the right angles in the walls and the ceiling.  I recently worked on a stage like that where I was walking “a big guy” and I was walking really hard and it sounded great to me, but then when I listened to the recording I sounded like a woman in heels.  There is just a bizarre, weird, echo bounce thing that can happen which makes things more difficult.  So I ended up having to walk this big guy really soft so that we wouldn’t hear that [the poor room quality].  It compromises the quality when you don’t have a great stage, but we can make do with just about whatever we are given.

WOODY:  You do Foley for feature films, but you also do it for television as well?

MONIQUE: Yeah.  Because I work at a few different places, I get to work on a really nice variety of projects which I think is helpful as far as one not getting into a bit of a rut.  I work on feature length films, good and bad.  I work on television.  I recently started a really great one-hour drama, “Mad Men”.  I sometimes get to do animation, which is the most difficult thing I do from a creative standpoint.  I work on reality TV, which most people are just amazed that there is Foley in reality TV.  That seems to be a huge secret that no one knows.  Even people in the industry are shocked when I tell them that I do Foley for reality TV.  I’ve done Foley for “Survivor” for 13 seasons. I am currently working on “American Gladiators” and “Wipe Out”.  I did Foley for many years for “Fear Factor”.

WOODY:  So you’re doing the munching of spiders?

MONIQUE:  Yes, yes, yes.  People eating intestines and things, the sound of people in a fish tank full of roaches moving about.  All of that stuff does not really have a sound associated with it, we put that in.  At first when I started “Fear Factor” I was very creeped out by the content and then what I grew to realize is it was one of the most creative things that I’d ever gotten to do from a Foley standpoint because it’s not straightforward.  It’s not setting a wine glass down.  There’s only so much pizzazz that can have.  But having to come up with a way to make the worms sound different than the roaches and the pig intestine chewing sound different than the hundred year old egg involves some true thought.  And plus, they actually play the stuff up, which is really nice.

WOODY:  That was going to be my next question.  Did you find that they use this for the on air mix or is it more for the M&E and foreign delivery.

MONIQUE:  For “Fear Factor” it made the mix and it was played up.  On “Survivor”, they say they use what we do, but the show has such wonderful music, the composer for that is just outstanding.  For something like “Survivor” we mainly cover the competitions.  So if somebody is going through some sort of obstacle course, that’s what we cover.  We also cover them traipsing around through the jungle and certain things that didn’t come out well in production because they don’t mic reality shows for those sounds the way they do when they are shooting in a controlled setting.  They mic for dialog, but no one bothers sticking a mic into the tank of cockroaches and I don’t even know if they would, what that would sound like.

WOODY:  I often prefer to work with Foley artists than to have to search through my sound effects library and layer and create and edit sounds.  Many times it’s better and faster and more creative to do it with a Foley artist.

MONIQUE: It’s so weird.  People get so cheap when it comes to Foley and they think, oh I can just cut that, but they don’t realize the time it takes to cut something like that that’s multi-dimensional and nuanced.  It takes quite awhile as opposed to we can do it in a matter of seconds.

WOODY:  So how did you get into Foley in the first place?

MONIQUE:  I was very fortunate.  It was accidental.  I had been doing art department work and I knew that was not where I wanted to end up.  It seemed like a lot of moving furniture to me and I didn’t want to be a production designer.  I couldn’t really see it going beyond the dreaded furniture moving that I was doing.  So, I thought I wanted to get into picture editing. I was at a party and I met someone and he said he was in post and I thought that meant that he was a picture editor.  I didn’t know anything, I thought that post was picture editing.  And I said, “oh I’ve always wanted to do post.”  And he said actually he was in post sound.  And I said “oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.”  I just went along with it.  He said he actually recorded Foley and I said you know, that has always been interesting to me because I’d seen the LA Times trailer [shown during the pre-show of film screenings which depicted various crew positions in motion pictures] they had a few years ago and it did look interesting.  So the guy called me a couple of days later and he said “we’ve been trying to train somebody and it’s been about a month now and he’s just not getting it so we’re auditioning people.  Would you like to come in?”  So myself, along with about ten lucky others, all had a chance to come in and try to walk footsteps in sync or move a piece of cloth.  Nothing real taxing or complicated, but just to see if you could hit sync with what was being projected.  They picked me and ironically I worked for them for about a month before the purchase of their building fell through and thus, their foley stage went along with it.  And so I had about a month experience and I sent a resume saying that I was told that I had potential talent but I had very little experience.

