The darker side of the job

A few months ago, I had a voiceover recording session for a one-hour long documentary. The director was to do the voiceover himself, and it was my first time working with him. He has acquired a lot of clout in the business, due to the controversial nature of the subject matter in his projects. So he arrived with an entourage of three producers, all of them carrying laptop computers and Blackberries, and they started handing out copies of the script and setting up their stuff.

We sat down to work, and within a few minutes, it became clear this would be a long session. Usually, a voice recording of this nature takes between three and four hours, depending on how well prepared the script and how good the talent are. After seven hours, we hadn't reached the halfway point of the documentary, for several reasons. There was constant talking on the phone by one or more producers, so we had to wait to play back a take for everyone in the room. Then, everyone had a wildly different opinion of the way a line should be read, frequently with one person in disagreement with the rest. And, to make matters worse, the director, not being a professional voiceover actor, had to take frequent breaks to rest his voice. Then he would listen back to his last read lines and he would realise they sounded different to the first ones because his voice was tired and croaky. So we would need to record those again to maintain an uniform sound throughout the documentary.

This would have been a bearable although very tiresome session, up to this point. At six o'clock, the scheduled cutoff time, and also my time to go home, I politely announced we would need to stop and continue the next day. Immediately, the director went berserk and demanded to know why they were being thrown out, saying they were the clients and would keep going until needed - that's what I was paid for. I bit my lip as one of the more sensible producers tried to explain that they had booked the studio until six, but they had also booked the following day as a precaution. After a lot of complaining and whining, the director and his posse left. I got very little sleep that night, laying in bed thinking I had another session with this bunch the following day.

I ended up getting through the whole thing uneventfully, but I just went through the motions, cold as a block of ice. No love for the work at all, no extra mile run. And it made me sad, because to me, there is nothing like doing a session that is energetic and positive, where the whole room is full of great vibes and a creative atmosphere, where the clients walk out shaking my hand with a big smile on their face and a heartfelt 'thank you'. It sounds very corny, but I think that's a huge reason many of us do what we do – we like to feel that clients are happy they spent their money working with us, and we like to feel we accomplished something special. Those who are in this field for fame and money are kidding themselves. There aren't that many sound people who have palatial mansions and appear on the covers of magazines. The average person doesn't care who the mixer who won the Academy Award for Best Sound this year is - they don't even know what a mixer is.

For many of us, the only choice is to grin and bear it. Unless you are an established freelancer or have a lot of weight within a facility, there is no option but to put on your best foot forward and get through the session. That doesn't mean you have to take everything that an abusive client dishes out at you, though. No studio manager with half a brain will let clients abuse their staff, and they will either ask the client to tone it down, or they will send them away if they don't. If the studio manager decides to hold the client in higher regard than their own engineering team, it's probably best for you to start looking for a job somewhere else, or to go freelance and choose your own clients and projects.

It's no wonder I see so many jaded and surly guys behind the board. They have gone through years of difficult clients and taken truckloads of abuse from them, ranging from rude indifference to foul-mouthed screaming. Hopefully there will come a time when these particular directors, producers and executives will understand that, without us mixers, editors and recordists, their projects don't get finished, sold or shown.

Evolution of an industry

There has been a very harsh recession in the sound post industry in the past few months, at least in Toronto. All of us freelancers and owners of small companies have felt the shockwave of an industry shedding its skin, transforming into something that, frankly, many of us find scary.

Some say that it is just the local economy shifting, with the value of the Canadian dollar going up and American production companies deciding it's best to stay south of the border. But even many Canadian producers are wary of spending their money on sound post, tax credits or not. I personally feel that, like global warming melting the ice caps, this change is a process that has been happening for a while, but we're starting to feel its effects now.

What I believe is that many medium-sized production houses (our bread and butter) have come to the quite erroneus conclusion that hiring a dedicated sound post facility is an overrated luxury. They have started to set up their own small in-house sound post studios, run by engineers that, for the most part, don't have a lot of experience – meaning that these engineers can't charge a lot of money, which is exactly what these companies like. Or these companies have bypassed that option completely and just assigned the title of 'mixer' to their in-house picture editors, with the results that I have explained in previous posts. So getting a master videotape bounced back from a network because the sound mix has mistakes is just another part of everyday life - they just fix it until it's good enough to broadcast.

In the shallower end of the pool, many starter production companies are putting out movies on a tiny budget that gets blown away before even getting to post. Then they resort to placing ads on Craigslist and Kijiji looking for a 'sound designer with his own rig that can edit dialogue, sound effects, do Foley and a surround mix', all for a screen credit and a copy of the film on DVD. And many kids do respond to these ads because its their way of getting credits and their 'foot in the door'. The sad truth is, even if one of these films got bought by a distributor, the chances that the sound mix were to pass Quality Control when being encoded for printing would be slim to none. This would mean, yes, a remix, and possibly a re-edit of all the sound. So the poor guy who spent countless hours slaving over the sound edit and the mix as best as he could would end up seeing someone else's names on the DVD credits - a team of sound professionals hired by the distributor to fix the sound.

