Multimedia
Newsletters
Blogs
Whitepapers
Events
DCP Directory
Mill Directory
Edit Calendar
Advertisers
Reader SurveyWartime Ambience
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley
Complex sound for a complicated era in Charlie Wilson's War.
Workflow detail
Another reason the dialogue on Charlie Wilson's War is so complex is that in addition to Sorkin's intricate verbosity, Dichter and Bochar asked for Hliddal's raw production tracks, which were recorded to an Aaton Cantar-X2 eight-track digital recorder. “We jumped immediately into the reprint audio — all four production tracks, instead of the mixdown that the production department film editors usually supply you with,” Bochar says.
The move was based on improving workflow. “We wanted to find out where the problems might be, where there was a lack of intelligibility, and if there was another source that we could pull that line from rather than take the time and trouble to loop it,” Bochar says. “It also laid the foundation for the actual mix by letting us develop volume maps and figure out the processing in advance, instead of getting the movie two weeks before the mix and having to do a number of temp mixes. We did all of two temp mixes for this film — that was it.”
Bochar adds that using as much production audio as possible confers a psychological advantage in the predub stage. “There's a tendency to want to edit around a bad line of dialogue before you replace it, and that means you're making decisions around a problem instead of going for a flow,” he says. “Our intent was to avoid that issue.”
Charlie Wilson's War has a flow to it that the audio sought to maintain. “As a mixer, I don't want to make abrupt scene changes unless that's specifically what the director wants for a transition,” says Dichter, who adds that that's exactly what Nichols intended for several scenes towards the climax of the film. “We saved the dramatic cuts for the end, where they really have a greater effect.”
