SoundWorks Collection Interviews the Sound Team Behind the Disney Film ‘Maleficent’ http://t.co/5AKf8zl0u0
— Laughing Squid (@LaughingSquid) June 17, 2014
Showing posts with label sound editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sound editing. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Friday, June 6, 2014
Designing the Sound on Disney's 'Maleficent' http://t.co/FvuRIfGjPj
— wolfcrow (@wolfkrow) June 6, 2014
Friday, June 1, 2012
60 Mins. Replay
The original airing netted them one of their largest audiences, which made a a replay -- with an updated post-engagement intro by Bob Simon -- an attractive late-season choice. The show still won its slot handily and its ratings were significantly higher than the week before and the week after. So when it's time to promote Maleficent, I would imagine the shows will be lining up trying to score a similar primetime interview.
LINK to video with updated intro
Week before, May 30
Week after, June 10
Broadcast primetime ratings for Sunday, June 10, 2012:
Replay of Taylor Swift interview
Final broadcast primetime ratings for Sunday, June 17, 2012:
Q&A
Listen Up: The Art of Sound Editing Blockbuster Action Movies
By TIM NEWCOMB | @tdnewcomb | June 4, 2012 |
You have never seen Becky Sullivan in a movie. You haven’t even heard her voice. But you’ve certainly listened to her work as a lead sound and automated dialogue replacement (ADR) editor on dozens upon dozens of blockbusters in her 25-year career, including Field of Dreams, The Fugitive, Batman Forever and L.A. Confidential. She was Angelina Jolie’s first choice to work on her directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey. She did all the superhero dialogue in the record-breaking Avengers. And she lent a hand in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, in theaters Friday. Sound—or more often, lack of sound—has played an important role in the Alien franchise. Sullivan recently stepped off the G.I. Joe: Retaliation set in Hollywood long enough to chat with TIME about battling the elements, creating alien dialogue and the sound of silence.
What is the role of an ADR editor?
I listen to all the dialogue tracks, everything shot in production on the set and on location, and evaluate the sound to see if it is good or not. I specialize in action films—and in action films there is generator noise, wind machines, gunfire and helicopters. When you are live on a set, the microphone is on, picking up everything around the actor. Most of the time the voices marry to a helicopter noise or a blank gunshot, so then we have to replace it.
(VIDEO: Prometheus is Totally an Alien Prequel)
How much do you change?
I go through the movie—all 2,000 lines—and write down every line of dialogue that needs to be replaced and give reasons why. I talk to the director about it and discuss sound problems and different ideas and see if they want to do performance changes. We have revoiced entire performances before. Sometimes I get a director’s thoughts and work with writers to get them to rewrite story points.
How do the rerecords work?
We get the actor in for looping and go onto an ADR stage specially made for what we do. There’s a recordist and a mixer in there and we record the line while we see the movie played back to us. The actor is watching himself and listening to the set through headphones. If he yells ‘hey guys’ at 14 feet [of film], then he does it on the ADR stage. We do take after take for every line to get the right performance, right tone, right volume and right timing. I digitally cut every word into their mouth to make sure it doesn’t look like talking Kung Fu.
How does sound work differ for each film genre?
The action genre is more challenging because you have a lot to do. I’m on G.I. Joe here [in Hollywood] and we’ve done a lot of looping due to the wind on set. When you are out shooting guns, the dialogue often gets ruined. I have done several comedies where the subtleness of a line hitting the right tone becomes important. I’ve also done comedies where they want to rewrite lines to make them funnier or add story points.
How big a role do you play?
The cool thing is I get to direct actors. Certain directors even let me on the set with the actors without them. I hit it off with the actors and it is really fun—that is my specialty. Some actors are really good at it and some love the loop because they know they can subtly change a performance, a word or a feeling. The better the actor is—the more high profile an actor—the better they are at coming in and doing magic. It is part of their craft. I can tell the new actors right away because they aren’t used to doing it.
Can you talk about working with Angelina Jolie?
She was fantastic. She was new to the post-production part of a movie, but was so willing to learn and understand the craft. We shot two films at the same time with two different languages. First we shot in English and then would switch and do it in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language. It was very challenging cutting dialogue and looping actors in that language.
