AT 4051 short shotgun mic

The demands for the audio of any given documentary project will vary wildly on the program content as well as the documentary style. A talking head program will usually have controlled interview situations and time for audio adjustments if needed.  A cinema verite or run and gun documentary may often just have the chance to get a microphone close to the action and hope for the best.  This post can’t address every situation that can be encountered however, it can advise best practices to the sound recording process.

Making documentaries requires a vast media tools skillset.   Several skills will have to be employed: from the camera and sound recordings, the transfer and storage options, to the edit, the mix and the output.  Usually by an army of one, namely, you.  A thorough understanding of the tools and techniques for sound recording is going to be essential for any documentarian.  Filmmakers often have extensive knowledge of new cameras, codecs, lenses and workflows but not understand the difference between a hyper-cardioid or an omni-directional microphone and might not know the difference between a short shotgun microphone or a long one.  But, before you can even get to the recording process, you should be applying one of the most important of your skills: listening.

LISTEN

To properly plan for sound the first exercise is simple – listen.  Listen to the room that you are in, listen to the location that you will be shooting and understand the consequences of the audio landscape.  Filmmakers must train their ears as much or more than they do their eyes.  As humans we spend enormous amounts of time filtering out sound.  We block out the trucks and buses, the airplanes and birds, the hums of computers and fans and air conditioning, but the microphones hear it all.  They simply record the audio environment.  The environment that you may not be “really” hearing.  Stop.  Listen. Stop again.  Listen.  Try to pull out the layers of the sounds you hear, first the fan, then the computer, then the traffic, then the wind, then the birds.  If you stop and really listen you’ll be amazed at how much is going on.  Do it right now.  Do it all day long, every day.  Learn to hear.  Learn to “listen” to your locations.  Make adjustments if you can.  No matter what, those audio recordings will be with the project right up until the finish.  Make sure every recording sounds as good as it can.

Closed ear headphones help minimize external noise

I once consulted on a doc that had numerous sound issues.  The first problematic scene was an interview of a person on a street corner.  The filmmaker chose to orient the shot so that the boom and microphone were pointing directly at a noisy street.  I asked if the composition of the shot was so vitally important to create such a noise issue.  I was told that there was no one monitoring the sound through headphones and that the shot looked good with the traffic passing behind the subject.  The sounds of this busy intersection completely overpowered the conversation being recorded.  There was a lack of understanding of just how much the audio had been compromised by pointing a directional microphone straight into a loud, evolving noise source – the street.  Of course with no one listening to the recordings it would be hard to determine the quality of the audio!

It might be easy to say, well this is something I would never do but due to the circumstances of whatever is going on as you shoot you do what you can and keep moving on.  In their case the only pair of headphones they had been using stopped working.  There are many problems that can and do happen in the heat of any given production.  The situations may not be quite as obvious as pointing a mic into a busy street but the damage is often just the same.

I’m not a purist and I understand that not all contingencies can be planned for.  But often there is no actual time logged discussing the sound beyond boom or lav and the gotchas come fast and furious in post.  For those of us who are tasked with fixing the audio track it can be a real head scratcher when you hear recordings that could have been easily fixed on set with a simple turn of the mic or an appropriately placed blanket.  Hear the location that you are shooting.  Minimize the audio obstructions.  Turn off fans, unused computers and point the microphone away from noise sources.  If a location is really loud have a second look to see if moving to another place is feasible.  Oftentimes simply an awareness of the sounds can prompt you to simple solutions.  Listen.  Many times.  It’s as simple as that.

PREPARE

Go to a home improvement store or look online and buy several moving blankets.  Sometimes these are called furniture pads.  They are quite inexpensive and are worth their weight in gold.  Blankets should be a part of your kit the same way a tripod is for the camera.  These blankets can be used to cover loud noise sources; they can be used to deaden reverberant spaces, they can be hung in doorways to block sound.  Just fold them up, throw them in the trunk and use them when needed.  Blankets can often be a simple noise fix and can save many hours and dollars in post.  Well worth the few dollars.