I was really lucky.  My timing was good and I met some very kind people who were willing to show me some things, which is extremely rare.  There’s not that many of us, I think there’s maybe only a hundred Foley artists in the state [California], and the work isn’t long like editors who can work on movies for a year given the different budgets.  But Foley artists, our job, even on a big budget thing, maybe get twenty days a month.  So everything is very competitive and no one wants to teach anybody how to do what they do because then that person is going to be willing to do what they do for cheaper.  It’s funny.  It’s very, very difficult to break in to.  It’s very, very competitive.  No one wants to show anybody anything and I managed to get some people to show me some things and to hire me.  I still am stunned.  I don’t know quite what happened and I don’t think I realized how lucky I was at the time.  I felt glad, I thought, this is cool, but I really didn’t know how truly lucky I was.  I am glad I didn’t know how hard it was to break into.  My naivete probably helped me along quite a bit.  If I would have known how hard it is to get into foley I may have not thought it realistic.  I meet people all the time that say they’d love to do Foley and I wish them well, but it’s very hard to break into.

WOODY:  I get that question all the time.  “Hey, I’d love to do Foley.  Would you hire me?”

MONIQUE:  I think part of the problem is schools, too.  I met a kid a couple years ago who went to a recording school and his parents paid I think about a hundred grand in tuition for him to go to school there.  And of course his parents were expecting that he would be able to come out here and get a forty or fifty dollar an hour job, which is what the school said would happen if they trained in this area.  I’m not saying all schools are to blame, this is just an isolated story, but the poor kid came out here, he was doing an internship and making nothing, and the next level up from that he was maybe going to be making $8-$10 in the machine room somewhere.  And he was super bummed because his parents kept asking him when he was going to make that big salary he had been led to believe he was going to get upon graduation.

I recently was on a judging panel for a paid internship that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences holds.  The person who receives the internship gets to work at a sound facility here in Los Angeles for a month or two.  And it’s a paid internship, it’s not a huge amount of pay, but it’s still some pay.  But they get the experience of that.  There were maybe thirty applicants and we had to narrow it down to three.  They have to write a letter explaining why they want to do the internship and what they hoped to gain.  It’s really interesting.  They get letters of recommendation from faculty and it’s just really interesting seeing what peoples’ ideas of what this business is and what’s going to be expected of them and what position they get to assume upon arrival.  There’s, of course, a number of talented people coming from USC, but the panel also likes to give opportunities to people from other states where they don’t have a chance to meet people and make contacts the way they do out here.  The exciting thing about it is there are a lot of bright talented foks out there that really are into sound, which is very cool.  I don’t know that that was the case twenty years ago.  I think people are a lot more educated about the importance of sound than they used to be.  It used to be kind of an after thought, didn’t it?

WOODY:  In many ways it still is.  One of my rants is that people think sound for film and TV is just a technical job.  They have no idea the amount of collaboration and creativity involved.

MONIQUE:  And I don’t know if they’ve changed course, but it used to be AFI didn’t even teach sound.  It’s weird, too, about that collaboration thing.  I think that’s really huge as far as what we do in general.  Editors have a tendency to work a lot by themselves, sound editors in front of a computer, but they’re still collaborating with the sound supervisor, with other editors on what the tone of the film is supposed to sound like so that there’s some continuity, and then with the dialog [editor] and with the mixer.  All of these forces come together and it’s really a hugely collaborative effort.  Every once in awhile I’ll meet somebody who is a Foley artist/recordist where they maybe have some way to push play from the stage, like they’ll have a little portable console and they’ll record themselves.  And that’s like working in a vacuum.  I would rather not do Foley at all than to work like that.  The collaboration is what makes this really interesting.

WOODY:  It also makes it better.

MONIQUE:  Oh, so much better.

WOODY: I don’t think people think of the sound portion of motion pictures as being artistic.

MONIQUE: I think it’s moving more in that direction where people are beginning to understand, but I think it has a long way to go.  Another thing, too, is that people have a tendency to run out of money.  They spend all of their money in production and then if they have a little bit left, that goes to picture editors and that process, and by the time they get to the audio portion, that’s the last thing. And then they have neither money nor  time.

WOODY:  A lot of times directors don’t understand or see the value of what we do until they sit in on a sound edit or mixing session.  What do people most misunderstand about what you do?

MONIQUE:  I’d have to say that what they misunderstand about Foley is that they imagine the difficulty would come from the creativity or from the sync.  Both of those things are difficult, but I find the thing that is the most challenging about doing Foley is having to pay such close attention the entire time.  You are glued to every second on that screen and you have to almost be psychic to be able to tell what a character is going to do next and to be able to do that in sync with the right intensity.  It requires a great deal of concentration.  So there will be times where I’ll work a really long day, maybe I’ll work a double shift, and people would imagine that I would be tired because I’m running and slamming things down and moving about and that’s not the part that’s tiring.  The part that’s exhausting about doing Foley is having to pay such close attention from the moment you’re in record.

WOODY:  Can you give me some insight in terms of your brain -you’re looking at something in life, a prop or item in a store, and somehow your brain sees that but hears something else.

