Features

Bruce Bisenz: His Personal Best

by David Waelder
Photos courtesy of Bruce Bisenz

Robert Towne: (recalling an interview prior to hiring him for Personal Best) What got me about Bruce— he did a movie about horse racing and I remember asking him about how he set up the sound on that movie. He told me there was nothing that he had seen or heard [in other horse racing films] that was unique in the way he figured it should be. He went out and recorded sound out on the track of the jockeys in the middle of a race and he said he’d never heard anything like it. It involved the way that the jockeys spoke and how significant [that] was and he described to me the ways in which it was different. I was fascinated because I felt that that’s the sort of thing that I wanted to do with track and field.

Jeff Wexler, CAS: I consider him somewhat of a mentor to me because anytime I was having any difficulty or I was, wanted to build something or had to do a job that I didn’t really understand completely, I would always ask Bruce, well, how would you do this … and Bruce always had an answer. It often was not the answer that I would get from any other Sound Mixer …

Bruce Bisenz has a well-earned reputation as a technical wizard. He designed and built much of the equipment he used throughout his career and he personally performed bias and alignment calibration (not a simple task) for all his recorders. It is particularly remarkable that he is essentially self-taught with little or no formal training in electronics or sound recording practices.

Coming out of military service in 1967, he was unsure what to do next but he had a good friend in David Ronne, who had already established a career in production sound. Bruce had an interest in hi-fi and work as an electronics technician, so David encouraged him to apply to FilmFair where he, until recently, had been working as George Alch’s assistant.

He stayed with FilmFair about two years, replacing David as George Alch’s assistant. He learned everything he could about production sound recording from George and then moved up when George left. He was also involved in Post Production, making transfers and preparing tracks for mixing, an experience that helped develop a sense of what was needed and what worked on screen.

Although he was earning good money at FilmFair, Bruce only stayed another year and left to tour Europe for a network miniseries hosted by skier Jean-Claude Killy. Returning home, he found work on documentaries and corporate projects. His friend David Ronne was then heading the Sound Department for Wolper Productions and recommended him for assignments including a special with historians Will and Ariel Durant and documentaries with Jacques Cousteau.

David Ronne introduced him to the practice of working with a handheld Nagra and a shotgun microphone, starting with a Nagra III and an EV 642 and progressing quickly to a Nagra 4.2 and the Sennheiser 804. That combination was a game-changer at the time.

A recordist, working alone, could produce a quality track that had previously required several people and a truck full of equipment. It was also an excellent training ground; the immediacy of working directly with the recorder and a handheld microphone imparts a keen sense of how microphone position determines the sound.

During this period and his time at FilmFair, he read everything he could find about sound recording and the science behind it, making a vigorous effort to understand all of the factors that determined the characteristics of a recording. This practice of total immersion investigation became a life habit. Portable radio transmitter/receiver sets were becoming more reliable so Bruce wanted to make the lavalier microphones used with them sound more natural. Over time he determined the placement and EQ that would allow him to ‘Mix and Match’ with his fishpole microphones. This was especially important in the days of singletrack dialog recording (no pre-fade backup tracks) when all microphones were mixed together.

Portable mixing panels with full parametric EQ were not available at that time, but David Ronne was building a device with potential. Ronne took out the guts of a Nagra and coupled a microphone preamp to a line preamp and bundled them together in a separate enclosure. Using this outboard preamp allowed feeding a third microphone to the two-input Nagra (or more if one daisy-chained the devices) and several Production Mixers built similar interfaces. (See the profile of Courtney Goodin in the Summer 2011 issue of the 695 Quarterly.) Bruce Bisenz took the design a bit further.

He recognized that the Nagra line output card was sufficiently hot to drive a passive Program or Graphic equalizer and still yield an output that could be recorded through the Nagra line input.

Bruce collaborated with his engineer friend, Paul Bennett, to custom-build a microphone mixer using Nagra cards with Bennett-modified Altec Program and Graphic EQs configured with the curve that Bruce specified to make radio microphones sound natural. They also fit custom 24 dB/octave high-pass and 18 dB/ octave low-pass filters. They even hand-selected capacitors and other components. The capability of this mixer-equalizer coupled with his experiments in microphone placement gave him the tools to tackle nearly any recording challenge.

Television commercials and documentaries were the sole beneficiaries of these skills for a long time but a change in advertising practice nudged Bruce to change direction in his career. He had been happy working commercials but the change from sixty-second to thirty-second spots diminished the work days needed on commercials and encouraged him to seek out long-form work. He was hired to record Damnation Alley in 1977 after audaciously telling Jack Smight, who was directing the picture for Fox, that if he didn’t prefer his work to their regular Mixer (who was unavailable at the time), they should fire him. This was his first studio picture.

Glenn (Rusty) Roland: The Sound Department at Fox got the dailies in from the location recordings and were amazed at how totally perfect they were. [They] didn’t need any additional work ’cause Bruce, you know, was a perfectionist right on set.

Using all the tricks and specialty equipment he had developed for commercials, Bruce produced an excellent track that needed little adjustment in Post. For commercials, he had been a NABET mixer but this project gave him the IA Signatory days he needed to qualify for IATSE membership. After his acceptance into IATSE Local 695, Bruce was able to work on studio pictures.

He worked with Cinematographer John Alonzo on FM and it was Alonzo who recommended him to Director Martin Ritt for Norma Rae.

Norma Rae cemented his reputation as a Sound Mixer of remarkable ability. Much of the action took place in the din of a working textile mill and Ritt’s expectation was that Bruce would only be able to get a scratch track in that environment but even that was not at all certain. On the location scout, he used a Radio Shack sound level meter and measured 103 dB on the machine room floor. That’s a deafening racket but not so loud that people couldn’t communicate. Mill workers wore custom-fitted ear protection in the machine room and he watched them as they would approach one another and speak directly into the other person’s ear. Even then, only the person listening could hear what was said; it was essentially private communication. He had principal actors fitted for ear protection by the mill and specified that the plugs should be molded around his 26 27 miniature microphones. Rather than stringing the earplugs on a cord, he sourced especially thin microphone wire and used that both as a neck-loop and to carry signal to the transmitter. Ritt naturally staged the action to match normal behavior in the machine room and the actors would holler their dialog into a microphone only an inch or so from their lips. While the results didn’t have the quality needed for a production track, they were quite sufficient as a guide track..

Bruce made another key contribution to Norma Rae. Near the end of the film, Sally Field as Norma Rae has a confrontation with the management of the mill and is carted off by police officers. It’s a climatic scene with dialog from several characters and would be chaotic if characters could only communicate by screaming in each other’s ears, one on one. Bruce reviewed this with the Director and encouraged him to find a way to shut down the machines for that scene. Nothing of the sort was scripted but Bruce’s suggestion came a few weeks prior to filming the scene so Ritt had some time to consider the advantages. He and his writers structured the scene so that, after Norma Rae displays her “union” sign, the workers, one by one, shut down the machinery. The scene played very much as Crystal Lee Sutton, the actual Norma Rae, recalled it but it hadn’t been part of the first draft of the script. This work stoppage is arguably the key moment of the movie and intensely powerful.

Each project in a career brings its own set of challenges. Bruce evaluated each circumstance individually and adjusted his approach for the best result. He used whatever tools or techniques would produce a good track.

Nick Allen, CAS: It was so [much] fun to work with Bruce because he would use lots of tools. With Bruce, you’d open the truck and, which of the forty-seven microphones would you like to use today, kid?

Glenn (Rusty) Roland: Bruce was always doing that on sets, he would always hide microphones everywhere … he was always placing those huge, I guess they were Neumann, those huge microphones …

Nick Allen, CAS: He was putting U-87s in the middle of a set and cranking it and getting real dialog they’d use in the movies. He did the wackiest, most obscure things but, like you said, his ears said, you know what, they’ll use that in the mix …

In some cases, the simplest method was the best choice but Bruce was not afraid to swim against common practice if that yielded results. For 10, there was a scene with Julie Andrews singing and Dudley Moore accompanying her on piano. Although he experimented with a plant for the piano, he ended up recording it off Dudley’s radio microphone. Post Production didn’t believe at first, that the piano was recorded on a wireless but he was fearless if a scene sounded good to him. Conversely, hiding microphones the size of a Buick, if they sounded good, was, for him, entirely normal.