As bleak as this landscape seems for many of us, it is what it is, and it won't change just because we will it to change. The only solution is to adapt. Some sound post facilities have done this by diversifying and offering packages that include everything: shooting the project, doing the picture editing, sound post, visual effects, packaging, the whole nine yards. The problem with this approach is that it opens up a massive can of worms. It becomes exponentially harder to keep track of every part of the process, and hiring supervisors is the only way of doing it, which turns into one more big expense to the company. The other way to tackle it, and this is what I currently do, is the exact opposite - eliminate the overhead as much as possible, and specialise. That way, the company is not bleeding cash, and the effective allocation of every resource is much simpler. Although you can't compete with 'free', you can get closer to something clients can afford, without selling yourself short.

There will always be the undercutters and the undercut. But there will also always be quality and mediocrity. If the sound post industry is to subsist, it will need to do so based on selling high quality, not the size of its tools.

Perception is everything

A few years ago, I was working on the sound design for a television movie. It was the first time I was doing any serious sound effects work, and I was really excited about the whole deal. This film had been a last minute job, and the sound supervisor and myself found ourselves working through New Year's Eve to meet the January 2nd deadline to start mixing at Todd AO in Hollywood. I remember taking a break at 11 p.m. on December 31st, going home, having dinner and a glass of celebratory champagne at midnight, and going back to work at 1 a.m.

The director and the producer for this movie are fantastic people, very positive, fun and energetic. The only problem is that, at the time, the director was a bit green – this was his first feature. And, again, my first as a sound designer as well. We sat down and did a week's worth of great work together, trying out different ambiences and moods for the emotionally-charged scenes. So, after working until 6 a.m. on January 2nd, we all went home, had a shower, and headed to the re-recording stage at Vine and Hollywood.

After we loaded all the gear into the stage and set it up, the mixer did a pass of the first reel with the faders up to get an idea of what the project was about. At this point, the director went pale and said, "But that's not what I heard in back in the sound effects suite, the levels are all wrong!" It turns out he thought that I was actually mixing the film as I added sound effects during that week before. And, I, being inexperienced, failed to properly explain that what I was doing was a rough premix with the temp dialog track so that he could get a feel for how the sound effects would jell with the rest of the soundtrack.

In the end, everything turned out all right, but I made a mistake that could have been disastrous, had the director been less understanding when we explained what had happened. What I'm trying to convey with this story is that, no matter how seasoned the production team is, it is extremely important to always explain what you're doing as you're doing it. This serves two purposes, as experience has taught me: first, it covers your ass, especially if there is a third person in the room with you – it's your insurance policy should something go wrong later. The second purpose, and just as important, is to make your clients feel that they are dealing with a pro, someone they can trust. If you have a positive and friendly attitude, you can describe what you're doing without the director feeling uncomfortable. He will actually feel grateful that you care enough about his project to be thorough and proactive.

Lack of communication can lead to creating rifts in the perception of what the process is. There aren't many things that make a producer more jittery than this – the feeling that someone on the team doesn't know what they are doing, or that they are mavericks who don't care much about teamwork. So, keep the director and the producers up to speed, and not only your part in the project will be completed succesfully, but you will very possibly get a call for the next one.

On music and sound design

As I mentioned in another post, there is a general misconception about what sound post people do. I always need to explain (cheerfully, if it's someone I like) that, no, I don't write the music for a film, I do the rest of the sound, and I'm always confronted with a smile and a blank stare. Then I explain how a movie is shot and that the only thing that needs to be recorded at that time is the actors' voices, and then we add everything else that isn't music.

It may sound like I'm being smug and belittling the vast majority of the people because they are ignorant of our trade, but I'm really not. After all, as a great teacher of mine used to say, "How would you know if nobody told you?" I don't know the first thing about business acquisitions or how the stock market works, so I understand how a professional broker would need to be patient and explain his livelihood to others. No, the problem I see with these misconceptions is that they happen right in our industry. That is one of the reasons this blog exists, and hopefully it will work as an educational tool for some that are (or plan to be) in the business of audio-visual entertainment.

The point on this post is that, to confuse things even more, composers and sound designers are starting to actually talk to each other and create alliances that benefit the soundtrack of a project. I did the sound design for a small-budget horror film called 'Shallow Ground', whose score was composed by my friend Steve London. We sat down even before the film was shot and made a plan to purposefully 'blur the line' between music and sound effects. He would use sound effects elements in his score and I would use musical elements in my sound design. So the end result was an aural tapestry that made the film sound bigger than what its budget suggested.

This method of working has the additional benefit of making the communication process between the director, the music department and the sound department much smoother, because everyone is talking to each other. It makes any potential "soundtrack crowding" problems come to the surface when there is time to address them, not at the final mix, when the only option is to sacrifice something. The problem is that this kind of open communication takes time out of an already crammed timeline, and it is complicated by the fact that it takes a lot of trust between the director, the supervising sound editor and the composer. To pull this off uneventfully, it takes a director that is very secure and really knows his stuff. I was lucky on 'Shallow Ground' in that the director was not only very technically adept, but also keen on experimenting with sound to make the film bigger and better. Others just like to keep things simple and not have to worry about supervising one more thing on their plate.

Even so, even if this 'blurring the line' between sound design and music is not what the film calls for, it is very important to maintain open communications between departments. I mixed a film with a crazy tight deadline that had a wonderful music score and great sound design action scenes, but I had to throw a lot of stuff overboard because there were too many elements fighting each other, and that could have been avoided by a few quick conversations between the sound team and the music team.