$12.00 blanket can save $$

Spend some time researching microphones and their use.  Chances are that you’ve learned a great deal about the camera, the post considerations, the media storage and the workflow.  Spend some of that time learning a bit more about audio.  Which is the best shotgun mic for your situation, short or long?  Would it be better to boom the shot or mic the person with a lavaliere?  How about planting a microphone to capture a wider area of sound?  Would a boundary microphone provide the coverage that would be required for the shot?  If these terms and concepts are new to you, if you didn’t know that shotguns come in different lengths and each one has a particular usage then next time you are on the Internet search “audio, microphones and techniques.”  You are going to be living with these location recordings through the rest of the process, take good care creating them.  Make sure that the audio captured is as sharp as your images.

Sound devices mic preamp 302

Another main tool in the recording arsenal is the microphone preamplifier.   They are sometimes referred to as mic-pres or preamps.  Most microphone preamps are a part of a mixing unit or board and are built into most digital video cameras.  The preamplifier is the device that a microphone plugs into and allows for precise control of the levels being sent to a mixer or recorder.

This graphic shows a mic-pre with three inputs.  You can see the XLR plug inputs on the left and the three corresponding knobs on the front panel to control the signal gain.  You want to record the audio levels loud enough to be well past the threshold of noise (signal to noise ratio) but not so loud as to distort the recording.

Preamplifiers are a key part of the quality of the recorded sound.  Some preamps are noisy, some are quiet, some provide strong clean gain, some not.  The quality of the recording will be determined by the quality of the microphone choice and usage, and the quality and signal to noise ratio of the preamp.  If these terms are new or strange get on that Internet machine and do a bit of research.  Just an FYI, in a general sense, the mic preamps that are included in a camera are typically not of sufficient quality to deliver excellent recordings.  If you want professional results that you will be able to sell and distribute later, (right?) use professional gear.

Bring a grab bag for your audio.  Fill it with safety pins, various types of tape, extra audio connectors and mic clips.  Bring along a mic stand or two along with some clothespins, rubber bands and paper clips.  Bring extra batteries, extra cables and most especially a bit of extra time for your audio.  If you don’t have a pin to affix a cable, tape to conceal a plant mic or a stand to put a mic in an awkward place you will lose an opportunity that may not come again.  You may never have another chance with that interviewee or that event.  Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

FINAL THOUGHT

One final thought regarding your location audio.  Besides learning about sound and how it spreads in space, besides learning about recording devices and which tool to use for the moment you need it, besides using quality equipment and excellent recording practices like not recording too hot and keeping the microphones close – I may also suggest; hire professionals.

Professional sound mixers have been there and they have done that.  They can anticipate problems before you’ve even considered it.  They can offer solutions to problems that you weren’t even aware existed.  They have probably been on more shoots than you, worked with many different talented people and are up to date in their knowledge about their specific skill: sound.  I know that budgets are tight and particularly on documentaries, but skimping on the sound process or the quality of the recordings will have a direct impact on the final product.  Bad sound has ruined many a worthy doc.  If you can’t afford to hire a sound team for the whole shoot see if you can get someone to consult with you.  A few hours in good conversation with someone looking over your gear and your recording locations can save you a lot on the back end.  You have a story to tell, make sure that your audience can hear it.

Nagra Tape Recorder

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!

The music can include the composed score, popular songs, and source music like radios, cars and or muzak.  Muzak is a brand-name but typically refers to background music heard in stores, elevators and the like. The sound effects can include sounds such as atmospheres or backgrounds, hard effects like car door slams or guns and explosions and or Foley recordings.  Each of these various sound elements may require a number of different edits and discrete sessions for final mixing.

For the purposes of this article we will discuss these ideas using Pro Tools as our recording, editing and mixing platform but these concepts can be easily ported to any other digital audio program.  For those who don’t use ProTools I will define the terms as I go – starting with “sessions.”  In Pro Tools world a “session” is simply the name of any one particular document.  In Microsoft Word you create a “doc file” in Pro Tools you create a “session file.”