Nick Allen, CAS: And he had a “keep trying” attitude. He taught me that if take one was wrong, put something else in on take two. When you find something that’s getting close, tweak it, don’t change. There was this path of methodology.

Regrettably, as Nick went on to say, the pace of production is now so relentless that the first take is often it and there may be no opportunity for adjustment. Whenever possible, he was a bold experimenter in the pursuit of excellence. It’s a dangerous business to be running EQ in a shot—and changing it on the fly, no less! Multi-tracking was not an option at the time and there was a risk of over-compensating and spoiling a track. Nobody gets it right 100% of the time, but Bruce had an enviable batting average. He worked to maintain that record both by doing his preparation carefully to be sure he knew what to listen for and also by keeping his hearing in top form.

Douglas Schulman, CAS: Another thing Bruce does, you know, I don’t know if he’s still doing it, but he would always wear earplugs in his ears when he wasn’t wearing his headphones.

Glenn (Rusty) Roland: Bruce was very protective of his hearing. If we were in a loud place, he’d have earplugs in or something. He did not want to get his ears damaged by bad, loud noises. He had incredible ears for sound.

Bruce regarded his ears as his primary instrument and took pains throughout his career to protect them.

Douglas Schulman, CAS: He didn’t have a problem, I mean, with teaching you something but Bruce was always funny. If he was going to show you something new, he would say, “Now, this is a secret. Don’t tell anybody.”

Nick Allen, CAS: I went to Berklee College of Music, very briefly, only for a couple years. I was studying production engineering and jazz piano and I didn’t learn as much there as I did from being around Bruce.

In the course of his work, Bruce acted as a mentor to several of his boom operators. He recalls a time with Nick Allen when they spent half a day listening to windscreens and cataloging how each one slightly altered tone and ambiance. This kind of attention to detail might seem obsessive but it provides the foundation of understanding that permits responding rapidly to challenges.

Douglas Schulman, CAS: The thing that I learned from Bruce is actually how to listen to stuff … we tend to, with our minds, focus on things and take things out and what I learned from Bruce was to listen more like a microphone which hears everything.

The summation or direction of a 37-year career isn’t often represented in a list of credits. This is especially true with crew people who don’t usually initiate projects but must accept or decline offers as they are available. Bruce Bisenz’s career was more eclectic than most, ranging from Reds, a grand historical vision spanning continents (he did the scenes shot in California) to intimate portrait films like Without Limits, the Steve Prefontaine story. He did performance films like Purple Rain with Prince and he continued to do documentaries like The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind. (I’m pleased to have worked with him on a few of the smaller projects like Legend.) Other highlights included Captain Eo and Smooth Criminal/Moonwalker where he engineered the off-speed playback, not a common thing at the time, so that Michael Jackson could dance in slow motion and still be in sync with the music. The one common element of all these projects is that they all received his focused attention and considerable thought. Bruce never “walked” through an assignment; he evaluated each one to consider what an audience should hear on the track and worked to accomplish that. It was just this intelligence that Robert Towne recognized in that first interview with Bruce for Personal Best.

Glenn (Rusty) Roland: Oh yeah. I always thought Bruce was, he was just the best, I mean when you worked with him. It is different than others, that’s for sure, but in a very good way.

Robert Towne: You know, I just said, this is what I need and he somehow delivered it. I honestly can’t say enough good about Bruce in terms of what he brought to his work.

The first thing that Bruce said to me when I interviewed him was that a “successful career implies a successful retirement. If you die in harness, that’s not a successful career.” He’s been retired for eleven years now but continues to be active. He records a live swing band weekly. The Jerome Robbins Dance Archive accepted for the New York City Library the photos of performing flamenco dancers he has been making over the ten years of his retirement.

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Interview Contributors

I thank Bruce Bisenz for making himself freely available and for supplying the images that illustrate his profile. I’m also grateful to the following colleagues who made themselves available for interviews:

Nicholas Allen, CAS was a Boom Operator for Bruce starting with Crimes of the Heart through Gilmore Girls. He works today as a Production Mixer.

Glenn (Rusty) Roland, a Cameraman/Director, remembers working with Bruce on motorcycle documentaries like On Any Sunday. He worked with Bruce on commercials and brought him in to do The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind.

Douglas Schulman, CAS was Bruce’s Boom Operator on Personal Best, Heart Like a Wheel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Captain EO and many others. He is a Production Mixer today.

Robert Towne is a Writer/Director. He hired Bruce for Personal Best, Tequila Sunrise and Without Limits.

Jeff Wexler, CAS considers Bruce a mentor; his first assignment in sound was booming for Bruce.

A remembrance of the The American West

by Bruce Bisenz

I hope you’ll believe me when I say this story’s so good that I didn’t have to embellish—even a little bit.

Seven years into my freelance career, I began to get occasional documentary work with my friends at Wolper Productions and became a regular with Group One Productions.

Those were heady times; newly available portable equipment like the 16mm self-blimped Éclair NPR, George Quellet’s Stellavox SP 7 (Sync/Stereo before the Nagra 4S) and VHF wireless from Vega made it possible for two or three to do the work of a whole crew. And Group One had assembled a skilled group of technicians who could use these new tools to best advantage. Bob Collins, their regular Director of Photography, and Editor Keith Olson had already won Emmys for Peggy Fleming at Sun Valley.

David Vowell, a documentary writer recruited for the project, had to interview a bedridden old man to construct a script. He asked for my help with equipment but jealously controlled access to his invalid, the famous film director, John Ford.

The idea was to film this amazing wreck of a man (still nobody’s fool—scant months from his passing) and combine it with footage from his legendary Westerns and interviews with actors closely identified with him to make a TV special. The American West of John Ford was to be his last project.

 I soon found myself at the “Four Corners” juncture of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. It is now home to Navajo, Hopi, Ute and Zuni reservations; it is also the location of Monument Valley and the Canyon de Chelly National Monument, the background for virtually all of the John Ford Westerns.

For “Pappy’s” last visit, there was no difficulty getting accommodations or enticing iconic actors like John Wayne, Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart to be available. Dennis Sanders, the Director/Editor and Bob Collins, the DP, set up their first shot, an image of “The Duke” (I called him Mr. Wayne) against the desert west that had played such an important part in his own mythic career. Wayne didn’t seem to take to me (after all, I was a “Long Hair”) so I was relieved when a minor incident focused his attention elsewhere. Duke Wayne had his big hat set to shade his eyes from the blazing desert sun when Dennis asked him to tip his hat back a bit for the camera. We all heard him rumble, “the hat stays right where it is!”

I knew that after a hard day of exteriors in the sun, there wouldn’t be any fun in town. We were deep in the Navajo reservation and hours from any town so I brought a deck of cards. I sashayed (this was the Old West) into the lodge’s dayroom and attracted a few players.

After a while, a 240-lb, 6-foot 4-in icon, moved by his unique gait, stood over our table and said to nobody in particular, “Is this a private game or can anybody play?” And a hush came over the room …

Even I knew the response to this straight line. I took a moment to catch his eye, way up there from my chair, and then, remembering to give him a thin smile, I said, “Your money’s as good as anyone’s.” And the Duke sat down!

John Wayne in his element Now, for some reason, everyone in the room wanted to play poker at my table. Soon I found myself with five cronies in Duke’s “Home Game,” all of them millionaires except me. But I had a wad of $100 bills in my jeans and $3,000 was a lot of money back then.

“What’ll we play, Duke?”
“Oh, dealer’s choice” (5/7 card stud and 5-card NOTHING wild).
“What about the stakes, Duke?”
“Um, table stakes?”
“Sure, sure Duke.”

Whatever “table stakes” meant; I was green in this game in more ways than one.

High-stakes poker with John Wayne; it was cutthroat. His cronies kept on “Oh goshing” the Duke as he pulled on the neck of the bottle at his right hand.

“Ah, I can’t drink the way I used to.”

But I noticed the level go steadily down past half.

I started out lucky. I grinned, bet and won with some pots running $500– $700. That was three or four days’ pay. Finally, I had the best “up cards” for seven-card stud. But, for once, my first-to-bet upcards weren’t getting any better. I was surely behind but I kept up my silly grin and the betting as, one by one, the others dropped out.

 Head-to-head with John Wayne! I reckoned he was holding two solid pairs. I was drawing to a “Two Outer” and “Dead to Trips” (I learned this lingo in a later century). The last down card was a “Brick” so I “Value Bet” $50 (and kept the dumb grin too).