MONIQUE:  It’s weird.  Sometimes people have said to me that as a Foley artist you probably hear things differently.  And that’s not true at all.  I hear things the same way everybody else does.  The only difference is that I might be, on occasion, more aware of them.  Like I recently bought a silicone, waffle-weave pot holder and I bought it because it was cool looking and I needed a new pot holder, but the other day when I was rinsing it I realized that it made this cool kind of sucking sound.  And I’m like, oh, this would be cool for something.  And I didn’t know at the time, and I still don’t, what it will be used for, but there will be a day where I’m sitting on a stage and I’ll need that particular sound and my brain will go, oh, that pot holder you have at home would be perfect.  Another thing is a lot of times the recordist will come up with a really great way to articulate to me what is or is not working about what I’m trying.  Say I’m trying to do a bug crawling and the legs sound too big or too crunchy, a good engineer will be able to tell me specifically what about it that isn’t working and then I’ll have to just be resourceful and based on the description of what is needed try to just experiment and figure out what will work.  Sometimes they can help me with EQ and sometimes they can actually help with suggestions.  As far as what part of the brain,  or what makes a foley artist able to access those ideas – I used to have a lot more fear about it.  I’ve actually lost sleep over thinking “how am I going to make this particular sound?”  But what I’ve come to realize is that we always work it out.  Whether it’s my idea or the engineer’s idea, at the end of the day we always work it out. So I don’t have that fear so much anymore.  If I don’t know how to do it, I just go, oh I don’t know how to do that, but I know that by the time I need to I will have figured it out or the recordist will have or we both will have.

WOODY:  When you see the final project, how much of what you do, do you think, makes it?

MONIQUE:  It really varies.  That’s where the re-recording mixer is the final say.  Some mixers love to use Foley.  Others really just like to use production and only use Foley when absolutely necessary.  I have learned through some disappointments early on.  I was doing “Gods and Monsters” maybe my second year of doing Foley, and I remember there was this one scene where Ian McKellen’s character operates on Frankenstein.  He opens his head and he removes his brain and then he stitches it back up.  This was one of those occasions where I lost sleep trying to figure it out.  I was pretty inexperienced and it was so specific and the sound supervisor said “oh we want something really cool for this,” so it was really something that kind of freaked me out.  I couldn’t tell you what I did now, it was too long ago, but I spent about an hour on it actually recording different elements for it and all together it sounded really cool.  I remember the sound supervisor called me in to a room where they were watching down the Foley and the director was there, and they were so complimentary.  And they were saying, “Monique this is just amazing, this is exactly what we want!”  They were thrilled and I was thrilled and everybody was thrilled and then I went to the screening a few months later and I was all excited about my big scene and all I heard was music. (Laughs)  So I’ve learned to separate myself from attachment to the outcome of what makes a mix.  As long as what the engineer and I have come up with sounds cool when our session ends when we play it back, as long as that sounds good, whether it makes the mix or not I’ve had to separate myself from caring.  Of course it’s nice when it does, but I can’t take that as a personal failure if it doesn’t because it’s really not anything to do with that.  Or sometimes it might be.  Sometimes they may not like it, but it’s generally just a creative choice.  Clearly with this Frankenstein scene they opted for music.

WOODY:  Do you enjoy the work?

MONIQUE: Yeah!  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I’m picky about where I work.  If something doesn’t feel right, like if I don’t get along with the people, I don’t work there.  So the show can be bad, the show doesn’t have to be good, it’s nice when it is, but really the most important thing is who I’m working with.  And if the show is bad it just gives us something to laugh at.  Sometimes we take our work for granted and we’re really fortunate to be living in a beautiful place, [Southern California] working in this industry that so many people would love to be a part of.  So many people have jobs they don’t care about.  They just do it as a means to an end, but I’d like to believe that if I came into a windfall of money from the sky, that I would still do Foley because it’s fun.

WOODY:  And I hope I’m behind the glass with you!

Todd Sklar, writer and director of “Box Elder” has just wrapped the first leg of his nationwide tour for the film.  The tag line for his movie “Box Elder” seems to sum up what it’s all about best – “On the the road to nowhere, these guys call shotgun.”  Todd took time out from scheduling the next leg of the tour to talk about directing, the tour and of course – sound.

WOODY: Many first time directors are more attuned to the visuals and the technical aspects regarding the picture than the audio and the recording process on set. Did you find that to be true for yourself?

TODD: I would say that for me story and performance always come first, but visually, as the technical aspect of the film, I understood that better. In a weird way sound is something that I am very acutely aware of when I am watching films but I have no practical production experience with it what so ever. It was more so the lack of know-how in the translation from point A to point B. I love overlapping dialogue and I really wanted that. I would always source Mash, you know how great that is.

WOODY: Altman was a master in his use of sound and production dialog.

