[Tech1] Movie 1917 - The sound of silence

Tue Feb 11 10:46:58 CST 2020

Both Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins tried hard not to talk too much about the ‘one-shot’ element of the film as they didn’t want people going to see it to be constantly looking for the ‘invisible’ cuts.
The longest shot in the whole film is actually only just 9 minutes and perhaps the real skill involved was the planning of the shots followed by the execution of the shot combined with the editing to make it look like there wasn’t an edit!!
I know that many times during the film Sam Mendes asked himself why he was putting himself (& everyone else!) through such a nightmare!!

Great film although strangely I thought it was better non IMAX…..

However, apart from the very ending which I thought was a pretty poor cop-out, Parasite was a very worthy winner of the Best Film Oscar and was, IMHO, a better film.

Graham Maunder

> On 11 Feb 2020, at 16:11, Geoffrey Hawkes via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Well done Alan for the detailed and interesting message though some parts were foreign-speak to me as a cameraman.
> My wife and I went to see the film about three weeks ago and we were really impressed. The film runs for about 2hrs and the reputed one-continuous shot thing puzzled me as to how it could be achieved. I wondered what happened if they got nearly to the end and something went wrong; would they have to start again from the top (groan, groan, imagine!!). I asked Ian Head, a veteran cameraman about this and he said all that meant was that it would have been done in a series of single shots, each with no cut-aways and involved a change of mounting, eg for high-angle shots. It worked well and I was thankful that none of them were the dreaded wobbly-cam style.
> We saw it in IMAX at Jarman Park, Hemel Hempstead and had a choice of that, the later Super-Screen or good-old 2D. We sat about half way up the auditorium and wished we’d sat further back as the fast action shots from side to side sometimes had our heads buzzing.
> What you said about the contrasting sound levels was perfectly true and the occasional loud bursts, like when the plane crashed had the shocking effect intended, adding to the reality of the wartime experience which is what it was all about. I had taken earplugs with me in case it was all loud as is so often the case nowadays and was glad not to need them.
> I recommend anyone who hasn’t seen the film to go and see it in Superscreen or IMAX if you can, but don’t sit too near the screen unless you really want the dizzying effect,
> Geoff
> 
>> On 11 Feb 2020, at 11:24, Alan Taylor via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> Last night I went to see 1917 and it was one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen.  Much has been said ( quite rightly ) about the way that it appeared to be one single continuous shot for the entire movie and of course the DoP was awarded an Oscar for it.  However I was also impressed by the sound track.  I don't ever recall going to a film where silence has been such a prominent feature, which is all the more surprising because the story set in the middle of a battlefield and conventionally, such a movie would have explosions and noises all the time.  Having the courage to pull the sound effects right back and only use them when needed was a masterstroke because it draws you in to what is happening to the main characters.  Obviously by being quiet for extended periods, it also offers the sound mixer more scope to shock the audience with sudden loud noises. 
>> 
>> It's something which is very close to my heart because I tried to exploit quietness and dynamic range in a number of dramas which I worked on.  In many cases the director wasn't easily persuaded about it, despite me pointing out that symphonies have quiet bits as well as loud bits, or that in television, flat lighting tends to be uninteresting, while clever use of light and shade makes for impressive pictures.  For me the breakthrough came when I did a Film Two drama ( shot on video ), "The Russian Soldier", which few people now remember.  The director was Gavin Millar and he liked the idea of enhancing the narrative by exploiting silence.  The principle location was a farm in a remote part of Dorset and the tense nature of the storyline meant that periods of silence worked well, it drew your attention to subtle reactions by the actors, it was as though you could almost hear the character's brains working as events unfolded. To give you an idea of how quiet it was, we could easily hear the crew's wrist watches ticking, so had to ask everybody to leave them behind.  There was scene where the dialogue went from a barely audible whisper to the loudest possible angry shout just a fraction of a second later. In order to handle the dynamic range, I fed the microphone to two channels, one set at a level for whispers, with the other set for the screaming.  The whisper channel was rapidly faded out on cue, while the screaming channel was left up throughout. A second, more distant microphone was also left faded up, which provided a touch of room ambience to the shouting, which made it sound even louder. This was in the days before split track recordings were feasible on VT, so it was important to get it right on the recording.  I did take the precaution of making a safety recording on a Nagra, but didn't need to use it.  The scene was very emotional and the actors didn't want to keep rehearsing it or shooting it, so after a quick rehearsal, the red light went on and every take was useable, retakes were only needed for performance reasons.
>> 
>> I was feeling really happy with what we shot, but was somewhat concerned when Gavin started telling me about the music.  He told me that he had managed to engage Stanley Myers, who had received an Oscar for his score on The Deer Hunter.  I was a young TV sound supervisor and I initially felt somewhat intimidated by the prospect of working with somebody of his stature and was worried that he might be intending to deliver a massive orchestral music score which would be at odds with the ideas I had for the sound track, but when we started discussing it, we found ourselves in complete agreement.  I had experienced issues previously where composers delivered music which largely obliterated important dialogue and wanted to explain to him how I like the music and dialogue to co-exist harmoniously, but needed to be diplomatic so as not to cause offence. The comparison I made was with any typical Frank Sinatra recording, especially those scored by Nelson Riddle.  What you think you hear is a massive orchestra giving all they've got with Frank singing over the top if it.  What actually happens is that the orchestra gives everything they've got during the intro, but when Frank sings, the only thing continuing behind him is the rhythm section strumming along, with no strident trumpets. His voice is always clearly heard.  At the end of each phrase, the orchestra kicks in at full volume, especially the brass section. The music weaves around the voice, never competing, dropping away just in time for Frank's next line. Stanley loved that comparison, especially as it was described in a way which made perfect sense to a musician, so much so that he went on to say that he proposed to pinch that comparison and use it during his lectures on score writing.  