His cronies kept calling out: “He’s bluffing, call ’em, Duke, call ’em, You gotta call ’em.” That’s when I realized: if they caught me bluffing, they wouldn’t kill me, but I might wish I was dead!

Well, Wayne thought for quite some time before he said, “Nah, he’s been getting some good cards lately” and threw in his hand. Desperately grateful this was the kind of a game no one would think to upend my down cards, I said to myself, remember this one—you just “Bought One From the Duke!”

Editor’s note: A variation of this story was originally published in The Coffey Files.

Photos courtesy of Bruce Bisenz

Production Sound for Gone Girl

by Steve Cantamessa

My first impulse when the editors of the 695 Quarterly called to ask if I would write a piece on doing production sound for Gone Girl, was to pass and finish my round of golf. More thought and my wonderful wife’s prodding changed my mind but presented me with my next quandary: though I try to keep up with the tech end of my craft and, with affectionate apologies to Mike Paul, my go-to guy for technical matters, production sound is not a terribly literary topic. A microphone with a skilled boom operator in control will render the best sounding track. Not always a doable task these days. It was a pleasure to work on a project that allowed us to use this technique. I spoke about penning this with a friend who reminded me that I have now become one of the new “old guys” and that I should just write what I know. So here we are.

Before my interview with David Fincher, I didn’t really know much about him, other than that I enjoyed his films and the work of his sound designer, Ren Klyce. That they sought me out was a compliment in itself. Thanks to my dad Gino’s lifelong involvement, cinema has been part of my life since before I was born. Talking with a respected director like Fincher promised to be interesting at the least. We sat down and I instantly saw that he knows what I do and has an informed opinion of how he thinks it should be done. Sadly, these days many may think they know what we do and how we do it, but they are usually mistaken. David Fincher knows. We discussed my approach to things on the set along with various advances in technology, and then he asked me to do the show.

It didn’t take me more than a couple of hours into the first day to realize that David Fincher was that rarest of birds these days—a director who does his homework and knows exactly what he wants when he gets on the set. And I mean exactly. Too often these days, many directors like to temporize important decisions. Others look at the call sheet and check things off and still others never seem to want to go home. On a Fincher movie, it is clear that everyone on the set has the same goal: to do his or her best work in order to make the best movie possible. Fincher crews his shows with the best people based, not on their ZIP codes, but on their body of work. From DP Jeff Cronenweth to Costume Designer Trish Summerville, everyone was helpful and mindful of the big picture, not just his or her own tasks. He understands that such efficiency on set will save far more money than any state tax credit ever will. He shoots his movie, not a corporate schedule.

Gone Girl was, I believe, the first show to use the Red Epic Dragon—a 6k camera capable of stunning imagery. As with the “first” of anything, there were issues. Specifically, considerable fan noise emanated from the front of the camera, where the actors usually are. The temperature of the chip in the Red was crucial, and seventy-two degrees was the magic number; once the camera readout on my video assist monitor went to seventy-three, I knew things were going to get noisy. Happily, the people at Red were most helpful. Though we started shooting in Missouri on mostly exterior locations, I knew that once we returned to LA for stage work, that fan noise would pose a big problem. Having been around the block a few times, when I explained this to the folks at Red I assumed that they wouldn’t give a damn about some sound mixer’s problems, probably being up to their own back ends with image tech problems. I was wrong. They listened, they asked questions and they wanted to hear my ideas. I told them that the fan noise coming out the front was a big issue and that it needed to be re-routed in some way. By the time we had returned to California, they had designed and built baffles that mounted to the front of the camera, routing the “sonic exhaust” around the side and then out the back. I was genuinely thankful and impressed that they cared. Most importantly, it worked.

The movie is wall-to-wall dialog, and my Boom Operator, Scott LaRue, was a busy guy; personal relief and lunch were the extent of his downtime. Our utility man was Brad Ralston, always a big asset with the gear and frequently serving as Second Boom Operator. Scott and I have been together since about 1992, so any discussion of how a shot is to be done is usually quite brief. Scott tells me how he sees it and I say, “Whatever you think.” There are those few occasions where I ask him to wire someone, but such requests are sometimes unwelcome. I do recall that when I was booming, I hated it when a mixer would tell me to wire someone I felt I could easily get with the boom. It must be a boom operator thing, but the fact is that he’s been putting me over for years and I am truly grateful.

It seems like we were always either rolling or setting up. To repeat, Fincher does his homework. The sets in Hollywood were beautiful and well built, but without greenbeds. It’s just the way it is now, most sets have ceilings and lighting is done differently, but booming on a ladder over a wall through a slightly raised ceiling piece certainly isn’t the most elegant approach.

HARDWARE NOTE: My standard package consists of a Cooper 208 mixing panel, an Aaton Cantar X2, Lectrosonics 411 radios with SMA transmitters, Tram lavaliers and 416s on booms transmitted via Lectrosonics 400 transmitters. And, of course, plenty of IFBs for the Director, Script Supervisor, Camera and Producers.

Even with all the dialog we had to record, I can’t recall David ever telling our department how we should do things. Again, Fincher’s hiring philosophy: he made it clear that being streamlined was important. Just do the job to the best of your ability without making everything into a sound issue. Find problems during rehearsals and get them solved while the DP is lighting so that, when the actors step in, you are ready to go. I don’t know how others do things, but this is how we always work. I can only judge from what I saw when I was booming. There’s a lot to be taken from having seen the likes of Kirk Francis, Jeff Wexler, Bill Kaplan, Eddie Tise and my dad Gino. These guys got to the top because they are professional filmmakers, very good at a most unique craft.

Back to Fincher: ask him a question and he’ll give you an answer immediately without any doubt or hesitation. This makes for a far more rewarding way to spend the day than the currently popular “Oh, just wire them all.” On the few occasions where he ran a tight camera with a wide shot, he would roll ten seconds of a clear frame and then have us bring the microphone into the shot. The ten seconds of clear frame provided a plate he could use to remove the microphone from the wide shot so the sound would not be compromised by the shooting plan.

Everyone involved in Gone Girl respected one another’s department and worked as colleagues. The focus and intensity on Fincher’s set benefited our department immensely. The actors never complained about wires. The Electric Department never jammed a generator up our butt. We never had to ask the dolly grips to quiet a track. The effects people were preternaturally aware of any sound implications. Locations were pre-scouted by the Locations Department for any sound issues, and those problems were solved before we got there. The sets were always dead quiet. For instance, we had a practical police station set located on a busy street in Culver City. David had the Construction Department build vestibules at each of the doors to the outside so we might have significantly diminished traffic noise yet still see extras come and go.

The scene with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (Nick Dunne and Amy Dunne) in the shower was the one place that was a bit challenging and was the only set where David couldn’t arrange things to our advantage. There was quite a bit of dialog at a low level with water running the whole time. The FX Department was helpful by painting “hogs hair” the same color as the tile. This allowed us to quiet the sound of the water hitting the tile floor and, being the same color, didn’t adversely affect any of the lighting. They also plumbed the water lines and packed them with sound-absorbing material to ease the sound of the water running through the pipes. The Construction Department removed out-of-shot glass panes as we worked so Scott could get the microphone into the shower and get the dialog. Again, everyone helped.

Some of the questions that come up when someone finds out that I mixed Gone Girl are fascinating to me. One is about the number of takes. Granted, he does a lot of takes but what’s the big deal? There is always a reason for them. Any direction I heard him give to an actor, or any department for that matter, was concise and thoughtful. The second question is regarding the sound style used on the dialog throughout the film. I wish I could answer this but I wasn’t there in Post; Ren Klyce, the Re-recording Mixer, would have the answer. What I do know is that David likes to use sound, even the dialog, to create certain moods and feelings that do not follow the normal rules. Everything you see and hear in a Fincher movie is intentional and controlled by David’s sensibilities. You may like the style, you may not, but I assure you that none of it is due to a mistake, laziness or lack of attention.

Those who know me know that I would make a poor courtier and seldom sugarcoat things. That said, I enjoyed the Gone Girl experience and got immense personal satisfaction from working on such a good film that people will enjoy watching. Working with good actors, talented technicians and a good director is all any sane person in this business could or should ever want. It is no mistake that nearly every review of Gone Girl includes mention of the high quality of the technical aspects of the film. David Fincher showed the good sense to hire from the best talent pool in the land to get what he wanted. Now, about my golf swing…

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Glossary of highlighted words

Greenbeds A series of catwalks above the sets in a studio.
Hogs hair A woven filter material for heaters and air conditioners, used on sets to soften the sound of water droplets hitting a surface.