TODD: Exactly, exactly. But I did not understand necessarily how much effort and work he put into that you know? They don’t have audio commentary tracks on DVD’s with sound guys talking about how you approach sound. The first time I watched Boogie Nights P.T. Anderson was talking about how they got that first tracking shot and so I can understand how to do that and plan how to do that. A lot of it was just not having the experience to understand how difficult of a thing production audio is. And the weird thing is, going into making the film I had so much research that I was doing and everybody, any idiot who’s made a film in the world would warn you and tell you how important sound is, and I was well aware of that. But you really don’t understand how it’s your number one priority if you do not know what you are doing. You should be listening to the sound guy and telling everyone else to shut up. That’s a learning lesson without question.

WOODY: And have you made other pictures as well?

TODD: I have made some shorts, but I would not really even consider them shorts. I would call them “film experiences” because they are all so flawed in their own little way. I have no background in film and didn’t go to film school. The only reason I made shorts was to get that hands-on experience and to learn story telling through the lens in a hands-on approach. Every one of the shorts I made was way overtly ambitious in every aspect of the medium, the story telling and everything. That way I could try to stretch myself and figure out how to do certain things. So they are all very much flawed and hard to watch.

WOODY: So that was inspiration to go ahead and tackle a feature-length project?

TODD: (Laughs) Yeah. It’s interesting because my technical prowess didn’t actually grow that much. I think my ability for story telling has always in its strongest form been natural instincts and intuition and what not. The thing that kind of progressed me into doing a feature is just the last short I made before this feature was around twenty-eight minutes long and that was heavily condensed with a lot of scenes. It was really too heavy and that was in its shortest form. I just could not fit all the things I wanted to do in a story in less than ninety minutes. So for me, I didn’t set out to necessarily write a feature, but I think the first treatment was twelve pages longer than my first draft of the script, which was like 160 pages. (Laughs) Either it’s going to be a TV show or it’s going to be feature.

WOODY: So you out grew doing shorts?

TODD: Pretty much. And only in the story telling aspect. At that point I did not even feel comfortable making another short as far as my technical skills go. I had to pick that up at a much more relevant pace to match the story telling.

WOODY: So in terms of actual time from when you finished the script to actually wrapping was what, 9 months or a year?

TODD: Yeah, a little bit less than that.

WOODY: And how about the post process? How long did it take you to get from wrapping production to a locked picture edit?

TODD: That was a crazy experience as well. (Laughs) Our editor Kamau [Bilal] was editing overnight the rough cuts of each scene that we shot during the shooting. So we had our first actual rough cut of the film I want to say less than five or six days after we wrapped. So that helped a lot. That really expedited the initial post process. Then from there me and Kamau worked together every day for a little less than 2 months. We did one day of re-shoots and then just edited around 18 to 20 hours a day between me and him. And I want to say we wrapped around mid September and had picture lock in the beginning of February so that would be about five months.

WOODY: In terms picture cutting, did you think that was about right?

TODD: I thought it was unbelievably fast. Our ethos during the whole process was that we were going to make the best movie possible and we’re not going to have any deadlines, festival or other. I worked at Sundance that year, so I was gone for a month doing that and then we did an initial round of ADR that took two weeks, so we had about a month and a half of that five months where we weren’t cutting at all. So technically it was really more like 3 1/2 months. And I thought for that, that’s just incredibly fast for a movie that going into it with as much improvisation as we did and also leaving ourselves as much exploration room as I needed to figure things out. I thought 3 1/2 months is pretty incredible to burn through and find the story that we did. That said though, keep in mind that Kamau and I were literally editing 18 to 20 hours every day during that period. So as far as actual hours go, it’s probably not too quick compared to a regular production, but as far as actual days go I thought it went pretty quickly.

WOODY: What format did you shoot?

TODD: We shot in HD. We used the Panasonic HVX and it is 720p and stereo sound and we used the 35mm adapter and shot most of the film with either the 35mm lens or a 50mm lens. Some of our close ups, especially the outdoor stuff, we used an 80 to kind of get the faces to pop out a little more. But a lot of that with the lenses works out because of the campus. (University of Missouri, the setting for “Box Elder”) My DP and I worked together a lot in preproduction talking about different styles and the kind of things I was interested in and the films that influenced me in general. He did a great job of understanding what about those films I liked and then we were intuitively able to create similar things. So in a weird way there is not a lot of rip off shots if you will. They’re very kind of (Jim Jarmusch) Jarmusian and Wes Anderson like with the relation between characters and space and settings. I think it helps tell the story because the whole idea was keeping the campus as a character in a way.

WOODY: How did you do your production audio?

TODD: That’s a really good question. We had the wonderful Jesse “C-Nug” Brown who was mixing and doing boom at the same time.

WOODY: Wow, that’s always a challenge.

