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Reader SurveyWartime Ambience
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley
Complex sound for a complicated era in Charlie Wilson's War.
For most scenes, actors wore lavalier microphones, but for the hot-tub scene, location recordist Petur Hliddal used boom mics only.
The next voice you hear …
Sound One's AMS Neve 72-fader DFC console was configured for the eight dialogue tracks that Dichter and Bochar had stemmed down to from the original 32. To that they added another eight tracks of walla in English and 16 more in various foreign languages. The mix of these tongues was critical in several ways. “Much of the film takes place in Afghanistan, so you need to have the right background languages,” Dichter says. “And the film will go to foreign markets, and some of them don't want any English at all in the backgrounds.”
These background walla tracks are incredibly complex and detailed, reflecting Nichols' obsession with precisely setting the tone. Care was taken to get exactly the right northern dialect of Pashto, with groups of native Pakistani and Afghan speakers assembled by ADR editor Deborah Wallach in New York and Los Angeles. (Overseas location shooting was done in Morocco.)
“You want to make it as real as possible,” says Bochar, who further layered the Pashto walla tracks with a sound design made from desert-air tones recorded on location and mixed with subtle mood tones drawn from his sound effects libraries. To recreate the barren landscape of a refugee camp in Pakistan, Bochar added drones from a keyboard synthesizer, which add a desolate note to the scenes and subliminally signal the pedaled drone strings of Middle Eastern instruments such as the sitar. Other walla tracks were also similarly contexted. In scenes that take place in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., reverberant ambiences were created to simulate the high-ceilinged chambers and hallways. “It's like foley — it's the backfill around the dialogue that gives you subliminal cues about where you are and what's going on,” Bochar says.
This philosophy extended to the mixing of these background tracks as well, with a subtle trick that viewers of The West Wing would likely find familiar. In a congressional hallway scene thick with foley, background voices, and sound effects — and with Sorkin's dialogue running at 90 miles per hour — Dichter and Bochar would carefully give certain cue words or phrases their own tiny space, allowing them to pop up for a half a second or so, interspersed with the main dialogue. “You'll hear the word ‘senator’ or the phrase, ‘Get this bill approved,’ here and there,” Bochar says. “They're just present enough to set the scene. [Nichols] always wants to hear a sense of ‘business as usual’ going on around the action. Sometimes you almost can't quite make out these words and phrases, but a part of your mind recognizes them unconsciously, and it adds to the reality.”
“Especially with close-miking used on the dialogue — there was no background ambience for a lot of it,” Dichter says. “It had to be created, and it was — in a very careful manner.”