P-Cap, MoCap , and All That Jazz / Part 1

by Jim Tanenbaum, CAS

As sound people, we live in (according to the old Chinese curse) interesting times. Our technology is advancing at an exponential rate … with a very large exponent. The analog Nagra ¼-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder was used on almost all of the world’s movies for more than thirty years. Then DAT (Digital Audio Tape) cassette recorders (though more than one brand) held sway for another ten. Hard-drive recorders (I beta-tested a Deva I) led the race for five years, then DVD optical-disc recorders (albeit still with an internal HDD) for only three. Sony’s magnetic minidisk unit never made significant inroads in production recording. Now we’re using flash-memory cards, and I’m surprised they’ve held on for more than a year, but the original choice of CF cards seems to be giving way to SD ones (except for Zaxcom). Next year?

But it is not only the technology that is changing—so is the product. Made-for-Internet drama or documentary shows aren’t that much different from their predecessors, but reality shows certainly are a new breed: dozens of radio-mic’d people running around, in and out of multiple cameras’ view, and in and out of multiple Production Mixers’ receiver range. Fortunately, we have Zaxcom transmitters with onboard recorders. Still, things aren’t that different.

But “capture” shoots are. Almost entirely different from anything that has gone before. And capture for Computer-Generated Image (CGI) characters (sometimes called “virtual characters”) is different than capture for live-action shoots. Also, Motion Capture (MoCap) is different from Motion Control (MoCon), though these two techniques are sometimes used together, along with Motion Tracking (MoTrac). And then there is Performance-Capture (P-Cap). They will be described in this order: CGI MoCap, P-Cap, live-action MoCap, MoCon, and MoTrac. Following that, working conditions and esthetics for all types will be discussed.

So now, for those of you who have yet to work on a capture job, here is a primer (pronounced “prim-er”; not “pry-mer”). The rest will be on-the-job training.

CGI MoCap

For starters, the capture stage is called a “volume”—because it is—a three-dimensional volume where the position and movement of the actors (often called “performers”) and their props are tracked and recorded as so many bits. Many, many bits—often terabytes of bits. You can expect to record many gigabytes of audio per day.

The stage containing the volume has an array of video cameras, often a hundred or more, lining the walls and ceiling, every one interconnected with a massive computer. Each camera has a light source next to, or surrounding, its lens, which special reflective markers on the actors will reflect back to that particular camera only. This is known as a “passive” system, because the markers do not emit any light of their own. The camera lights may be regular incandescents or LEDs, with white, red, or infrared output. More about that later.

The cameras are mounted either directly on the walls and ceiling, or on a latticework of metal columns and trusses. WARNING: It is vitally important not to touch these cameras or their supporting structure. If you do, you must immediately notify the capture techs so that they can check to see if the volume needs to be recalibrated.

The actors/performers wear black stretch leotards studded with reflective dots. The material is retro-reflective, which means it reflects almost all the light back in the direction it came from, in most cases utilizing tiny glass spheres. Scotchlite™ is a typical example, used on license plates, street pavement stripes, and clothing. For use with the capture suits, the reflective material is in the form of pea-sized spheres, mounted on short stalks to increase their visibility from a wider angle. The other end of the stalk terminates in a small disc of Velcro™ hooks, so it can be attached anywhere on the capture suit’s fabric.

As an aid in editing, the capture suit usually has a label indicating the character’s name. Hands and/or feet may be color-coded to distinguish left from right.

The markers in the image above are glowing because a flash was used when the picture was taken. The camera was very far away, and the stage lighting completely washed out the light from the strobe on the people and objects, but the markers reflected most of the flash back to the camera lens.

Capture cameras mounted on more rigid
columns, but still subject to displacement if hit. [Formerly Giant Studios, now Digital Domain’s Playa Vista, California, stages]

If MoCap is to be used on the actors’ faces, smaller, BB-sized reflective spheres are glued directly to the skin, sometimes in the hundreds. When too many have fallen off, work stops until they can be replaced, a process that takes some time because they must be precisely positioned.

Props and certain parts of any sets or set dressing (particularly those that move, like doors), also get reflective markers. Unlike “real” movies, props and set dressing do not have to look like their CGI counterparts, only have certain dimensions matching. They are often thrown together from apple boxes, grip stands, and “found” objects, and may be noisy.

Here is a description of the mechanics of MoCap.

The floor of the volume is marked off in a grid pattern, with each cell about five feet square. This array serves two purposes: 1, it allows the “virtual world” in the computer to be precisely aligned with the real world; and 2, it allows for the accurate positioning of actors, props, sets, and floor contour modules.

The capture process is not like conventional imaging—there are no camera angles or frame sizes. The position and motion of every “markered” element is simultaneously recorded in three-dimensional space. Once the Director is satisfied with the actors’ performances in a scene, the capturing of the scene is finished. Later on, the Director can render the scene from any, and as many, POVs and “focal lengths” as he or she wishes.

But for this to be possible, every actor must be visible to (most of) the capture cameras at all times. This means that there must not be any large opaque surfaces or objects to block the cameras’ view. If there need to be physical items in the volume for the actors to interact with, they must be “transparent.” But glass or plastic sheets can’t be used, because refraction will distort the positions of markers behind them as seen by the cameras. Instead, surfaces are usually made out of wire mesh or screening, e.g., a house will have thin metal tubing outlining the doors and windows (to properly position the actors), with wire mesh walls (so the actors don’t accidently walk through them). In the virtual world, seen from a POV at some distance from the house, the walls will be solid and opaque, but as the POV is moved closer, at some point it will pass through the “wall” and now everything in the room is visible. Tree trunks can be cylinders of chicken-wire fencing, with strands of hanging moss simulated by dangling strings.

Props need only to be the same size and overall shape, and weight, to keep the actions of the actors handling them correct. They will have a number of reflected markers distributed over their surface. Live animals, if not the actual living version, are made as life-size dolls with articulated limbs and appropriate markers, and puppeted by human operators. This gives the actor something “living” to interact with.

Since the motions and positions are captured in three dimensions, if the ground or floor in the virtual world is not flat and/or level like the volume’s stage floor, the bottom of the volume must be contoured to match it. This is done by positioning platform modules on the grid squares to adjust the surface accordingly. (More about this later.)

It is necessary to precisely align the real world of the capture volume with the CGI virtual world in the computer; otherwise, parts of the CGI character’s bodies may become imbedded in “solid” surfaces. The first step in this process involves a “gnomon” (pointer) that exists in both the real and virtual worlds.

As an aid in editing, the capture suit usually has a label indicating the character’s name. Hands and/or feet may be color-coded to distinguish left from right. The gnomon has three arms at right angles to each other, tipped with reflective markers to allow the MoCap system to create its CGI doppelganger in the virtual world. To align the real table with its “twin” in the virtual world, the gnomon is placed at one of the real table’s corners, and then the table is moved in the volume until the virtual gnomon is exactly positioned on the corresponding corner of the CGI table. This is usually the simplest method. Another possibility is to go into the virtual world and mouse-drag the CGI table until it lines up with the virtual gnomon. The entire virtual world could also be dragged to position the table, but this might throw other objects out of alignment. Global position shifts like that are limited to adjusting the virtual ground with the volume floor after the contour modules are in place.

Real-world alignment gnomon and “transparent” table with wire-mesh surfaces. (Photo: ‘AVATAR’ ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved)

Multiple conventional HD video cameras are used in the volume for “reference.” These cameras cover the scene in wide shots and close-ups on each character. This allows the Director to judge an actor’s performance before the data is rendered into the animated character. A secondary function is to sort out body parts when the MoCap system gets confused and an arm sprouts out of a CGI character’s head. Looking at the reference shot, the Editor can figure out to whom it belongs, and mouse-drag it back into its proper place. In most stages, the cameras are hard-wired into the system so they have house-sync TC and do not normally require TC slating. They may use DV cassettes and/or send the video directly into the system.

Until a few years ago, it was not possible to see the CGI characters in real time, but now Autodesk Motion Builder™ software allows real-time rendering, albeit in limited resolution. Warning: The flatpanel monitors on the stage have cooling fans that may need to be muffled or baffled. Video projectors’ fans are even louder.

