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MillimeterThe Sampler
Jan 25, 2005 12:09 PM
And the Oscar Goes To …
Well, we won’t know that for a few weeks, will we? But on Tuesday, Jan. 25, the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were announced and, not surprisingly, we’re keeping a close eye on the sound and music categories--after all, an Oscar nomination in the sound effects editing category represents a pinnacle of achievement in that field. Their work will be admired, absorbed, and imitated by other recordists, including those who work on SFX libraries. And chances are that the nominated music scores will sooner or later be influencing production music, as well: how many library composers have used Oscar-nominated scores by John Williams, James Horner, Thomas Newman, Hans Zimmer, and others to inspire them in their quest to write vital, contemporary dramatic music?
In the sound effects editing category, the three nominees are selected at a Los Angeles gathering in early January known as the Bake-off. (The visual effects folks also have their own Bake-off.) Weeks before the Bake-off, the sound effects editors who are members of the Academy’s Sound Branch are sent a “pre-nomination” ballot containing a list of eligible films. The members then submit a list of what they believe are the five best films in that category.
The top seven vote-getters are then invited to the Bake-off, and the supervising sound editors for those films (up to two) are asked to submit a 10-minute reel (usually consisting of clips that show the range of SFX in the film; not just the flashy ones) to be viewed by members of the Sound Branch at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. This much-anticipated evening has been described by award-winning SFX wizard Mark Mangini as “the loudest night of the year." It’s 70 minutes of ear burn for the hearing impaired. It's louder than real bullets, more powerful than actual explosions, able to burst small ear drums with a single sound. Look, up in the sky. It's absurd, it's inane, no, it's the Bake-off.
Once the clips have been shown and the audience’s ears are bleeding, they are asked to rate the films on a scale of six to 10, and the ballots are given to grim-faced suits from Price Waterhouse. In past years, films had to achieve an average score of 8.0 to be among the up to the three films that could be nominated in this category. This was a bad system, however, as there were years when only one or two films reached that lofty standard. This marks the first year that the top three vote getters automatically earn a nomination slot. To which we say why not five like in most other categories?
The seven Bake-off participants this year were: The Aviator, Collateral, The Day After Tomorrow, The Incredibles, The Polar Express, Ray, and Spider-Man 2.
And the three nominees for Achievement in Sound Editing are:
The Incredibles (Michael Silvers and Randy Thom); The Polar Express (Randy Thom and Dennis Leonard); Spider-Man 2 (Paul Ottosson).
For Achievement in Sound Mixing, which is usually shared by the re-recording mixers and the production sound mixer, the nominees are:
The Aviator (Tom Fleischman and Peter Hliddal); The Incredibles (Randy Thom, Gary Rizzo, and Doc Kane); The Polar Express (Randy Thom, Tom Johnson, Dennis Sands, William Kaplan); Ray (Scott Millan, Greg Orloff, Bob Beemer, and Steve Cantamessa); Spider-Man 2 (Kevin O’Connell, Greg Russell, Jeffrey Haboush, Joseph Geisinger)
For Best Original Score, the nominees are:
Finding Neverland (Jan A.P. Kaczmarek); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (John Williams); Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (Thomas Newman); The Passion of the Christ (John Debney); The Village (James Newton Howard).
Manhattan Production Music: Chesky and Woody and More …
Chesky Records is one of the leading audiophile record labels in the world, boasting a catalog filled with impressive jazz, classical, and world music titles, and is noted for their impeccable fidelity. Company president David Chesky is a jazz and classical composer of some renown, as well as a producer for the label. But David’s roots are in production music, too, and with his brother Norman, who co-founded Chesky Records, he is also involved in one of New York’s leading commercial music concerns, Manhattan Production Music.
“Norman Chesky started the company in the mid-’80s,” says MPM VP of sales and marketing, Ron Goldberg. “David wrote music for jingles, Norman sold it to agencies. At that time, one of their specialties was sports music, and the head of creative at CBS Sports told David to prepare a lot of different kinds of music he could use instead of continually asking him for specific stuff, and that’s sort of how the library got going. They made ten vinyl records of different types of music that could be used for sports on a needle-drop basis, and then it took off from there.”