Most computer programs allow for the ability to save a document “as” something new.  Basically you “save as” the file saving the past work and adding to it in the new “save as” session.  My strong recommendation is to “save as” whenever you are substantially changing a session.  In fact I like to do many sorts of “save as” sessions.

I have encountered many engineers who like to save over their prior days work.  Most programs have some sort of “back-up” schemes and Pro Tools is no different.  These sessions are automatically saved and can be used to go back to prior work.  However these sessions are meant as back-ups so they will not be well documented.  In the case of Pro Tools it creates a new back-up file by time increments designated by the user.  For instance, by choosing your preferences, you may create a back-up every half-hour or quarter-hour.  This is essential practice for any engineer as a safety but it is not useful over the long term for a complicated project such as a TV show or a feature film that may contain many different “sessions” prior to the final mixing.

Here is a simple system that I have devised using “save as” in my session saving.  The rule is – new day – save as the next increment – Dialog Edit 5 becomes Dialog Edit 6 and so on.  Or if a new engineer is adding to the session, as in the case of a multi-user facility or project, save as the next increment.  Also save each edit, record or mix session by name – “Dialog Edit 1″, “Foley Record 1″, “ADR record Jesse 1″ and so on.

Over the course of a complex project will there be many sessions created in this manner?  Yes, absolutely, but it also allows for precise documentation of each session.  Also the media used within the project is what takes up drive space, the actual size of the “session” file is quite small so you are not using gigs of additional storage.  One of the difficulties in complex projects that are spread over many days or weeks is keeping tabs on the changes that occur as the show progresses.  One thing any good editor/mixer will learn early on is that there must be a simple way to get back to prior work.  Directors and producers change their minds often and you must be prepared to get to those changes quickly.  A director will not want to hear that a session or sequence must “be rebuilt” to conform back to what was recently completed.

I also create a document that references each session file as a paper document.  This is old-school – utilizes a pencil and paper!

These session sheets are printed, documented and kept in a show specific binder.  A sample document can be seen here.  This can and should be altered to fit the working style of the team as well as the project but this one hits the main points for documentation.

Name of session and date are obvious.  I also include the engineers name as well as which session, if any, it was created from.  I also include where the media and the session are physically located, i.e. which computer, which drive, which directory etc.  Nothing is worse than not being able to find an edit session!  Oh it’s on THAT drive!

There is also a notes section that is to used for – notes.  Detail these notes, this has been a long days work and there have been many changes, additions, deletions and breakthroughs.  Be sure to accurately note what has been done, what has not been done, what challenges are still faced in the session and so on.  It may seem that keeping all of this information in your head is fine but good luck in a month.  Theses documents will prove invaluable as the process continues and are particularly useful when multiple editors are working on the same material.

All of the session sheets are kept in a binder accessible to anyone that is working on the project.  In the case of a feature film for instance I break the session binder into sections and by date for easier retrieval.  One section is devoted to the dialog session sheets, one for Foley, one for sound design and effects editing and so on.  Each is placed in the binder on top of the next per section so the most current sessions are on top.

This documentation is not just for today.  A lot of projects change or get changed as time passes.  The producer gets a foreign sale and they require a new set of deliverables.  Or the music rights of some tracks have expired and the sound needs a re-cut.  I’ve had many projects come back at a much later date for a few “tweaks.”  These binders help track down the small things that directors need to alter the film.  I’ve swapped out entire music tracks and re-mixed, I’ve changed ADR lines, I’ve recorded voice-overs to clarify story points, all well after the final mix.  It’s in your interest as the post sound lead to be able to make these changes in a timely and effective manner.  Three years down the line tracking down some ADR takes may be more difficult than you think.

Archiving the sessions will also take some planning if they are to be useful at a later date.  Pro Tools has a great function called “save copy”.  What it does is it takes all of the audio files that are used in a particular session and creates a complete new session.  I can’t go into too many Pro Tools specific things here but there are a couple of tricks I use for archiving that Pro Tools offers.  It has some great ways of importing and deleting audio files and tracks.  When a project is complete I like to create what I call “master sessions” which are a reflection of the elements of the final work.