Lighting in the volume is very uniform, soft and non-source, to ensure that the reference cameras always have a well-illuminated image. In addition, having no point-source lights ensures that there will be few, if any, specular (spot-like) reflections that might confuse the MoCap system’s cameras.

To capture motion effectively, the system must measure the marker positions at least twice as fast as the temporal resolution required. For 24-frame applications, this means a minimum 48 Hz rate. Currently, much higher rates are used, 120 Hz to 240 Hz. If “motion blur” is desired, it can be created in Post.

P-Cap

Motion Capture was developed first, and initially captured only the gross motions of the actor’s body. The facial features were animated later, by human operators who used mouse clicks and drags. Then, smaller, BB-sized reflective balls were glued to the faces, in an attempt to capture some of the expressions there. Unfortunately, this process couldn’t capture the movement of the eyes, or the tongue, or any skin wrinkles that formed. And since the “life” of a character is in the face, these early CGI creations failed the “Uncanny Valley” test.

It turns out that human beings evolved a built-in warning system to detect people that weren’t quite “right.” Back in the “cave people” days, subtle clues in a person’s appearance or actions were an indication of a disease or mental impairment that could be dangerous to your continued good health or even your very existence.

Multiple hard-wired HD reference cameras (although these have DV cassettes as well). (Photo: ‘AVATAR’ ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved)

A graph of the “realism” of a character versus its acceptability starts at the lower left with obvious cartoon figures and slowly rises as the point moves to the right with increasing realism. But before the character’s image reaches a peak at the right edge, where photographic images of actual human beings fall, it turns sharply downward into the valley, and only climbs out as the character becomes “photo-realistic.” Even an image of a real human corpse (possible disease transmission) is in the valley, as would be that of a super-realistic zombie.

When you watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon, you know the character isn’t “real,” so its completely “inhuman” appearance is not a problem. Likewise, when you watch a live-action movie, the characters are real, so again there are no warning bells going off in your brain.

Current computer-animated cartoons like Despicable Me or Mars Needs Moms don’t have a problem because their “human” characters are so obviously caricatures. The trouble began when CGI characters developed to the point of being “almost” human, and started the descent into the uncanny valley. The 2001 video-game-based movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was the first attempt at a “photo-realistic” CGI feature movie using MoCap. Although an amazing piece of work for its time, it didn’t succeed visually or at the box office. But it didn’t quite fall over the precipice into the uncanny valley, either. The characters’ faces all had that “stretchy rubber” look when they moved, the motion of their eyes and mouths weren’t close enough to human, and most of their exposed body parts (except for hair, which was quite good) were rigid and doll-like, moving only at the joints. It still was “only” video game animation, and back then, nobody expected that to be real.

The stylized 2004 feature The Polar Express had an intentionally non-realistic, stylized look to its settings and characters, but since the MoCap process was used, their now, much more realistic motions caused a slight uneasiness among some viewers.

It wasn’t until Beowulf (2007), that the CGI capabilities increased to the “almost photo-realistic” level and a larger portion of the audience was disturbed by their being in the uncanny valley, albeit subliminally. It was mainly that the characters’ eyes were mostly “dead,” moving only on cue to look at another character, and never exhibiting the minor random movements that real, living eyes make continuously. The interior details of their mouths were also deficient.

Interestingly, the same capture volume that was used for The Polar Express and Beowulf was also used for Avatar (2009), but only after James Cameron spent a great deal of time and money to upgrade the system. Avatar successfully crossed the uncanny valley because the facial-capture cameras worn by the actors allowed for the recording and reproducing of accurate eye and mouth movements, and the formation and elimination of skin wrinkles. “Edge-detection” software made this possible. Thus was born the “Performance Capture” version of MoCap.

P-Cap volumes have the same soft, non-directional lighting as MoCap, plus additional lights mounted next to the facial capture cameras to make sure the face is never shadowed. Avatar used a single CCD-chip mounted on a strut directly in front of the performer’s face, and many systems still use this configuration. To avoid having the distraction of an object continuously in the actor’s line of sight, by the time AChristmas Carol went into production in 2009, four cameras were used, mounted at the sides of the face, and their images were rectified and stitched together in the computer.

At the beginning of the production of Avatar, Cameron used a live microwave feed from the face camera to “paint” the actor’s human eyes and mouth onto the CGI Na’vi’s face as an aid to judging performance. But after a while, this proved not to be that useful and was discontinued.

Face-Only P-Cap

For certain action scenes, the actors cannot safely wear a camera head rig. For these situations, only the body markers are used, and conventional MoCap is employed. Sound is recorded with a boom mike or wireless mike with a body-mounted lavalier, but will (normally) serve only as cue-track. Afterward, P-Cap techniques will be used to capture the face and dialog. If the director does not automatically ask for it, I recommend that you suggest he or she have the actors attempt to reproduce their body motions from the MoCap sessions as accurately as possible, because this will induce a form of realistic stress to their voices. These setups should be mic’d in the same manner as the rest of the project.

Alternate Techniques for Face-Only P-Cap

The capture infrastructure is continuously evolving, and several new technologies are emerging. Unfortunately, because of NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements), I cannot describe the projects I worked on in any detail. The information here comes from public sources such as Cinefex magazine and Wikipedia.org.

Real-time LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) scanning is used to measure the shape and position of the performer’s head, down to sub-millimeter resolution. (This technique is also used to capture GCI data from large motionless objects like buildings, statues, vehicles, etc.)

Real-time multiple-camera, multiple-angle views are used to compute 3-D data from the different 2-D images of the performer’s face.

For both of these, you must usually keep the mike, the boom, and their shadows out of the working volume.

Live-Action MoCap

Live-action scenes, often shot against green- or blue-screen backings, need to have dramatic, sourced lighting. There are also many shiny wardrobe items and props, some of which even emit light themselves, and all these would confuse the passive MoCap system. Exterior scenes shot in direct sunlight can completely wash out the reflected capture-camera lights. For all these reasons, the reflective marker passive system cannot be used. Instead, “active” markers are used. These are larger, ½- to 1-inch cubes, with an LED array on each visible side. The markers emit a pattern of light pulses, either red or infrared, to uniquely identify each individual marker. Externally mounted markers that are visible in a shot can be eliminated with “wire-removal” software in Post. Infrared markers may sometimes be concealed under clothing to avoid this extra step, along with its attendant time and cost.

MoCon

Motion Control was developed long before any capture processes. A camera was mounted on a movable multi-axis platform that ran on tracks, and had sensors to record its motion, position, and lens settings. The initial shot was made by a human operator, then the subsequent ones could be made by playing back the recorded data and using it to control servo motors that moved the camera in a duplicate of whatever dolly, pan, tilt, zoom, focus, etc., moves were made the first time. This allowed “in-camera” compositing of multiple scene elements without the need for optical film work in Post, with the attendant problems of generation loss, color shifts, etc. A typical use would be to shoot a night scene of model buildings with illuminated windows using a large outdoor model city street. To get uniform illumination, the tracking shot past the buildings is shot in daylight, with the camera stopped down to reduce the exposure. This would require impossibly intense (and hot) lights to illuminate the windows brightly enough to read in direct sunlight. Instead, a second, matching, pass is made at night with the lens opened up, so that low-wattage bulbs will provide the proper exposure. The original Star Wars movies used this method extensively. While this system is still in use, it is now possible to use markers to track camera position, particularly with handheld cameras.

MoTrac

Motion Control requires a large amount of expensive equipment, but now that computers have become so much more powerful, digital manipulation can accomplish some, but not all, of the tasks formally done with MoCon. And of course, many that were impossible with MoCon. And sometimes MoTrac can be used instead of needing MoCap to record camera positions and moves.

MoTrac has two main applications. First, green- and blue-screen work where there will be camera moves that must be coordinated with an added background plate. To do this, an ordinary non-MoCon camera is used, and visible “fiduciary” marks are made on the screen as a reference for how the plate image must be shifted to have the proper parallax for the moving camera. Usually, the mark is simply an “X” made with pieces of contrasting color tape. Enough marks are placed on the screen to ensure that some of them will always be in frame. The computer tracks the motion of these Xs and then adjusts the position of the background plate to match.