TODD: (Laughs) It really is. This was his first feature as well and so it was a nightmare for him but he was a trooper and he did an unbelievable job. Primarily we used a Sennheiser Shotgun and some wireless lavs as well. For a little while we were using plate mics just to get production audio around the set, but mostly we just shot with a shotgun, a boom, and tried to keep the sound as natural as possible. Our production audio was easily the weakest element going into post and that was primarily because of my inexperience, again technical inexperience. And for C-Nug this is his first feature and his first time working with any of us, so he didn’t know anybody on set. It was very hard for him to kind of step up and say “hey guys I think you need to do this” or “I think we need to do that.” He did try to do this and unfortunately we didn’t listen as much as we should have. Thank God he was a trooper about that because a lot of people know they’re right and they should if they know their job, and you’re telling them to shut up or don’t worry about it. They will just storm off or get grumpy or say “I do not want to work with these people.” C-Nug was just like you know “it’s cool, let’s do it your way, we will worry about it later.”  And he never once in post when we had sound issues was like, “I told you so.” You never heard him say that one time. It was always “what can I do to help.” So we got really, really lucky to have a personality like that on set even though we kind of did not utilize him as skillfully as we should have.

WOODY: Prior to “Box Elder” had you had any post audio experience?

TODD: No I didn’t. Most of the time whoever is [picture] editing for me would do all of that for me. It’s a very interesting thing – I’ll say three of my four shorts the DP ended up doing the editing and did a lot of the sound design and the other one the editor did a lot of the sound design and sound effects and cleaned it up. I never recognized this until looking back, but in almost everyone of those processes I was in the editing room you know like twenty-four hours a day being a partner in every decision until “now I’ll just clean up the sound and we will look at again it tomorrow.”  And I can’t believe that I never once considered what “cleaning up the sound” was. It’s pretty amazing especially knowing that I would break and I would go and stay up for twelve hours and think about a new scene to shoot and the editor would stay up for twelve hours “cleaning up the sound” but I never connected on how intensively he was working on that. So my lack of experience in post sound definitely crippled the film a little bit.

WOODY: So when you began to focus in more on just the audio were you horrified, did it open more doors for you or did you see it as a chance to change the pacing or to help scenes in a way that you hadn’t prior?

TODD: That’s very interesting. In every other facet of the post-production phase I did a good job in making sure to stay creatively thinking “how can we make the film better.” How can we take this and creatively either fix it and find a creative solution or use it to our advantage and to the film’s advantage. But at that point with the audio we had tried so many things and failed so many times that I had become more lenient there than ever before. It’s either – we are going to try and fix this and get it the way I want it or we are just going to bite the bullet and do what we have to do. And that was my attitude going in. But then after working on it and focusing on it and realizing the possibilities that were still there even though we were in a time crunch, it opened up to me – we are still creating a film here! What I really look forward to on the next one is doing the post edit for the sound as a whole new other edit again. For first time filmmakers, especially in a time crunch and budget crunch, it’s a tough thing to remember that you’re not just fixing the mistakes, you’re supposed to be creative. I looked at it more as a “mistake fixing” scenario than a creative one.

WOODY: Kurosawa said something like, “Cinematic sound does not merely add to, but multiplies two or three times, the effect of the image.”

TODD: That is great. That is really good. I’m probably going to steal that.

WOODY: If you were advising other first time feature directors, do you have any advice either about the production audio or the post audio process?

TODD: For post audio I would say take half of your post budget and dedicate it to post audio. And that’s a minimum. And I would also say take half of the time you’ve allotted for post and dedicate that to post audio.

WOODY: You know a lot of people will think you’re crazy for saying that. (Both laugh)

TODD: Here’s the thing. We had a production with “Box Elder” that was the epitome of “we have one less day” or “one less thing” than we need. And that said, throughout the whole process, from every aspect, from money to time to resources, everything, the only thing that we actually ran short on was time and money for post audio. We got away with everything else. Everything else we found a creative solution to make to make it work, make it fit. I would much rather error on the side of having too much time and too much money for post audio verses the other. I don’t think you would waddle around if you had extra time. You are already so close to the finish line. And my advice regarding the production audio is, and this is so repetitive because everyone will tell you this, but it’s the most important thing in the world. I was very well liked by my actors and my crew was very supportive but the biggest aspect of my production for me was to protect the actors, to make sure they had an atmosphere and an energy where they could create and people weren’t inhibiting that or offending them or making them feel uncomfortable or make them feel like they had to perform. And a lot of that was because of the natural energy and the creative energy and what not. But I think that the sound person, whoever is doing production sound should be defended and respected by the director in the exact same regard. Especially because it is so often that the sound person is looked at as the evil guy on set because “oh no, we didn’t get it because of this or that” or “I’m not quite ready yet because I’ve been waiting on you guys and now I have to start doing my job.” It’s definitely a job that everybody on set doesn’t really take into consideration and it’s so important. So one thing I will be doing next time out is being as conscious of my production sound person as I am with my actors and just as protective. You know C-Nug was amazing – being on set in his first feature, he doesn’t know anybody there, and it compromises that situation and makes it so much more pressure filled. I really feel like it is the filmmaker’s obligation, it was my obligation to say “Are we okay? Is the refrigerator on?” Because that way if he says “no, we need fifteen minutes” I’m on the hook. I’m the guy who makes that decision and says “you know what guys, I know we want to shoot this, we want to make the day but we need to wait fifteen minutes to get the sound in.” He’s not being the bad guy, I am. I think that is part of what being a filmmaker is all about, being the bad guy, making sure that you are the one making those decisions. Because everyone who is there, they showed up to make your film. They don’t care if they have to wait fifteen minutes – they came that day to do what you needed them to do. They didn’t come that day to do what C-Nug needed them to do. That’s not his responsibility, its mine. So I think the biggest thing for any future filmmaker is to make sure you are responsible for your sound person. That is totally your responsibility. And that was like the biggest thing that I learned- because I did not recognize that at all I didn’t defend him at all and that should have been an absolute priority. It’s incredible to think that like I was so protective of these actors because it was their first time, I never once considered to think about that for the sound person. Yeah man what a trooper, what a guy.