For instance, I will compile all of the ADR takes for each actor into one session.  I will then strip the session of everything except for the initial picture editors guide track, a stereo mix of the final completed mix and all of the takes recorded for all of the characters.  I will then save that as the “ADR master session.”

Of course you will need to create a “final mix master session” which will contain only the final edits, audio files and work that created the final mix.  Repeat as necessary. Foley master session, dialog edit master session, whatever is needed to easily reach for those sessions at a later date.

If this article was to be stripped down to its essentials I suppose you could pin it on one word – organization.  If you are the supervising sound editor on a big, long project such as a feature film you will need to find and document things clearly.  Get in the habit of it.  It will make the edit easier, it will make the collaboration easier and it will ultimately make your life easier.  Wouldn’t you rather have the chance from time to time to leave early and relax rather than stay late digging through drives looking for a random audio file?

Here’s a rundown of a few things that consistently come up.  You can make your own determination about them to see how you might react if you were sitting at the other side of the desk.

The Approach:

There is a reason that in high school writing classes we are taught to correspond formally.  It’s because in business you must act professionally.  Typically a letter will have the recipients name and address, a date, the senders name and address and a salutation such as Dear X,  -

Email and texting has completely changed the way many people communicate with one another.  Nothing wrong in and of itself of course, but it has carried over into the workplace. Causal notes or emails will not get much traction.  Here is an example -

“hey – cool studio. looking for some work.  I do it all. resume attached.  later”

Or:

“Qualified engineer.  Loads of experience.  The real deal.  Call today.”

Or:

“Just graduated with a degree in sound.  Foley, ADR, sound design specialist.  Give me a shout.”

Or:

“See attached resume.”

Something that any potential employee must understand is that every communication from phone calls to query letters to resumes must inspire confidence that you are going to be a great asset to the team.  What a potential employer sees in your dealings with them is what they will project as to your dealings with their clients.

The Interview:

It must be the allure of the uber-cool entertainment business that implies casualness.  We see it portrayed that way in the media, stars walking around in ripped jeans and tee shirts, crews with backwards ball caps and shorts.  But they are already in it.  They are not applying for work.

I’ve conducted many interviews over the years with unshaven, unwashed, ungroomed potential employees who can’t figure out why they weren’t hired.  Typically I will ask them at the end of the interview if they dressed and acted like this for their last “fill in the blank – Starbucks, Macy’s, Sizzler, Van’s Shoes” job.  They get an odd look on their face and it seems for that split second that they may have had a revelation.

Here’s the thing from this side of the mixing desk – I own this company.  I work hard for this company.  I work hard to get my clients.  I work hard to keep my clients.  I want to continue to be busy and successful.  People don’t come to me to mix their shows because I have Pro Tools.  People come to me because I do good work, have a great staff and I am extremely service oriented.  This is what makes us stand out.  Show me that you understand not only Pro Tools and post but that you also understand clients and service and you may just get a second interview.

Treat the interview with the same respect you would any other job.  Dress well, look good, and make a strong impression.  Be professional, be courteous and most of all be honest about your experience and your goals.  If you are new to the work but show aptitude and the right attitude you may have a leg up on someone who is more experienced but is lackadaisical in their appearance and their demeanor.

The resume:

OK, here’s a pet peeve of mine; a resume filled with skills but no actual experience.  I see countless resumes that indicate “Foley artist, ADR recordist, sound designer, dialog editor“ any and all of the above and yet no actual experience.  Maybe a short film or a couple of school projects but no real work experience.  The lack of experience is not the issue, the idea that you are representing yourself as a Foley artist or a dialog editor after one three minute short is the problem.

I receive dozens of resumes a month.  Many are from seasoned professionals who work freelance and are looking for a new post house to get on a roster.  Many are from students and new engineers.  The differences in resumes are striking.  Not just from the credits of course but in the attitude and in the approach.