Second, smaller marks, often ¼-inch red dots, are stuck on real objects that will have CGI extensions added on to them. The moving ampsuits used in Avatar existed in the real word only as torsos on MoCon bases. The CGI arms, legs, and clear chestpiece were attached later in the virtual world. If you are planting/hiding microphones, be careful not to tape over or otherwise occlude any of these marks.

While not commonly used at present, it is possible to put fiduciary marks on a mike boom as an aid in removing it Post. And the recent Les Miserables used them to help remove the exposed lavaliers that were mounted outside the wardrobe.

MoTrac MoCap

This hybrid has limited capabilities, but is often used for liveaction shoots on real locations or sets, with CGI characters that are human-shaped and slightly larger than the human performers. No reflective or active markers are used because the scenes often involve action and stunts, and the markers could injure the wearer or be damaged or torn off. Typical examples are the Iron Man suits and the humanoid droids in Elysium.

This method does not capture 3-D position information directly, and is used to simply “overlay” the CGI image on top of the capture performer’s on a frame-by-frame basis. Perspective distortion of the shape and size of the marker squares can be analyzed by the software to properly rotate and light the virtual character.

The actors wear grey capture suits with cloth “marker bands,” consisting of strips ranging from ½ to 2 inches in width having alternating white-and-black squares with a small circle of the opposite color in the center. The bands are fastened around the portions of the actor’s body that are to be captured: head, torso, arms, and/or legs. Only gross body movements are captured with this system; not details such as fingers or facial features.

If wireless mikes are used, there is no face-cam mounting strut available to mount the microphone, but neither it nor the transmitter has to be hidden. Like a regular shot, boom shadows have to be kept off anything visible in frame, except for the capture suit. (The shadow will not be dark enough to be mistaken for black makings.)

Editor’s note: Jim Tanenbaum’s explanation of P-Cap and MoCap practices will continue in the next issue of the Quarterly with specific guidance for sound technicians working these projects.

Text and pictures (except Avatar set pictures) © 2014 by James Tanenbaum, all rights reserved.

My Wild Ride

by Coleman Metts, CAS
All images courtesy of Coleman Metts

My friend and colleague, Scott Harbor, who was having a scheduling conflict, referred me to the movie Ride. He thought, “Coleman surfs and stand-up paddleboards, so he’ll be great for it.” When the Producers initially contacted me, they said, “We are keeping it simple, but we want the actors, Helen Hunt and Luke Wilson, to talk to each other as they’re going out through the waves and catching the waves.” Well, I thought, perhaps the new wireless microphone transmitters from Lectrosonics might work. I told them it would be an experiment, but I felt pretty good about being able to pull it off.

My initial plan was to cut holes in the wet suits and have the microphones exposed but removed with computers in Post. The Producers responded they could not afford to do that for every shot. After considering a range of alternative options, we eventually agreed to cut small holes in the wet suits and attach the microphones behind each hole with tape. We then began an exhaustive process of trial and error in an attempt to mount the microphones. We could not find any tape that would effectively work in saltwater! Eventually, we settled on using Velcro to mount the microphones. However, it was not long before we learned that the Lectrosonics waterproof transmitters are not saltwater proof!

Lectrosonics was very cooperative about minimizing the L&D expenses, but the wireless transmitter failures forced my crew to capture all the sound sequences, both on the ocean and in the surf zone, with an old-fashioned overhead boom microphone. On the water, I used a Sennheiser 60. We got basically traditional coverage, so we were very lucky in that respect, and the microphone worked perfectly. I used the Lectrosonics plug-on transmitters to get the sound from the boom microphone back to me. My recorder for the movie was the Zaxcom Fusion. Working in this environment is incredibly hard on every piece of equipment. I am still finding sand in various places among my sound gear, months later.

We did not make any technological leaps on this movie; it was just persistence, and positive attitude, that solved our problems.

The initial schedule showed us on and off the water a lot, so I had a small ENG-type package built for the ocean, and my main rig I left built for filming on the land. Even at sea, I managed to send an IFB feed to video village and, particularly to Helen Hunt, who was directing as well as acting. I also supplied signal to the Script Supervisor and the Video Playback Operator, fellow 695 member Anthony Desanto.

We did not have a lot of prep for this project, so we had to improvise and figure it out as we went along. A nice benefit of the show was that I was able to bike to work every day for three weeks. Also, I got to wear my sandals at work every day for about a month.

So began my two weeks out on the water. I was placed in everything from zodiac-type boats to the back of wave runners. I eventually spent much of my time on a large stand-up paddleboard as no motorized craft were allowed in the designated surf zone which, in the Marina Del Rey/Venice area, extends from the beach out three hundred yards.

My Boom Operators, Johnny Evans and Jim Castro, also operated from large stand-up paddleboards for significant portions of their time on location. When not on a stand-up paddleboard, the Boom Operators were standing directly in the surf zone. Doing so, however, required the use of Watermen/Stuntmen who would position themselves directly behind my crew and grip them tightly to prevent them from being knocked over by the oncoming waves. My Utility, Ace Williams, did a phenomenal job in these trying conditions. Oftentimes, I was texting Ace what resources I needed sent out on the next supply boat.

It was not long before I realized that working on the water is very different from playing on the water. Being out on various watercraft all day was pretty fatiguing. Communication was limited. In the beginning, we also had a failure in the transfer process when the facility transferred all the tracks for dailies. That added some stress at the start of the show. Eventually, we got it all sorted out—just about the time when we moved off the ocean and started filming on dry land.

What did I learn from this project? Well, I guess I learned that when they say it’s going to be simple, it’s not. And I learned that you need more than one plan to deal with any eventuality plus enough resources for almost any scenario.

The process of filming on the beach, on the water and on multiple locations throughout Venice made Ride the hardest show I’ve done by far. But the amazing people I worked with made it a memorable and positive experience. The Director of Photography and his crew, the Key Grip and his team and our Stunt Coordinator and the Waterman were outstanding. They solved amazingly hard challenges every day. They all displayed the best positive attitude and everything seemed easy for them. After eighteen years in the business, I’ve learned not to take these things for granted. Ride restored my enthusiasm for making movies; it was a bright spot in my career.

Jim Webb: A Profile

by David Waelder

“ He was the most perfect Sound Mixer I ever worked with.”
–Chris McLaughlin

“ I would say that Jim was the father of multi-track. I really would.”
–Harrison “Duke” Marsh

“ He seemed to field a lot of curveballs very elegantly.”
–Robert Schaper

“ He was a great educational source to learn from.”
–James Eric

“ Jim Webb is a crusty old pirate of a man who has a heart bigger than words can describe.”
–Mark Ulano, CAS

James E. Webb Jr. is justifiably renowned for his work developing multi-track recording on a series of films for Robert Altman. He captured the dialog from multiple cast members and interlocking story lines on such iconic films as Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 3 Women, and A Wedding. He pioneered the multi-track process.

The scenes were so complex, so intricate and so audacious that Altman himself parodied the style in The Player.

And yet, this was really just the beginning of Jim Webb’s career.

He studied film in college, first at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and later at USC in the Department of Cinema. In 1962, he was drafted into the Army and, after training in radio and as a radio teletype operator (RTTY), served in Germany at an Army Aviation Repair Company that occupied the old Luftwaffe hangars on the military side of Stuttgart’s main airport.

Discharged in 1964, he worked for about a year at USC and then took a job, first at KTLA and then at the CBS station KNXT. The stations had contracts with IATSE and he got his IA card at that time.

ROCK & ROLL

Work in feature films was the goal but opportunities were scarce for recent film school graduates and new members of the union with limited contacts and seniority. Seeking to create their own work opportunities, he formed an independent production company with Pierre Adidge, a friend from Northwestern, and Bob Abel.

The newly formed production company did music specials for PBS and also documentary concert features. The Joe Cocker film, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, was the first feature, followed by Soul to Soul (as a consultant) and Elvis on Tour. These projects taxed his technical skills to keep everything in sync and sensibly organized. He was well aware that Woodstock required a full year of work to get everything synced and worked strenuously to avoid a calamity of that sort. He insisted on shooting regular slates and on assigning one track on the eight-track recorder to a sync pulse. His commitment to good protocol was not always adhered to but his efforts were at least partially successful and the films were all released in a timely manner.

