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Into the Fire

Oct 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson

Ladder 49 places high demands on the SFX and mixing crew

Firefighters have always been respected and admired in this country, but especially since the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001, when so many lost their lives in the World Trade Center collapse. That disaster served as a sobering reminder of the bravery and heroism that are part of the firefighter's job. And more than just being anonymous service professionals, they are also members of a community — flesh and blood humans with spouses, children, and relatives who worry about them every day.

Ladder 49, director Jay Russell's new film, set in contemporary Baltimore and centered upon a fire there, has nothing directly to do with 9/11, yet it has a lot to say about the inner makeup of firefighters and the powerful bonds between them, and in that way it serves as a powerful postscript to an event still so indelibly etched on us all. The film jumps back and forth in time as fireman Jack Morrison (played by Joaquin Phoenix), who is trapped in a burning building, struggles to survive and reflects on his life as a firefighter, husband, and father. John Travolta plays Captain Mike Kennedy, who is on the outside of the inferno, trying to talk Jack through the crisis and, ultimately, rescue him. Though it's definitely an action flick, the interior drama involving the two main characters is really the subject of Russell's film.

It's been 13 years since the last major film about firefighters, Ron Howard's Backdraft. That film won Oscars for best sound (Gary Summers, Randy Thom, Gary Rydstrom, and Glenn Williams) and best sound effects editing (Rydstrom and Richard Hymns). But members of the sound crew for Ladder 49, while praising that earlier work, say that their approach to sound design was much different — rooted more in the subtle psychological underpinnings of the film instead of repeatedly presenting loud, in-your-face, ferocious fires.

“My order from the director was to make it more emotional, so we can tell the story about how the firemen feel, rather than just making a big Hollywood movie,” says Kelly Cabral, supervising sound editor for effects on Ladder 49. “It would have been easy for us to make every second of the fire really big, filling it with animal growls and making it so loud that it's scary, but that's not the approach we went with. We wanted there to be a lot of variety to the sound and to use that as a way to get into the firemen's heads.”

Cabral is that relative rarity in film sound, a woman who gets top supervising sound editor gigs. She already had a role model in the family: brother Barney Cabral has been a sound editor and supervisor for nearly 30 years. But Kelly still had to work her way up through the ranks. She worked as a driver, assistant, Foley artist, ADR editor (and then supervisor) before eventually moving into effects. Among Cabral's other notable supervising sound editor credits are Blue Crush, John Q, and The Notebook.

She was mentored in effects by one of the best in the business, Wylie Stateman. “I was working on L.A. Law, and I had known Wylie for many years, and he basically called up and said, ‘I want you to supervise a show with me.’ So I went over to Soundelux and worked with Wylie and Lon Bender for the better part of six years. These are two super-great guys who taught me so much about how to create sounds and how to design and how to deal with aspects of the job in many, many ways. Wylie and I did some wonderful projects together — The Perfect Storm, Any Given Sunday — and he never held me back. He let me be involved in the effects and let me go, while still sort of guiding me. It was a wonderful learning experience.”

Ladder 49, she says, was probably the most challenging sound job of her career. “Every film requires a lot of homework before you even get to the actual sounds you're going to want. I always like to go on the set with my DAT and get a feel for the environment and for what the director's trying to do. But I also want to understand the world I'm working in, so in the case of Ladder 49, I spent countless hours talking to firemen and hanging around a fire station in Baltimore when they were shooting the film. I went out on actual [fire] calls so that I could understand more what it's like to ride on a fire truck with the sirens going, on the way to a fire. So you get a sense of what it sounds like and also, as important, what it feels like internally. But I also got so much from talking to the firemen. I don't know what it sounds like to be trapped inside a building that's on fire. I'll never know, hopefully. So the only way I was going to know was to go and talk to firemen.”

What was it like riding on the truck to a fire? “It was one of the loudest things I've ever heard in my life,” Cabral says. “The truck itself is so loud. The horns are blaring. The siren is almost deafening. That's why they wear earmuffs. You get this very intense feeling. You're anxious. You're excited. You have all these emotions because you're going into this uncontrolled and unexpected thing. Every fire is different, and you never really know what you're up against until you're there, and even then, it can change so fast. For firemen, when they go out on that truck they get very quiet; they're in their own little space: ‘How's it going to go down today?’ So I tried to put that in an audio perspective on Ladder 49. How does it sound to these guys? How does it make these guys feel? Is it scary? Is it guttural? So I took all that information and created the sound that way.”

Toiling hand in hand with lead sound effects editor Jason King, Cabral had her work cut out for her, beginning with the sound of the fire itself. The fire shown in the movie, however, had to be a controlled burn, occasionally augmented by minimal CGI work. “We couldn't create it from production fire,” Cabral notes, “so it was created from a lot of things, everything from your basic bear growl to recording pops from a fireplace — firemen hear that all around them in a real fire, and it can be deafening. I have a fire pit in my yard, and we recorded some things there, very close-miked. Some of that went into the film, but it was never the main element; it was always a piece of something larger.

“Everything we'd record, we'd say, ‘That would be cool in that scene — OK, what else? It's not big enough, wide enough, emotional enough.’ There are shots in the film where the fire engulfs this one area of an apartment, and then it rises above the roof. How do you get that movement? A lot of it was done in the mixing. We did a lot of cool stuff on the mixing stage at Universal with Chris Carpenter [effects] and Andy Koyama [dialogue]. It was a huge joint effort on everyone's part — the mixers, the director, us. It was so many tracks.”

Effects were either recorded to DAT with a variety of Sennheiser and Neumann shotgun mics or directly to Pro Tools. Submixes for the temp dub were done, according to Cabral, in a Pro Control environment.