WOODY: So now you’ve packed up your film and you’ve taken your show on the road. You are driving around the country, bringing your film to the masses. How did the actual tour concept come about?

TODD: I originally came up with the concept before I was actually writing the script, or it was right around that period of time. It was primarily based around my experience that I had with booking bands and concerts in Columbia, the college town I went to for school. I had a lot of success with graduate marketing and e-marketing and event planning and event coordination and event booking. I didn’t have any background in that so I was using a lot of hustling, just kind of intuitive skills to make that happen. I felt like if I could do that with bands in a small college town then I could probably do it with movies. Not too different of a business. And when I started to explore that, the difference between the two of them I found was that it really wasn’t that different of a business model. It was just that the movie industry on the distribution side of things is a lot more of a mess than the concert industry. So in actuality the situation is more stacked in my advantage to book a film in a town and make it an event than it is with a concert, which is really eerie to think about because it is such a different trade off on the financial side of things. But based on that I had a pretty large social network in different college towns and I did a lot of road trips, so I knew the country fairly well and felt that I had the right guys in place to come along with me to make it all happen, so it was kind of fundamentally based on that. And also at the South by Southwest festival there was a panel that Richard Linklater was on. It was right after he had sold “Fast Food Nation”, and they were asking him the things he was shocked by as far as new trends in filmmaking were concerned. The questions were geared towards digital cinema and how did he think technology has affected cinema. He said how he was shocked by how technology wasn’t changing cinema. He was blown away that when he sold “Slacker” at Sundance in ’91, I think it was, the same person who had sales rep’d for him then was his sales rep when he sold “Fast Food Nation.” He was just blown away that every other aspect of the industry had changed ten times over in the last sixteen some odd years but not with the infrastructure – those same people were still doing the same jobs. There just had been no change what so ever. And that to me was like, if this guy thinks that there is a problem then I am not crazy and maybe, just maybe, we have not a solution but the beginning of something. So that was just a real source of inspiration.

WOODY: And how has the tour experience been?

TODD: The tour went pretty well man, it was pretty crazy. It was a good venture. We ended up showing the film in a little over thirty-three theaters, which is a good amount for any independent film and ended up selling about nine thousand six hundred tickets or a little more than that. So, yeah, we did well with that. With that said, the whole idea of the first tour was to kind of make it a beta stage for the distribution model itself. We took a lot of risks and tried every trick in the book at cost effectiveness. We ended up spending more money than we should have, but through trial and error we made a little bit of money. We need to make a lot more, but it was good. It was defiantly an incredible thing. It was amazing to see, you know, a couple of hundred or so odd people in the theater every night watching your movie. The great thing is getting to know your fans. These people become zealots because it’s your audience and you’re doing a very direct marketing, doing a niche-oriented first hand, person-to-person target marketing. You’re picking up people who you think and kind of know are going to love the film and getting them in there and knowing that they’re going to love it is a very inspiring thing.

WOODY: So how many times did you end up watching the movie?

TODD: You know its funny. I watched it all the way through at start for I don’t know, I didn’t get sick of it until maybe half way through the tour, then I would kind of watch it in parts. Then it got so busy towards the middle of the tour that during the screenings I would be working outside the theater still trying to set things up for the rest of the tour, so I ended up not watching it for about a month and a half. Then I kind of missed it. So the last few weeks I started watching it again, which is kind of nice.

WOODY: Sometimes when I re-watch a picture I spent a lot of time with after a break I often find that I take something new and different away from it.

TODD: Totally, see that’s the best part. That was the first experience for that with me finally with the film, to see it with new eyes for the first time at the end of the tour, which is really nice.