ROBERT ALTMAN AND MULTI-TRACK

His Army training and experience with radio mikes and multi-track music recording on concert films gave him a good foundation in skills needed to implement a production style that Robert Altman was developing. Traditionally, films had treated their subject matter as if they were stage plays seen with a camera. Close-ups and tracking shots provide changing perspective but the action unfolded as a linear narrative. Altman saw the world as a messy place where events didn’t always proceed in an orderly way. Sometimes everyone would speak at once. Sometimes, with multiple participants, it wouldn’t be clear who was driving the action until the event was over. He wanted to bring some of that messy uncertainty to his film projects.

Altman used a loose and improvisational style in films like MASH but encountered difficulties with sound for McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Without precise cues to know when each character might speak, it was difficult for the Sound Mixer to deliver a suitable track, especially when action was staged in authentic locations with hard floors and other acoustically difficult features. Having multiple microphones, and assigning the outputs to isolated tracks, was the obvious solution. Altman brought in Jack Cashin to design a system of multi-track recording that might be used on location. Most of the equipment then available was designed for use in a studio and it required some ingenuity to adapt it for location use. But assembling the hardware is only part of the equation; someone must operate it effectively and this presented challenges to the Production Mixer.

The system Cashin developed used a Stevens one-inch, eight-track recorder. With one track assigned to a sync signal, seven tracks were available for discrete audio. No multi-track mixing panels that could work off DC were available at that time so 2 eight-input, four-output consoles were linked to supply the needed signal feed. The whole business ran off a 12-volt motorcycle battery with a converter circuit to provide the higher voltage needed by the recorder.

Paul Lohmann, Altman’s Director of Photography, recommended Jim Webb for the multi-track skills he had demonstrated on the concert films. And that was the beginning of collaboration among Robert Altman, Jack Cashin and Jim Webb on a series of films.

Jim Webb:

They had everything together but they didn’t have any idea about how to use it. And I said, “Well, the only thing that makes any sense is to put radio mikes on everybody.” You can’t have open mikes because if you add those back in the pre-dub, the background is going to be astronomical—you won’t be able to tell anything. You have to do a lot of close mic’ing to make this work. So my contribution was radio mikes.

The first picture made with this multi-track technique was California Split. It was a fortuitous choice because it made good use of improvisational technique but was less ambitious in that application than subsequent projects. It provided an opportunity to shake out the system.

By the time we got to Nashville, we pulled out all the stops and went blasting our way through it. We shot that film in eight weeks at a dead run.

Putting radio mikes on each performer and assigning them to discrete tracks was an obvious approach but there were also limitations. Post work required an additional two weeks to deal with all the different tracks. There was also an inherent lack of audio perspective. Jim Webb explains it best himself:

There’s no perspective. We ran into that immediately on Nashville. There’s this scene that opens the movie which is where they’re all in a recording studio and I went about putting radios on everybody, even the ones behind the recording glass. And I went over to Altman and I said, “Are you sure we’re doing this right? We’re throwing perspective just completely out the window.” And he said, “Yes, yes, of course we are.” I went back to putting radios on. About twenty minutes later, he comes over and says, “Are we doing this right?”

A little late to change the action now. And it worked out. I would have people come up to me and say, “That was the most realistic sound I’ve ever heard.” Well, there was nothing real about it. You’re not hearing people shooting through a double-plate glass and hearing all the conversation inside there, as well as what’s going on outside.

But it was primarily designed for overlapping dialog and improv and things of that nature where you never knew what anybody was going to say.

And you can’t possibly listen to it all because it’s just a Tower of Babel. So once I previewed all the radios and made sure they were working, you were just watching the meters.

Capturing the dialog with individual radio microphones was a complex undertaking that required all of Jim Webb’s skill but it accomplished what Robert Altman needed to fulfill his vision for the film. According to the Supervising Sound Editor, only two lines weren’t recorded in the original production track. One was a failed radio on Henry Gibson and the other one was an added line of Allen Garfield’s back as he was walking away from us. That was it; the rest was all stuff that we did.

THE ULTRASTEREO MIXER

Very little was available in the way of a portable mixing panel at the time Jim Webb was working the multi-track pictures with Robert Altman. The specialty mixing panels that Jack Cashin adapted for those pictures had liabilities that make them cumbersome for use on most pictures. He and Jack Cashin set to work to address this need with a capable mixer.

In the late to mid-fifties, [Perfectone] had a little threepot black mixer that was very popular in the studios; it was a little rotary pot thing and everybody used it. And it was around a lot. And then they updated their little portable mixer with a straight line. And they had six in and one out—it was still a mono mixer. And I liked the straight-line faders because you could handle them a lot easier than trying to wrangle three rotary, four, five rotary pots. So I said to Jack [Cashin], “Can we modify this and make it two track?” And we looked it over and said, no, it’s going to be simpler to make our own version of this. And he designed it and I built it. I built a dozen of them, maybe 12 to 14 of them. Sold them all.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN AND A RETURN TO BOOMING

Right after Nashville, Jim Webb was hired to do All the President’s Men, largely because his multi-track skills were applicable to situations where actors might have to interact with video monitors playing in the newsroom. He was also particularly skilled at recording telephone conversations and there were many of those in the script. Although he had his own working prop phones, the Special Effects Department supplied the multi-line key phones used in All the President’s Men. Webb provided a phone tap to record the phoneline conversations on a separate track from the on-camera dialog. He would supply an audio feed to actors brought in just for their off-screen dialog. Because everyone heard everyone else, either through the phones or via a specially provided feed from the mixing panel, overlaps were possible and could be recorded naturally. It was expensive because of the need to bring in actors who didn’t appear on screen but freedom from the pace-killing process of having lines read by a script supervisor allowed the filming to fly and yielded more natural performances.

When we rehearsed it, it went like lightening. And when we got through, Bob [Redford] said, Holy cow! … He was shocked at how fast it went and that’s how we did the scene.

It’s not often that the Mixer gets a chance to dabble in how the scene plays.

All the President’s Men was more tightly scripted and allowed a more normal recording technique than the Altman pictures. It came at a good time:

I remember going into an interview one time and I said, “I’ve done this Altman this and that.” And the guy looks at me and says, “OK. What else have you done besides that?” And I didn’t have anything so I was thinking to myself, it’s better to work around; it’s better to do different formats and utilize them when you need them.

Chris McLaughlin was his Boom Operator on the film but the newsroom scenes presented particular challenges. The Washington Post set was gigantic, consuming two linked stages, and lit naturalistically from overhead fluorescent lights. Fortunately, due to the heat they generated, the ballasts for all those lights were mounted in a shed outside the stage so there wasn’t a serious problem with hum. Director of Photography Gordon Willis favored up-angle shots that showed all the lights in the ceiling. When Jim Webb asked if it would be OK to boom, Willis held out his hand, casting multiple soft shadows and said, “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t make any shadows on my set.” “That was the end of that conversation,” says Webb. Chris did manage to boom the picture using primarily a Sennheiser MKH 815 from below, flitting in and out of the performer’s legs.

According to Chris McLaughlin, Webb entrusted the microphone selection to his Boom Operators. But the big Sennheiser was clearly a favorite. He describes using one on The Long Riders. The Keach brothers were fitted with wireless mikes when Jim Webb learned that they intended to ride into the Chattahoochee River at the conclusion of the dialog. Concerned about immersing the radio packs in the river, Webb resolved to boom the scene. Chris McLaughlin thought that he could capture the dialog with a Sennheiser 815 off a 10-foot ladder. He turned the mike back for maximum rejection of the sound of the river and they accomplished the shot. At the end, the Keach brothers did ride into the river and Webb didn’t lose any mikes. “So I have a lot of respect for the 815,” he said, “it got me through a lot of tough places.”

It’s key to an understanding of technique that there was no agenda, no rules about how each scene needed to be recorded. Jim Webb approached each project with an eye to achieving the Director’s vision and capturing the elements needed for the picture as a whole. Duke Marsh says: “I think with Jim it was, if I’m [Post] mixing this thing, or I’m going to do the Post work on it, what do I want to hear?”

And Jim himself says, “You just gotta do what you gotta do, you know. And I never worried, pretty much at all, about what people thought about what I was doing. If I saw a way to do it and it felt right, that’s what I was going to do.”

Each project presented its own set of challenges to test his skills and preparation.Noises Off presented a particularly complex situation. Originally a stage play, it concerns an acting company rehearsing and presenting a play on an elaborate set. Come opening night, everything goes awry, cues are missed, props misplaced, and the comic errors pile one atop the other. The two-story set mirrored the set that would be on stage. To accommodate the perspective of the Stage Manager, a key character, the entire set was built ten feet above the sound studio floor, complicating any work from the stage. Peter Bogdanovich, the Director, intended to shoot the entire film using a Louma crane that had the ability to swoop in on individual performers, further complicating efforts to capture the audio with a boom microphone. Moreover, the script took the actors up and down stairs and through doors at a frenetic pace.