>> 
>> Stanley came to the dub and said that if I make the first music cue peak to about 3, the rest will all fit nicely.  Obviously you don't just leave the faders alone, but he was essentially bang-on and if the faders had been left alone, it would have been perfectly usable.  During one particularly emotional scene, the music was barely peaking 1 and was borderline inaudible at times, but that's exactly how he wanted it and it worked beautifully.
>> 
>> As an aside, the day after that dub, I was doing a pre-production meeting in Threshold House for another drama.  During the small talk prior to the meeting starting, the producer mentioned that they had cast an actor for a major role because she claimed she could play the piano, which was only  minor requirement for her role, but that morning they discovered that the only tune she could play was the theme from Deer Hunter and while that tune would have been OK within the story, he was concerned by how much it might cost to get the rights to use music from an American film. I pointed out that the composer was Stanley Myers and that he was British, so it might be OK after all.  He was still doubtful, so I asked him if I could use his phone.  I opened my Filofax, phoned Stanley Myers and explained the problem.  He said it should be perfectly straightforward and not very expensive, asking for our people to contact his people for it to be sorted.  I told the producer that the composer is happy for it to be used and it won't be expensive.  The look of the others in the room was priceless when they realised I had just called a Hollywood composer, had a friendly chat and resolved their problem. For some reason I completely forgot to let them know that there wasn't another composer on the planet who I could have made such a call with.
>> 
>> On other dubs, I was also able to use silence creatively.  On a police drama, the story starts with a scene where officers in a patrol car were bored out of their minds, parked up in the middle of the night when there is an explosion in a nearby factory.  Rather than leave absolute silence, I decided to subtly add quiet sounds which you might not normally be aware of.  Library 'atmos' recordings were trawled through, but without much success and even the much-used "distant dog" disk was far too prominent, so I used a portable DAT recorder to record some suitable stuff in the middle of the night such as a train passing three or four miles distant or occasional cars passing quite a long way away.  Distinct recordings of things with a lot of air between them and the microphone sound quite different to a conventional recording played quietly.  It worked well in the mix because when you half hear such things, you seem to listen that little bit harder to try and work out what's there, which means that when the explosion comes, you jump out of your seat.  The gram op eagerly offered to jump up and down at the back of the dubbing suite when the explosion happened to make it seem more powerful for the director, but I declined his kind offer.
>> 
>> Dubbing "The Life and Loves of a She Devil" was much more challenging in that respect because Phillip Saville was one of those directors who always wanted everything turned up to 11 all the time.  There were some scenes where I knew we needed a large dynamic range because of explosive effects or explosive dialogue, but if Phillip had had his way, there would have been no headroom for the loud parts to rise into.  I always used to print dubbing sheets, which had a linear timeline, typically showing two to three minutes per page, with each track laid out vertically and plenty of room for my notes.  It gave me a good oversight of what was coming up and helped me keep to schedule.  If I needed to leave room for a loud noise, I would mark my dubbing sheet to warn me at least thirty seconds ahead of that point within the story that I needed to hold the levels a bit lower than usual so that I could make an impact when needed. However, I found that I had to compensate by boosting the control room speakers by a corresponding amount so that Phillip didn't notice.  Once the loud bit had been mixed, there was then the problem of getting back to normal monitoring levels, however scenes such as that were generally the culmination of a build-up, so completing that scene was the ideal time for a quick tea break and normal monitoring levels could resume unnoticed.
>> 
>> Going back to "1917",  for those who haven't yet seen it, I thoroughly recommend it.  My local cinema relegated it to the upstairs screen with fabulously comfy seating for barely one hundred people.  There were only half a dozen other people there yesterday and they remained utterly silent throughout the movie.  I don't recall the last time I watched a movie without being distracted at some point by others in the cinema.  It was well worth a fiver of anybody's money.  I'm sure than any of us folk watching that movie would think countless times "How the hell did they do that?".  There are some YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUBT6_CLF4> videos explaining much of it, but I would strongly advise watching the movie first and only watching the "how they did it" videos afterwards.
>> 
>> Alan Taylor
>> -- 
>> Tech1 mailing list
>> Tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk
>> http://tech-ops.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk
> -- 
> Tech1 mailing list
> Tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk
> http://tech-ops.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tech-ops.co.uk/pipermail/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk/attachments/20200211/152660fa/attachment.html>