“Director Jay Russell came in with the thought that he didn't want constant fire rumble,” says re-recording mixer Carpenter. “The fact is, that is a lot of what you hear in a big fire. You're going to feel the rumble. But you can't play that all the time — you can't play that reality because first of all, the audience gets tired of it, and then when you do want it, for a big moment, it loses its impact, and it gets muddy. Jay started out saying he didn't want any of that, but later we went back and added some rumble to create size. We threw some rumble into the subs but don't have it going constantly because it makes people uneasy if they hear too much of it.

“Actually, a lot of the stuff we ended up putting in the surrounds is creaking and debris. The building is stressing. Then, when we're out on the ledge with the guys, there's plenty of opportunity for putting communications and other sounds from below and the helicopter that's constantly up there into the surrounds,” he says.

Carpenter lauds Jason King's work organizing the effects and delivering the Pro Tools sessions to the stage sessions on MMP drives. “Jason did a great job of laying it all out for me,” he says. “He had the rumbles separate, sometimes in a three-track format, sometimes in a five-track format. Then he'd have a series of debris. Sorting everything out was fairly easy because it was so tastefully presented to me. He also did a lot of the processing on the sounds, so I didn't have to later.” Carpenter and Koyama (whom Carpenter calls the best dialogue mixer in town) did their work at Universal's Stage 3 on a Harrison MPC console.

According to Kelly Cabral, Ladder 49 also required “huge amounts of ADR” because of how noisy the sets were during the fire scenes and the fact that the main characters often had to speak their dialogue while wearing cumbersome oxygen masks. “We probably had a good 50 or 60 tracks in any given sequence of just ADR and breathing,” she says. “That was tough. On the production track, you couldn't hear anything when the guys were in the masks, so then it became, how do we do it? We ended up going to Doc Kane over at Disney, and he set up this contraption which was basically hanging the mask from a mic stand about a foot and a half away from the actor, and the microphone would sit behind the mask, and the actor would say his lines, and it was almost like it was bouncing through the mask, but you could actually understand what was being said. It took countless hours to figure out the right position, because if you were too close you couldn't understand anything, and if you were too far off you didn't get the effect of the mask.”

Also challenging was the creation of different ambiences inside and outside the burning building. Again, it was a fortuitous marriage of well-designed effects mixed for both impact and variety. “Its relatively easy to cut what you see,” Cabral says, “but cutting what you don't see is more difficult because you have to find the right balance. Is this too busy? How many companies have come to the fire at this point? You have the firemen running around, the water on the ground, all the hoses. In the building in the film it's being sprayed from all sides — how much are you hearing inside? The deeper you get into the building, the more you have to filter the outside sounds; then you cut outside, and it's huge. It's not about the fire noise so much — it's the activity of all these people and the radio calls. There were so many layers going on.

“Even in the firehouse scenes, they have a P.A. system that constantly has chatter going on it. In addition to that, there's a guy in one room watching TV, another couple of guys playing cards. There's somebody cooking and someone else playing basketball. We had to have all that. The director said, ‘It has to be real.’ And then you have to be able to hear the dialogue, too.”

Cabral also notes that in the fire sequences, they decided to have a different sonic emphasis each time the action shifted to Jack being trapped in the interior of the building. “In one sequence, where Jack is lying on the ground, we focused on the cement debris falling around him, and we had the fire [sound] more in the background. The next time we cut to him, it was about the water that was coming in. The next time we might focus on the fire again. The time after that on the metal rocking — the actual sound of the movement of the building. Everything else would keep playing [in the mix], but we'd focus on one element for each individual cut. It was nice to have that variety, and you really got the idea that this guy was in a very dangerous situation.”

Cabral says that many of the chaotic debris effects were cut on the Foley stage, supervised by Gary Coppola (of Sound Satisfaction). “We did so much Foley to get the detail in the film,” she says. “For all that metal, they were tearing and ripping and banging every different weight of metal imaginable. We also tried to work a lot on the weight of the suits with the tanks and all, so when someone's walking up the metal stairs and carrying a hundred pounds of stuff you really got the feeling o how heavy it is. Gary did a great job on all that.”

The sound team also tried to bring the viewer inside Jack's head by occasionally adopting his perspective. “We'd be in a fire with our lead character, and it would be really loud, and we'd have it in the surrounds, and you were really in this fire,” Cabral says. “But then it cuts to a close-up, and we strip a lot of the sound away, and you just hear his breathing, and you feel, ‘Oh my god, it is so claustrophobic in here.’ Instead of just saying, ‘Let's just have a big fire,’ we'd find moments where we could dig out details of what it's like to be a fireman who's in this fire and scared to death. There's a possibility that the sound goes away and you do hear your breathing louder than anything else. In fact, that sometimes does happen.”

“When [Jack] first falls down through the floor,” Carpenter adds, “we went away from the fire sounds and instead went to water drips and a little radio, warning beeper, and some [building] stressing. It's surprisingly quiet. Then the ambience sort of wakes Jack up, so we sort of wake up with him — we bring a little fire up in a roar, and we wake him up. His eyes open, and then he realizes he's in big trouble. It's a nice sound moment.”

“With audio,” Cabral concludes, “you can sell the audience an intensity level by making them feel like the person in the scene rather than being a person watching a movie. That's something Jay wanted to do with this film, and so that's what we were working toward. He kept saying ‘I want to be the firemen; I don't want to be the audience.’ He drove himself crazy trying to help us get there, and he was never willing to sell it short. He wanted it to be right, and so did we, of course.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.