Typically experienced engineers list their skill sets and the relevant work.  New engineers, new grads will typically fill their skill sets with every sub-genre of work they’ve taken a class in.

Now I can only speak for myself on this, of course but I would prefer to see the real work of a beginner.  If I see that you worked summers at a restaurant, or a local business and I see some consistency in that work I will draw some conclusions about you.  That says more to me than a class that was taken in Foley.  Since I work with world-class Foley artists with major Hollywood features and I get resumes from the same individuals seeking employment it just rubs me a bit the wrong way when I see recent grad also telling me that they are a Foley artist.

The resume is not only a reflection of your work experience; remember it is also your introduction to a guy like me.  If it’s filled with hyperbole, I may just draw ideas about you from that.  It will color my impression of you.  If you are just beginning I am smart enough to know that your resume won’t have pages of work experience and you won’t be judged by those standards.  However, whatever impression the resume gives me is the first window I have into you.

By the way, I am not saying to leave school projects off the page.  It is legitimate and shows me what you’ve done.  It’s just that often these are made to look like work that it is not.  Be honest, straight-forward, put the real deal out there and you will get your shot.  Trust me I get credit lists from highly experienced crew whose resumes are filled with shows I’ve never heard of.  That’s the sad fact about the work we do, there are many shows that live in obscurity and don’t have the recognition factor you’d expect from someone with years of experience.

The wind-up:

So what is one to do?  Here’s the post in a nutshell: take the interview seriously, dress well, look good, act confident and be truthful.  Show the employer that you are there to work, work hard and do what it takes to move your career forward.

Don’t pad or inflate the resume.  Put all of the relevant experience there and if you worked as a restaurant manager for three summers in college – write it down!  It will show that you are responsible, trustworthy and motivated.  By the way some schools have resume templates.  The only reason I know this is because I get resumes that all look alike and have the exact same information on them.  Only the names are changed.  This again is not a great indication of why you are better than the other guy or gal.  Make your resume your own, you are not your classmates.

This one I hate but I have to say it -  be persistent and follow up.  Ask if it is alright to stay in touch, send resumes every six months or if the employer may have advice in getting ahead.  You’d be surprised how much that can help.  Here’s a crazy example of what happened to my summer interns – I met with a number of potential interns.  I chose one who said they were leaving town and would contact me when they returned.  After a couple of weird and incomplete emails and unanswered calls they never did arrive for the internship.  I lost three weeks waiting for that person after having turned down other qualified candidates.  I then met with more interns to replace that one and again chose, what I felt was the best one.  I called to tell them that they got the internship but never returned my call!  I did not and would not call repeatedly to have them come in.  I feel that if I needed to draw them in to a job they were being offered then their internship could also be problematic.

By the way, it may not seem like it now but I can tell you – Hollywood is a small town.  The person you blow-off or disregard today can be the same person with the choice gig you crave only a couple of years later.  Be polite and don’t burn bridges if at all possible.  Your future career can really depend on it.

Keep your head down, be respectful, don’t have all the answers, have all the questions.  Be willing to come in early and work late.  Show initiative if you get the job, work hard and learn.

Good luck out there!

This is a typical email from many loyal readers inquiring about where I’ve been since my final posting last year.  It has been a while but I have been very busy and there have been a lot of great things happening.  Now that some time has freed up I’ll get back to some serious postings.  I have a number of great things planned – more interviews, reviews and post audio articles.

blog [at] WoodysSoundAdvice.com

Even though I am pleased to receive all of the private emails from readers I’d like to encourage everyone to post comments and questions directly on the posts.  It generates more interest when the conversations are out there for anyone else to chime in on.  I would like to see more dialog open up on the site like that.  We can all learn more from each other.

AUDIO BOOK OUT THIS SUMMER

One of the main things that has taken an enormous amount of my time is a book that I’ve written for JB Learning. It is, of course, audio specific and it is called “Audio Production and Post Production.” It will be published and released in August.  It has been a “long, hard slog.” But with some determination, a mighty heaping of will power and a lot of help – thank you Wendy, Roxanna and Iryna! – I was able to make it happen.  The cover is posted below and the book layout ties in nicely with the cover design.  I think it looks pretty good!