(Q&A: Legendary Creature Creator Rick Baker Talks Aliens)
How do you deal with mixing together audio where some creatures don’t exist in the real world, like the aliens in Avengers?
Luckily, I am a fan of Marvel’s films, so I knew all the characters and each back story. Many times I will record actors to voice aliens or creatures. You get the organic human sound from the actor and then process the voice using different digital sound design techniques. You can design the voice a million different ways.
How close of an eye do you keep on other big-name films?
I am always going to see films, watching and listening to other people’s work. The sound community in Hollywood is very small; we all know each other and respect the creative talent that each person brings to a project. There is always more to hear and things to learn.
What was your role in Prometheus?
I cut the ADR breaths that each actor recorded on the ADR stage. Funny, right? But even the sound of the characters’ breaths is important to sell the story and put the filmgoer in the scene.
Read more:
60 Minutes @60Minutes
60 Minutes @60Minutes
60 Minutes SpaceX; the murder of a neo-Nazi leader; Angelina Jolie. (N) 7 p.m. KCBS
LINK to video with updated intro
CBS Wins First Week of Summer in Viewers
60 Minutes was first in households (6.3/112), viewers (9.77m), adults 25-54 (2.2/07) and adults 18-49 (1.4/05).Sunday Final Ratings
Week before, May 30
| Time | Net | Show | 18-49 Rating/Share | Viewers (Millions) |
| 7:00 | FOX | NASCAR (7-10PM) | 2.1/9 | 7.41 |
| ABC | America's Funniest Home Videos - R | 0.8/3 | 3.50 | |
| CBS | 60 Minutes - R | 0.7/3 | 6.22 | |
| NBC | Dateline - R | 0.6/3 | 3.50 |
Week after, June 10
Broadcast primetime ratings for Sunday, June 10, 2012:
| Time | Net | Show | 18-49 Rating/Share | Viewers (Millions) |
| 7:00 | NBC | Dateline (7-9PM) | 1.2/4 | 5.50 |
| CBS | 60 Minutes | 1.1/4 | 7.88 | |
| ABC | America's Funniest Home Videos - R | 1.1/4 | 4.88 | |
| FOX | American Dad - R | 0.9/3 | 2.05 |
Replay of Taylor Swift interview
Final broadcast primetime ratings for Sunday, June 17, 2012:
| Time | Net | Show | 18-49 Rating | 18-49 Share | Viewers Live+SD (million) |
| 7:00 PM | NBC | 2012 US Open Golf Championship 7-10:31p | 2.2 | 7 | 9.630 |
| ABC | Jimmy Kimmel NBA Special | 0.9 | 4 | 2.730 | |
| CBS | 60 Minutes | 1.0 | 4 | 7.510 | |
| FOX | American Dad -R | 0.8 | 3 | 1.700 |
Q&A
Listen Up: The Art of Sound Editing Blockbuster Action Movies
By TIM NEWCOMB | @tdnewcomb | June 4, 2012 |
You have never seen Becky Sullivan in a movie. You haven’t even heard her voice. But you’ve certainly listened to her work as a lead sound and automated dialogue replacement (ADR) editor on dozens upon dozens of blockbusters in her 25-year career, including Field of Dreams, The Fugitive, Batman Forever and L.A. Confidential. She was Angelina Jolie’s first choice to work on her directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey. She did all the superhero dialogue in the record-breaking Avengers. And she lent a hand in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, in theaters Friday. Sound—or more often, lack of sound—has played an important role in the Alien franchise. Sullivan recently stepped off the G.I. Joe: Retaliation set in Hollywood long enough to chat with TIME about battling the elements, creating alien dialogue and the sound of silence.
What is the role of an ADR editor?
I listen to all the dialogue tracks, everything shot in production on the set and on location, and evaluate the sound to see if it is good or not. I specialize in action films—and in action films there is generator noise, wind machines, gunfire and helicopters. When you are live on a set, the microphone is on, picking up everything around the actor. Most of the time the voices marry to a helicopter noise or a blank gunshot, so then we have to replace it.