Goldberg came on board a while later, and the company has grown steadily through the years, adding an impressive number of titles through the auspices of various affiliated sub-brands, including Apple Trax (which offers dozens of different genre collections, from Modern Guitar to Drones to Percussion Drama to Dark Orchestra); the 150-plus-disc BRg library, which spotlights “the latest sounds and musical attitudes for high-impact productions”; and Live Trax, which promises cuts from top studio cats in a wide variety of styles, including blues, swing, emo, and more.
Additionally, MPM licenses Chesky Records tracks for commercial use. Another feature clients seem to like: SplitTrax, which offers certain cuts in a special separate mix with the lead instrument on one channel, and what is essentially a mono mix of the track on the other. “It allows clients the flexibility of raising or lowering the level of that instrument in relation to a voiceover or whatever,” Goldberg says.
Clearly, MPM is doing something right: Their client list includes a large number of current films, television programs and national commercial accounts. Goldberg is the first to admit that landing clients takes a combination of hard work, business acumen, and even luck. “Everybody’s got pretty good music out there,” he says. “A lot of it is, frankly, connections. You have to know the right people. Sometimes, too, you get a break.
“Like we’ve [licensed] music for five Woody Allen movies, including the one that’s coming out in March, Melinda and Melinda. The producers are all old school guys--they’re into jazz and classical, which is usually what we license to him, especially classical music. But this time they called us and said, ‘Look we have a dance club scene; what’ve you got?’ So I contacted a partner label of ours, and I was able to go back and say, ‘We’ve got your music. These guys are hot; they’re on the charts.’ And they ended up actually shooting the scene to the song, instead of just using it in the background.
“That’s the way this business is,” Goldberg continues. “You get a call, hopefully you have something, you get them the music, the stars align, and it works out.” He also does a lot of fishing for business. “I’m calling people all the time. Nine out of 10 are going to say no, but then you’ll land one. It’s important to stay involved and let people know that you care about their needs. We do a lot of network promos--like for Survivor--where we’ll provide straight dramatic music from our library CDs. Anyway, we’ll call them every so often to make new recommendations to them, just to stay on top of it for them.”
As with other library companies, downloads have become an increasingly important tool for MPM, “because of the immediacy of it,” Goldberg says. “I just got off the phone with someone in Hollywood and I’m e-mailing them something right now. He needs it fast and BAM, we can give it to them.
“Still, a lot of people want CDs on the shelf. They like to be able to reach over and find something, plus they avoid the cost of search fees. In the current climate, we like providing both.”
For more info go to www.mpmmusic.com.
Speaking of The Aviator …
Remember those amazing, deafening flash-bulb sounds in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull 25 years ago? Well, Marty’s at it again in his Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. Once again, the sound of old-style flashbulbs explode on the soundtrack, but it is in service of one of the main points of the film: Hughes hated the attention of the press and was very uncomfortable in large gatherings where photographers were present. So every flash and pop from the sea of photographers is like a psychic bullet, in a sense.
When I interviewed supervising sound editor/sound designer Eugene Gearty about the film last fall, here’s what he had to say about the flashbulb SFX:
“My first thought was, ‘Am I going to be clever and try to outdo the man himself, Frank Warner, who really did the flashbulb thing in Raging Bull.’ I mean, he pretty much nailed the coffin on that one, didn’t he? [Laughs]. No, I’m not, but I still have to come up with something good for this film because it’s important to the story. So my only recourse was to be authentic to get the best recordings of the real thing.
“So I went out and bought quite a few different bulbs--Press 50s, Press 20s and Press 25s--and we shot them all off at the C5 Foley stage in New Jersey with a Grafflex camera of that period [1930s] and recorded them from different perspectives. We did three stereo pairs simultaneously, recording to Pro Tools through really tricked-out Millennia preamps. We had Scheops Colette mics in X-Y close up, a Neumann cardioid pair as a mid-mic, and we used a Sass as a room mic--that one’s a PZM concept where they use two mics facing opposite each other at about 180 degrees. It’s a very wide image with a gaping hole in the middle; it’s perfect for background.
“Then we took the bulbs and smashed them and recorded that, too--they had their own crackle. In my Sound Miner database, for every ‘shot’ there were multiple events--it was listed by microphone, so I could go to the Schoeps pair or the Neumann pair or the Sass and hear the same one from a different perspective, and then we cut it that way, building the track bulb by bulb until we had the effect we wanted in the scene. There are hundreds in the movie, and we wanted to make them sound different from one moment to the next, so we were always trying to get lots of variety."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