More information regarding the book can be found here at this link.  If you use the code “WOODHALL” you will get 35% off the cover price!  Buy 2!!!

I thought it was tough writing the occasional article for this blog.  Never wrote a book before but I think that it is a good one.  It is intended as a textbook primarily for college level classes.  But it is written as a practical text for anyone more interested in learning about audio for film and television.  Their site has the table of contents and more detailed information regarding the text.

I will also be offering seminars and classes specific to the book this summer in Los Angeles.  I will update dates and times here.

AUDIO POST SEMINARS

I regularly conduct audio post seminars and classes here in Los Angeles.   I have done a number of these already this year.  Earlier in the year I did an audio seminar for the Producers Guild of America. We had a terrific turn-out and several folks joined my post specific group - The Los Angeles Post Production Group.

At the end of April I did a presentation at the Recording Institute at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood where I discussed what I call “Real World Audio Post.”  This is a specific talk geared towards audio students embarking on the start of their audio careers.  How to be patient, results oriented and positive as you create your career. And beyond “audio post” itself – I talk about the importance of looking good, acting humble and being willing to watch and learn.

Woody and Monica Mancillas at MI

 

I was also part of a panel for the ShowBiz Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center called “The Sound of Success.”  Panel participants included:

- Glenn Berkovitz, CAS (Moderator) – Local 695 Production Sound Mixer (Weeds)
- Keira Morrisette – Associate Producer (White Collar)
- Phillip Palmer, CAS – Local 695 Production Sound Mixer (Glee)
- Jay Patterson, CAS – Local 695 Production Sound Mixer (Without a Trace)
- Woody Woodhall, CAS IMDB

Laurence Abrams not only set-up the panel but also created a video for members of the Hollywood Local 695, which is up on their website.  There is a link here.

The Sound of Success

If your organization would be interested in my presentation of an audio post seminar feel free to contact me.

PRIVATE CHEFS OF BEVERLY HILLS

I just finished up mixing six episodes of a new reality series for Food Network called “The Private Chefs of Beverly Hills.”  It is a challenging show, with multiple wireless isolated microphones and the issues of quick cutting in a kitchen environment.  It is a very entertaining show and the producers are extremely experienced and it is a pleasure to work with seasoned professionals.  I’ve got a few other things coming up as well and they will be detailed as they arise.

PRIVATE CHEFS OF BEVERLY HILLS

If you get a chance to see the show it is airing on the weekends on Food Network, with each show’s premiere on Friday nights at 10PM.

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.

Human hearing of frequencies is calculated on a scale of hertz or cycles per second.  The commonly defined range of human hearing is 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz per second.  A graphical EQ device, be it a hardware version or a software plug-in like those shown here generally work within that range. (Depending on your age and life experiences your hearing may be markedly less than this…)  In the application of boosting or cutting particular frequencies there are also a few controls which determine how the boost or cut will be applied.  The first is the particular frequency itself, the second is the amount of boost or cut, usually described in decibels, and third is the “Q” or width of the boost or cut.  If the horizontal line is flat, as shown here, then no EQ processing is happening.

10 band parametric EQ

Looking at the photo here you can see the controls just described.  This particular EQ is a 10 band EQ meaning that you can affect 10 different bands or frequencies at one time.

The graph indicates the frequency to be affected sorted with the low frequencies at the left of the graph to the high frequencies at the right.  Each ‘band’ has several controls – on/off, the type of “curve” to be applied, the gain or amount of the processing, the frequency where things are being applied, the Q of the processing and the overall input of the source and the output after processing.

Bell EQ curve

Here is a bell curve which looks sort of like a – bell.  This is a very common way to apply EQ to a particular frequency.  The Q is set to very wide so it is affecting a wide range of frequencies that are near the key frequency.  Applying EQ to satisfaction is to determine the central frequency to be affected, the size of the Q and the shape of the curve and the amount of gain that is being cut or boosted.

