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Lee Orloff's
Production Recording of
'The Patriot'
Excerpts from an article by Tom Kenny.
The Sony Pictures Entertainment lot was abuzz at the end of May with the controlled rush to bring Mel Gibson and the drama of a family caught up in war to the big screen. From the remodeled Cary Grant to the William Holden and all-new Burt Lancaster theaters, with the Foley and ADR working overtime and John William's sessions in the historic scoring stage, the sound crew was, to quote re-recording mixer Kevin O'Connell, "all blazing". The goal, from Lee Orloff's production recordings to the preparation of tracks at Soundelux and the final mix at Sony, was to support picture and story in a natural way.
.... The Patriot balances
the intimate and the epic on every level, from script to photography to acting,
and certainly with sound. Mel Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a guerilla hero of
the French and Indian War who has put his brutal past behind him and adopted the
life of a widower family farmer in South Carolina raising his seven children
alone.
As the threat of conflict with England looms, he
speaks out against war. His firstborn son, meanwhile, believes passionately in
the cause and enlists in the Continental Army, the the militia. When the war
comes literally to Martin's doorstep and his family is attacked by the rouge
Colonel Tavington, the reluctant hero enters the fray to save home and country.
It's a simple story, but it's told with such
deftness and poignancy that audiences and critics are sure to respond. Robert
Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) penned the script, which was beautifully shot
by Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, Anna and the King), capturing the
overwhelming scope of the battlefield and the softness of candlelight. Director
Roland Emmerich, who with his production partner Dean Devlin is best known for
the effects bonanzas Independence Day and Godzilla, can now add
storyteller to his resume.
For the sound team, it's a dream package
and a wide-open palette, but in a much different way from the typical
blockbuster action picture. Kevin O'Connell, who with his partner Greg P. Russel
has mixed more than his share of outrageous, anything-goes effects thrillers,
including
'Con Air, Godzilla, and Armageddon', says, "Unlike some of
the other summer movies, we're not using the sound to sell anything because this
movie sells itself visually. All we are doing is supporting what we see. Our
goal is to bring clarity and detail" ....
EVERY WORD COUNTS
.... "This is not an action movie," says Hallberg. "It's big,
spectacular, and has all those elements, but it's really about a family and
about values. That's the heart of it, and that's where we need to make it feel
right. The whole setup is for us to connect with the father and his family
living a beautiful life, so we make it sound soft and beautiful. It's about
emotion, and you need Mel's (Gibson) voice to have that chesty, rich quality
coming through in the quiet dialog scenes."
"Mel's voice is edgy, deep and rich,"
adds O'Connell, "which is why I like it. Everything in production was so
well recorded that it captured that warmth and richness. I plan just play it on
the screen that way. There was surprisingly little ADR in this movie, which is a
credit to Lee Orloff and his crew. We had a lot of group ADR, but not a lot of
principal ADR. These tracks are stellar."
Production mixer Lee Orloff recorded
digitally to a 4-channel Nagra D and was able to use boom mics (boom operator
Knox White and assistant David Acord) a majority of the time, which accounts for
some of the richness and naturalness in the tracks. "When you look at the
work tapes that we're cutting to and you see the boom (mic) in the top end, just
out of the frame line ... well, it's very seldom that you see that these days,
with somebody who dares to get in there and stay right on the edge,"
Hallberg says. "A big hats off to Lee and his crew. Every time I see that
boom above the frame, I think, 'That's my man!"
"Bringing the shoot to the Low Country
of South Carolina, where the actual events took place, was one more example of
the filmmaker's desire to maintain historical accuracy throughout the
production," Orloff says.
" We reduced intrusions of 20th
century life on the track by the typical road closures and by keeping a handle
on local train and plane scheduling. But we also had to eliminate the hazards of
'friendly fire' - maintaining tight base camp lock-ups and generator baffling,
and control over special effects foggers, smokers and wind machines. We would
often hand out Comtek wireless receivers with dialog feeds to the effects
operators, along with 'sides' for them to read so that they could help pull down
particularly noisy elements on cue in an effort to keep the dialog clean.
" Stereo mic configurations were used
extensively during the battles and were laid down on two of the four
channels," he continues. 'Once the atmosphere had been tamed, the ambient
levels supported the use of multiple booms for the majority of the principal's
dialog recording, ensuring proper perspectives on those tracks. The
multi-channel
format allows us to deliver a mixed mono for dailies and editorial, while at the
same time preserving clean pre-fader outs to protect the inevitable overlaps and
paraphrasing, which occur from time to time. The higher bit rate of the Nagra D
enables a natural, fuller and more dynamic recording to be made than is possible
with 16-bit mastering formats. We then made certain to interpolate, rather than
truncate, the additional information contained in the longer word length when
the tracks were loaded digitally into the DAW's."
All four tracks were
loaded digitally into WaveFrames for editing, then laid back to Sony DADR-5000
playback machines. It was the first time Hallberg had a completely digital
dialog
chain, with no analog conversions.
"My biggest goal as the dialog mixer
is intelligibility," O'Connell says. "You have to understand every
word, and I live by the fact that there are no rules to doing dialog right or
wrong. I'll use fractions of words from the loop, fractions from production, and
I'll use crazy EQ in order to understand the line.
But I probably process the dialog less than anybody I know. When I first started
mixing dialog (in 1987), I would take out every hum, buzz and rumble at the
predub. I would use dip filters, CATs (43 or
430 Dolby single-ended noise reduction units), compressors, de-essers. But over
the years, I've literally got down to using almost nothing except a little
compression and de-essing in predubs. By the time you put in the music, BG's,
Foley and everything else, you can't really hear those extraneous sounds in the
dialog track, and by stripping them out, you can't help but strip away some of
the richness. Once I'm in the final mix, if a sound still pops out, I'll address
it then." ....
MIX Magazine, July 2000.