WOODY: Many filmmakers make their project and just shop and shop and shop it hoping a sales rep or distributor will pick it up. I really admire your proactive approach to getting your picture out to audiences.

TODD: I think a lot of filmmakers and not just filmmakers there are a lot of people in the industry in general, I think it might be more of a producer/investor thing than a filmmaker thing, and they don’t make content for themselves and they definitely don’t make content to story-tell. They don’t make the content to show it to people, they make the content to either make a profit or build or progress a career in some way shape or form. So then the idea of making a film, then the plan is to sell it and the investors will make money and the producer will have a blue star on their resume and the filmmaker will get to make another film and everyone is happy. That’s the goal. Where as with us, I already had an investor group interested in making my next film before I had even started shooting this one. There was no pressure what so ever to try and get my next film made. I had no interest in progressing a career and neither did Brock [Williams - Producer of Box Elder]. We just wanted to make a film so that we could show it to people. I think that’s the other thing that didn’t necessarily play into the actual distribution model but the thing that kept it alive the whole time from like November 2005 or whatever to actually touring it, the fact that no one got in the way of saying, you know, maybe we shouldn’t tour. It’s just that we all wanted to make this film to show it.

WOODY: So what’s on tap for the next Todd Sklar project?

TODD: (Laughs) Well we are touring again in the fall. We’re going to the west coast then we are touring in the east coast and we are going to make a documentary while on tour this time. That’s going on and then summer of next year the plan is to make another film. I have a script that I wrote before “Box Elder” that’d kind of a little bigger in scale that I want to make going across the U.S. and kind of like a little road movie and hopefully a with a lot of the same people.

WOODY: Can’t wait to see it.

Jackie took time out from her crazy schedule to talk with us about the art and process of dialog editing. She is also an accomplished pianist and composer.

Woody: How did you first get into dialog editing?

Jackie: I was just a musician and I wanted to do something else. My major had been film and I thought, okay, well, maybe music editing because you know, I know music and I like computers (Laughs). How’s that for a brilliant way to get into something? Then I went over to Digital Sound Works where a friend of mine had sent me and they said “well we don’t do music editing here, we do dialog editing, but, you know, we could teach you.” And they just hired me as an assistant dialog editor, showed me how to do all the assistant dialog editing stuff and from there they taught me dialog editing. It’s just unbelievable that they picked me over other people who went to school for four years to do to the exact same thing. They picked me with no experience because they wanted to teach me from scratch their way, you know.

Woody: Right.

Jackie: And because, you know, I’m a nice person (Laugh). There’s that of course. (Laughs)

Woody: How long does a feature dialog edit take?

Jackie: Well it’s pretty standard. I mean, it’s generally about two weeks. This is for smaller, Indie pictures, major motion pictures can take quite a bit longer because of picture changes.

Woody: For what length picture?

Jackie: An hour and a half, 90 minutes.

Woody: A ten day edit?

Jackie: Yeah. I mean if they throw extra things at you like, I don’t know, finding alts or whatever, that’s the assistant’s job anyway, then you know then things can start to take longer. But generally for your basic dialog edit, removing the PFX (Production Effects) and laying out the tracks properly for the mixer, yeah it’s a couple weeks.

Woody: So what is your process when you start?

Jackie: The process. My first step is, I should say is to watch the picture, but it’s not because I get too eager. What I do is remove all the stuff that doesn’t need to be in there, like if they give you stereo tracks there’s always one track that sounds terrible. So you remove whatever is the excess. Sometimes your stereo tracks are needed because one is on one person and one is on the other and it’s an ambient and you need them both. But a lot of the time you’ve got to get rid of all the excess.

Jackie: Then the first thing I do is delete all the automation that the picture editor has created. I do a universal read “off ‘for all automation. And there may be some choices that the picture editor made, like in this last movie I did somebody was beating somebody up and the production sound slowly faded out as the music came up. So it’s good to know that, but that’s on the guide track, I don’t need to see his automation in order to know that happens, I see that from the guide track.

That’s one of the rules – the guide track is king. Because that’s the decision that the director has made. They said, okay, this is what we like. So if you don’t hear it in the guide it doesn’t go on the edit, even if it makes sense or vice versa.

Woody: What next?

Jackie: I lay out the tracks – one, two, three, four and five- to make sense for the mixer. For example – you have “Scene One C” all on one track cause it’s all from one angle, so it’s all one particular sound. You have “Scene One A” on the next track which is all from the close up. And you have “Scene One F” which is a distant shot or whatever all on a different track so that the mixer can do his one mix on each track. (Laughs) I assume that’s what you guys do. That’s what I was taught to do (Laugh).

Woody: That’s the right approach. You consider track management as an important part of the job?

Jackie: I think whatever we have to do to make it easier for the mixer the better, because the mixer and the mixing stage is what costs money. So whatever we can do to save time on the mixing stage is what our job is. Cleaning things up, making things uniform, making things easy to see and read and understand for the mixer I think is the most important part.