Shelf EQ curve

Here is a shelf curve that sort of looks like – yes – a shelf.  Different EQ makers apply this differently and this one makes a slight cut prior to the boost.  By the way these are pretty extreme boosts being made in these examples to more clearly show what is being discussed.  Often EQ will be applied at much lower boosts or cuts and at several different frequencies.  The idea with EQ is generally to do as little as possible to affect the desired change.  You can easily mangle the recorded audio to something unacceptable.

Low Pass and High Pass filters

This picture shows a different type of EQ – the curve at the left is called a “High pass” filter and the curve at the right is called a “Low pass” filter.  These filters will remove all of the frequencies at the cut off frequency.  So, in this example, the high pass filter removes all frequencies below 100 hertz and the low pass filter removes all frequencies above 10,000 hertz.  These are very useful filters for removing unwanted elements of recordings.

These “pass filters” are powerful tools for affecting the recorded audio being processed.  Here are a few examples that might shed light on their particular usage.  Let’s say that your boom man has trouble holding the pole and his fingers are creating small “boom” sounds during the recording.  Often these noises are very low in the frequency range and are difficult to hear without a sub-woofer.  A high pass filter may remove all of the noises without affecting the quality of the recording.  Or perhaps the tracks sound a bit “murky” so a slight presence boost at 2.5K or 3.5K may help “lift” the voice and a small cut at 300 – 400 may remove a bit of “boominess.”  If you look at the EQ that has a low and high pass filter applied you’ll see that it creates a “band” of frequencies that will pass through it.  The other name for this sort of setting is a “band-pass” EQ and these can useful in a number of ways.  Since band passes limit the frequency range of a recorded signal they are useful for many things. Many devices such a telephones have a “limited band-width” so you can mimic this bandwidth with a band pass filter.

Notch at 1K

Let’s say you hear a steady noise in your recording that is present in the upper frequencies.  You may want to try a “notch filter” which can notch out the offending frequency.  Here several bands are tied together to really define the notch.  The idea here is to carve out only the offending frequency and try not to disturb anything else around it.  As you can see a graphical EQ is a very handy way of visualizing your sound.  Mix engineers will often “sweep” the notch along that horizontal range of frequencies until the frequency range to reduce or add is pinpointed.  Notches can be very useful in eliminating any type of steady state noise.  Steady is the key idea because if the noise or sound oscillates to other frequencies then the notch is no longer relevant since it is specific to only a narrow range of frequency.

EQ is an amazing tool with many useful applications.  However it is not a miracle device and it is most certainly not a noise reduction device.  It can indeed reduce noise but it is less successful at that than a dedicated noise reduction device is.  There are “broad band” noises such as air conditioners that cross many frequencies at one time.  They usually can not be notched or pass filtered out.  They will require some different processing, but if you need simple boosts or cuts or if you have tones that need to be minimized or emphasized in your recordings that are steady state, EQ will be the right tool to use.

This is merely a quick explanation of this wonderful, misunderstood and useful tool.  Experiment with EQ and learn how each of the controls affect the frequencies.  Learn how cutting and boosting achieves different effects and how specific frequencies affect specific sources.  Listen to the world at large and imagine if you had to use EQ to recreate the sounds you hear.  Walk by a stone building with music playing inside, loud but boomy and distant, what EQ curves might be applied to a standard music track to achieve a similar sound?  Listen to the world around you. This in time will guide you on how to use EQ to mimic the sounds in and of everyday life.  And then use those ideas to create the sounds you hear from this world – or others. Comment with thoughts, ideas or questions at will.

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.

Let’s start with an HD INDIE feature called “Box Elder”.  This is a project in the spirit of (maybe) Kevin Smith and I think the tag line sums it up nicely – “On the road to nowhere these guys call – SHOTGUN!”  I had the pleasure of mixing this movie and working closely with Director Todd Sklar and Producer Brock Williams.