The actors hoped to avoid using radio mikes, in part because there was often little costume to conceal them. But they needn’t have worried as the pace and frequent costume changes made that an inconvenient choice.

The original plan was to distribute plant microphones throughout the set and go from mike to mike as the action required. After a rehearsal, Webb said, “Guys, I don’t know.”

McLaughlin thought he could capture the dialog using Fisher booms and had a plan for how to accomplish it. They would use two of the big Fisher booms and, to get them high enough to work the elevated set, they would replace the regular bases with purpose-built scaffolds and mount the booms to the top rails of the scaffolding. Wheels fitted to the scaffolding allowed moving the booms into position as needed.

Jim Webb was open to the idea and brought in Fisher booms with 29-foot arms fitted with Neumann KMH 82i microphones. Randy Johnson joined Chris to operate the second Fisher and Duke Marsh was brought in to work from the greenbeds with a fishpole to catch anything that fell between them. After hearing a rehearsal, Jim Webb said, “This is the way to go. Pull those plants.” They did use a few of the plants to pick up dialog occurring well upstage, under the set overhangs where the booms couldn’t penetrate, but using the big Fisher booms simplified the plan considerably. The plan still demanded considerable mixing skill to blend the two main booms, the fishpole operated by Duke and the occasional plant mike, but there was logic to the operation and the team successfully recorded all the dialog.

Other films presented challenges of their own. The Bette Midler films, The Rose and For the Boys, each presented playback challenges because of the large audiences or the complex shots envisioned by Mark Rydell, the Director. Webb worked with Re-recording Mixer Robert Schaper on For the Boys to build modern elements into period microphones so they might accomplish live-records at the highest quality levels. Robert Schaper recalls:

We ended up stealing vocals off of those mikes in the playback situations. One of Bette’s songs to her husband, when she is reunited with her husband, had a very silky, lovely, studio playback [of] “I’m Going to Love You Come Rain or Come Shine.” And she had a very silky rendition of that. [But] it didn’t match her acting performance at all because she was crying, overwhelmed with seeing her husband that she hadn’t seen in months and she was very worried about it and everything else. And we had planted … a Shure 55 with a rebuilt Shure capsule in it. Even with playback coming at her, the isolation was good enough on her actual live vocal—and she always actually sings all of her lip syncs. And she performed the heck out of the song … I ended up compiling all of that and using her live vocal—rather than the pre-record … from the plant that we had out there … and it turned out to be a really great acting performance.

CREW RELATIONS

“ He left a lot of it to the boom man. He walked on and said the boom man was the money-man, the boom man, he believed, controlled the set. ”
–Duke Marsh

“ He put great trust and faith in his Boom Operator. It was a collaborative effort. ”
–Chris McLaughlin

Over the course of a career, every Sound Mixer works with many Boom Operators, Utility Technicians, and Playback Operators. All who worked with Jim Webb praise his skills, his concentration, his commitment both to the project and his crew. A few brief stories from Duke Marsh illustrate:

[From Beaches] I would go and grab the snakes at wrap and he comes up behind me with gloves on and he said, “No, I do that.” “But I’m the cable guy; that’s a cable.” And, instantly we were buddies. And he’d go, “But, Duke, you gotta understand, those snakes are for me so I can work off the truck.” And in my whole career with him, in the rain, in the mud, in the snow, he’d always come off that truck. And there were days when I would say, “But you’re the Mixer.” “Well, you got other stuff to do. Go do that, come back, give me a hand.” That was Jim. He would always back his crew.

And then, in 2001 when he was receiving the CAS Lifetime Achievement Award:

I get a phone call and Jim says, “I want you to come. You’ll be at my table.” Well, he invited Doug Vaughn and Chris McLaughlin. [He delivered a speech accepting the award] then he says, “Those three guys at that table are responsible for a lot of this in my career. If it wasn’t for the boom man, putting that mike in the right spot, I wouldn’t be here.” And he had us stand up and we got an ovation. And I’m thinking, how many mixers pay attention to the guy that’s out front?

AWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

In addition to the CAS Award, Jim Webb won the Academy Award for All the President’s Men in 1977 and the BAFTA Award for Nashville in 1976. He received one other Oscar nomination and three additional BAFTA nominations.

Nashville and All the President’s Men are each featured in both the Criterion Collection and the Smithsonian List. While Robert Altman and Alan Pakula, respectively, are recognized for their vision, Jim Webb shares in the accomplishment through his skill and inventiveness in facilitating that vision.

It’s also instructive to note the Producers and Directors he’s worked with multiple times. The list of three or more film collaborators includes Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Garry Marshall, Walter Hill, Bette Midler, and Paul Mazursky. Mark Rydell is one of several directors who employed him twice.

For each of these directors, Jim Webb contributed a sense of the role of sound as part of the whole and adjusted his technique to meet the needs of each particular project and the vision of that particular filmmaker. In talking with him, it is apparent that he has taken great pleasure in the process.

Jim Webb: “Good production sound has production value! Don’t give up. Be consistent and do the best you can.”

 

Mic’ing the Instruments

In the course of interviewing for this profile, Jim Webb shared many great stories that didn’t fit neatly into the narrative. This is one of the stories rescued from the trim bin.

In California Split, it started there and at the end of the scene there was going to be—and I found out this about two minutes before we were going to shoot it— there was a piano with tacked hammers in the bar and there was a lady that would play the piano and sing. Elliott Gould was going to be sitting there and they were going to talk a bit while she was playing the piano—and eventually they were going to sing “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

And I said, oh my God, it would be nice to know about this a little bit earlier. So I ran back and the only things I had around in those days were the old ECM-50s which were some of the first electrets from Sony. And I had a bunch of those. So I ran over to the piano, raised the lid and put one taped to the cross bar pointed down and the other one pointed up to the top end. I connected cables from the mixing panel, closed the lid, put a radio on each performer, ran back, turned the equalization all the way up – all I had – and prayed. So I laid down four tracks and it worked pretty well. In fact, they couldn’t duplicate it.

The scene didn’t really make the film but the song is in there, at the end, over the credits.

Anyway, they discovered that I could do that. So, in the smaller scenes in Nashville, where there were just the two gals singing in a place and the piano and whatever, I would do that mike, if it was an old upright, I would stick a couple of mikes in there … and as long as I hadn’t filled up the eight tracks, I could do that.

Well, they decided that I had so much dialog going on that I couldn’t cover all the music too; I just didn’t have enough tracks. So, they hired a guy named Johnny Rosen to come in and they had a sixteen-track truck and they hired him to do the Opryland stuff and all that. And their mixer, I think his name was Gene Eichelberger, was shadowing me just to see what I was doing. And he saw me doing this lavalier routine and I’m thinking to myself, I can’t tell anybody in Nashville that I’m using lavaliers to mike instruments because they’re going to laugh me out of town. Next thing I know when I get to Opryland, Eichelberger is over borrowing every ECM-50 I’ve got and he’s taping them to fiddles and everything in the orchestra he can find. So, I thought, well, OK, that’s how we’re going to do this. And that’s how it all kinda went down.

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Interview Contributors

These colleagues of Jim Webb assisted in the preparation of this profile by making themselves available for interviews:

Crew Chamberlain was Webb’s Boom Operator on several films including The Milagro Beanfield War, Legal Eagles, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

James Eric knew Jim Webb from his days working the microphone bench at Location Sound. Later, he served as Utility Sound on Out to Sea.

Robert Janiger is a Sound Mixer and friend who collaborated on further development of the Ultrastereo mixer.

Harrison “Duke” Marsh worked with Jim Webb on seventeen films including Pretty Woman, For the Boys and Noises Off. He worked variously as Playback Operator, Utility Sound and Boom Operator.

Chris McLaughlin boomed twenty-one films for Jim Webb starting with California Split and continuing through Noises Off. Among others, he did Nashville, 3 Women, The Rose, The Long Riders, and Hammett.

Robert Schaper was Supervising Music Engineer on For the Boys.

Mark Ulano is an award-winning Sound Mixer who considers Jim Webb a mentor.