Woody: Do you bring your own materials to add to the edit?

Jackie: I have a little CD of fills (roomtones) I bring that I keep adding to if I find something brilliantly clean and wonderful, which is rare. And that is another whole issue that is very important. Roomtone is key. I would say if you’re not going to record room tone, don’t bother recording the movie. Here’s the thing, even if you have perfect sound recorded on set, you still need room tone because stuff does get pulled out even if your production dialog is perfectly recorded.

You know, you listen to any room and you think, oh that’s just quiet, but really, it’s just so different from every other room. It’s unbelievable how I can take room tone from my little folder that sounds like it might match the other room and I cut it in and it is completely different. There’s no way to match exactly any room without recording that room itself. The only way around that is to find enough of the real room tone and piece it all together because you don’t have one big long piece. You piece it all together and then create one big long fade into one of your own room tones where you actually have a 10 second piece. And do it subtly enough. Room tone is the key to a clean edit, for sure.

You need it for the basic edit, you need it for the PFX track when you pull stuff out, and you need it for the ADR when you pull that production dialog out.

Woody: For someone who may not know – what exactly is PFX?

Jackie: Any production audio without dialog, people opening and closing doors, walking, sitting, putting their coffee cup down, even breathing, panting, if they’re running around or whatever it may be, all of that needs to go on a PFX track cause it makes for a better M & E (Music and Effects Track) in the long run. If it’s something that they’re going to have to replace with Foley, if it’s an action that you actually need to see sound for, yeah, that needs to go on an M & E because it’s the real sound. You don’t want to have to Foley absolutely everything just for the M & E.

Woody: That sounds like it’s a huge part of the dialog edit.

Jackie: That is the most tedious part of the job. And that is actually where room tone becomes most important because you tend to pull out chunks and you know you do have to back fill it because at some point they may choose Foley over the production effects at which point they won’t have any sound in the background. If they use production effects of the PFX track, great, you’re all fine, but you need to back fill it anyway because during the mix they may go – “you know what, I like the footsteps from the Foley people better. ”

Backfilling means putting in room tone so that the dialog track plays without the replaced dialog or the PFX – seamless, as if nothing was removed. And the important part about PFX is you have to ramp in and ramp out of the PFX tracks, you can’t just pull out the handles. If you put the coffee cup clanking sound onto the PFX track and then simply pull out the handles you’ll have the same sound on the PFX track that you have on the dialog track and they are going to phase against each other. So you have to find different sounds to ramp in and out of the PFX track or out of the dialog track so that you do not have the same sound overlapping each other. Cause then you end up phasing tracks now playing together and then the mixer gets really mad at you (Laughs).

Woody: So now we know that a dialog editor pulls the production effects onto it’s own track the PFX track.   What then is an “X” track?

Jackie: An X track is something that you need to save, but you’re probably not going to use. It’s where the bad sound goes. And if you desperately have to go back to it, it’s still there in the session, so you just pull it back up from the X track. You’re trying to save the mixer time. You’ve pretty much decided that it’s no good, but the director may go “oh that’s a horrible ADR line, what’s production sound like on that” and they can pull it back up and say “here’s production.”

Woody: So besides sounds you may not use the X track contains the production audio of lines that have been ADR’d?

Jackie: I prefer to have a nice clean dialog edit before I ever make pulls for ADR because a lot of times they will put back the production and blow of the ADR. So you want the edit nice and clean and then pull out the production tracks for ADR and backfill once you get the list. I end up collaborating a lot with the ADR guy because he often asks me if there happens to be any alts in the session or how’s this or that or the other thing really sound. He’s judging the ADR often times off of the guide track and most of the time the guide track is a compilation of those two stereo tracks. He is hearing stuff like radio mics, phasing and stuff like that, but one or the other track might be perfectly clean. I’ll call him up and say you know this line, that radio noise is not on the other track and it sounds fine. I’ll pretty much just get a list from him and then call him back and go “why is this line needed, because it’s fine.” Or I’ll also say why not this line, because it sucks. But I’ll wait ’til I get the list before I start annoying him. (Laughs.)

Woody: Any advice for new directors?

Jackie: The problem starts from the very first day of shooting with the sound person on set and how the sound recording is approached on set. I think it’s worth it to spend more money on the dudes on set recording the sound and to make sure he knows exactly what he’s doing. I can only tell them that it sucks after it’s been recorded, I can’t tell them how to make it better. And room tone! Those two things: a real sound dude and room tone.

Woody: What is it that you love about dialog editing?

Jackie: It caters to my personality of liking a challenge. You get this thing, you see the diamond in the rough and you get to chip away until it’s a diamond. You get to clean stuff up and make it beautiful. How bad is that?

Woody: That’s perfect.

Jackie: And I get to work at home.