Whenever I am bidding on a feature project one of my first questions is “Do you have distribution?”  There are a number of reasons for this but for my bidding purposes this will mean that if the answer is “yes”, I will get a long list of “deliverables” which will specify how the audio is to be finalized and delivered.  Often I hear “no distribution, we’re going to hit the festival circuit and then it’ll get picked up.”  I won’t go into the pitfalls of this “model” at this time, but filmmakers following this “plan” may well be disappointed.

The team from Box Elder had/have a quite novel approach.  When I asked Todd Sklar about distribution or film festivals for “Box Elder” he said “no, I have a different plan.”  He instead was “going on tour.”  There is a lot of heat about Todd and his tour which can be found here on his website. I also did an interview with Todd for this blog in which he discusses his unique model.  Those who are interested in the trials, pitfalls, triumphs and solutions to INDIE filmmaking should give it a read.  Those who are particularly interested in sound for film should read it.  And not just “sound people”, Todd had many insights regarding audio when he got the post stage and also about his location recordist Mr. Jesse “C-Nug” Brown.  Kudos to Todd for spying back on the process and understanding how to make things even better next time.  And kudos to the Box Elder team for such an entertaining production on a shoe string budget.  The new 2-disk set is available from Todd on the “Box Elder” website. Buy two and share!

Next up is the documentary “Fat Head” produced and starring Tom Naughton.  A perceptive and well researched project that concludes that everything you know about food, diet and eating is wrong.  Tom makes a very persuasive argument.  In the process he tackles the FDA, The Center For Science in the Public Interest, the US Government and documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.  This is a highly recommended documentary for those interested in better nutrition, weight loss and the often dubious practices of the government and documentary filmmakers.

A wealth of additional information on the doc is available on the movie’s website. Tom is a recovering stand-up comic and a highly intelligent and entertaining guy.  His doc is deeply researched, filled with great facts and figures that are fleshed out by wonderful and funny animations and sharp observations about “the great experiment” that the US government has foisted on an unsuspecting populace.  It is not available in US until Feb 3, 2009 but it can be purchased directly through Amazon.com.

One of my New Years wishes will come true in ’09 if I can see Tom and Morgan sitting across from Oprah and debating the merits of a “fast food diet!”  As you can see from the picture “You’ve been fed a load of bologna!”  I have many favorite moments from this movie but I particularly like the news footage of the McGovern sub-committee telling the scientists to “develop cholesterol free eggs.”  Yep, we vote ‘em in….

Finally I want to bring to your attention a very different sort of documentary by filmmaker Costa Mantis.  ”Flying Pumpkins – The Legend of Punkin Chunkin”.  Costa made a delightful feature doc about an annual event held in Delaware each year.  Started as a simple challenge between two bored neighbors about who could throw a pumpkin farther across a field with a home-made contraption, it’s now a four day event that benefits charity.  It’s a fascinating look at an obsession of kids, young adults and the young at heart who build awe-inspiring contraptions to throw – pumpkins.

You can find a wealth of information regarding the movie and and Costa at his website here. You’ll see retired IBM execs, journalists, mechanics and engineers, scouts and students perfecting all sorts of machines to toss pumpkins.  It’s grown to a point that there are categories for catapults, air canons, torsion contraptions and more as well as kid and adult divisions.  It is beautifully photographed with a terrific bluegrass score.  This one is for the family.  In a time of ever decreasing quality family fare this one is truly for the young and old.  Kudos to Costa and the Pumpkin team as well as all the participants in the annual event.  The doc shows a cross section of event participants as they build and assemble their monster machines and then shoot pumpkins across a field! This disk is available on the website listed above.

Again in the interest of full disclosure I am not a producer, investor or financial participant of these movies in any way.  There is no financial incentive or renumeration for this post or any of my endless PR for these shows.  I am a true fan and friend of all these filmmakers and understand the difficulty of INDIE film and documentary filmmaking.  I am a champion of them and their grit and determination to finish these projects and I, in my small way, want to spread the word about their acheivements.  Rent, buy, or attend a screening of these movies and become a supporter of INDIE filmmaking!