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MillimeterWartime Ambience
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley
Complex sound for a complicated era in Charlie Wilson's War.
Ron Bochar's Top Five Sound Projects
Ron Bochar, Charlie Wilson's War supervising sound editor and co-mixer, has been involved in some great films and television with unique audio. Here's his top five list:
- CAPOTE (2005 — sound rerecording mixer and supervising sound editor): “Probably the most powerful sound in the film was silence. We created a very complex, organic prison background — everything from pipes groaning, pipes with running water in the walls, prisoners talking, processed winds moaning, thunks and clunks, and guard movement off camera. Plus a boatload of design, like vari-speeded breaths, rusty hinges, and winds. Yet when the killer began his confession to Capote, we slowly peeled the sounds back, so when he reveals the truth there is only the room tone, dead-center mono, and his voice, followed by blackness on the screen with simple piano notes from the score. We break it all back to reality with shotgun shots in flashback. But getting to that silence and the void it presented is what sold the scene.”
- ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003 — sound rerecording mixer and supervising sound editor, which won Bochar a Cinema Audio Society sound award and an Emmy Award): “Here was a six-plus-hour stage show adapted to on-location in New York City. Mike Nichols wanted the city to be a character as much as any living creature, and the tone of the film — the arc of the story — dictated moods. We start quiet and rather reserved — interiors are rather mild, the city intrudes softly. As we go, a storm breaks it up, voices from the streets get intrusive, cars and traffic enter the scenes no matter how high up in a hospital you are. The story gets complex, and so does the sound. And we had fun with Angel's wings, which I created mainly from winds. I heard her as displacing the space around her, [rather than] ‘flying’ with flapping sounds.”
- AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003 — sound rerecording mixer): “The first feature I mixed entirely in [Digidesign] Pro Tools. I made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot of tricks, and will never mix in any other way again, given the opportunity. Splendor allowed me to truly take the philosophy of, ‘The edit is the mix; the mix is the edit,’ and exploit it to the fullest. I use that method for every temp mix I do, and all those decisions follow into the final.”
- YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998 — sound rerecording mixer, supervising sound editor): “Nora Ephron presented me with an issue where the music she wanted to use for the opening wasn't long enough to follow the visual effects they were using, so I took a lot of phone-dialing sounds, made them work with some of the musical themes in the movie — [touchtone sounds played as melody], computers' start-up sounds, modems, the ‘ether’ of the Internet sounds, synthesized buzzes, and tones that I Dopplered — and ending with a consistent computer beep that turned into the rhythm of the opening notes of the song Nora wanted … thereby giving her music cue an opening that followed the images and integrated it in. It's short, but very sweet.”
- PHILADELPHIA (1993 — supervising sound editor): “When Andy [Tom Hanks] is on the stand being cross-examined by the evil lawyer, he's beginning to space out due to his illness. I processed additional dialogue tracks to accompany his basic track, with phasing, close-room reverb tones, and ringing notes. The mixer, Tom Fleishman, combined them in various ways during the mix to alter the voices that Tom was hearing, as well as his own voice through his point-of-view shots. In addition, we altered his room tone in his POV shots to include the sound you get if you stick your ear into a shell.”
— D.D.