(VIDEO: Prometheus is Totally an Alien Prequel)
How much do you change?
I go through the movie—all 2,000 lines—and write down every line of dialogue that needs to be replaced and give reasons why. I talk to the director about it and discuss sound problems and different ideas and see if they want to do performance changes. We have revoiced entire performances before. Sometimes I get a director’s thoughts and work with writers to get them to rewrite story points.
How do the rerecords work?
We get the actor in for looping and go onto an ADR stage specially made for what we do. There’s a recordist and a mixer in there and we record the line while we see the movie played back to us. The actor is watching himself and listening to the set through headphones. If he yells ‘hey guys’ at 14 feet [of film], then he does it on the ADR stage. We do take after take for every line to get the right performance, right tone, right volume and right timing. I digitally cut every word into their mouth to make sure it doesn’t look like talking Kung Fu.
How does sound work differ for each film genre?
The action genre is more challenging because you have a lot to do. I’m on G.I. Joe here [in Hollywood] and we’ve done a lot of looping due to the wind on set. When you are out shooting guns, the dialogue often gets ruined. I have done several comedies where the subtleness of a line hitting the right tone becomes important. I’ve also done comedies where they want to rewrite lines to make them funnier or add story points.
How big a role do you play?
The cool thing is I get to direct actors. Certain directors even let me on the set with the actors without them. I hit it off with the actors and it is really fun—that is my specialty. Some actors are really good at it and some love the loop because they know they can subtly change a performance, a word or a feeling. The better the actor is—the more high profile an actor—the better they are at coming in and doing magic. It is part of their craft. I can tell the new actors right away because they aren’t used to doing it.
Can you talk about working with Angelina Jolie?
She was fantastic. She was new to the post-production part of a movie, but was so willing to learn and understand the craft. We shot two films at the same time with two different languages. First we shot in English and then would switch and do it in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language. It was very challenging cutting dialogue and looping actors in that language.
(Q&A: Legendary Creature Creator Rick Baker Talks Aliens)
How do you deal with mixing together audio where some creatures don’t exist in the real world, like the aliens in Avengers?
Luckily, I am a fan of Marvel’s films, so I knew all the characters and each back story. Many times I will record actors to voice aliens or creatures. You get the organic human sound from the actor and then process the voice using different digital sound design techniques. You can design the voice a million different ways.
How close of an eye do you keep on other big-name films?
I am always going to see films, watching and listening to other people’s work. The sound community in Hollywood is very small; we all know each other and respect the creative talent that each person brings to a project. There is always more to hear and things to learn.
What was your role in Prometheus?
I cut the ADR breaths that each actor recorded on the ADR stage. Funny, right? But even the sound of the characters’ breaths is important to sell the story and put the filmgoer in the scene.
Read more:
60 Minutes
Sunday: A director in Hungary, an actress in Hollywood: an interview with Angelina Jolie. Preview: cbsn.ws/KNgAv8 #60Minutes
SUNDAY: Angelina Jolie tells Bob Simon she feels lucky to have escaped her dark past. http://cbsn.ws/KNgAv8
60 Minutes
Sunday: Angelina Jolie says her best work experience has been behind the camera, not in front of it. http://cbsn.ws/KNgAv8 #60Minutes
Thursday, January 19, 2012
NAACP Image and Golden Reel Awards and Ewan McGregor
My my, Angelina Jolie is quite the director! IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY is a strong debut. Review soon!
The NAACP awards show is being covered in prime time and will give the film valuable additional visibility so I would imagine Angelina would want to fly back from Europe to attend. At this point, B&H needs all the help it can get to turn profitable as it is struggling even just to match The Whistleblower's already anemic $1.1M domestic take. The two films share a similar geographic focus and both are very heavy dramas, but Whistleblower has a big-name cast led by Rachel Weisz -- who is very good even though the film itself is a heavy-handed slog -- and it is in English. Blood & Honey's biggest hope may be Europe and Russia given that the events happened in their backyard.
February is shaping up to be an exceptionally heavy travel month but then they do have the benefit of private charter. She may not have anticipated that they would be going to so many awards shows when she scheduled her European premieres.
So it looks like London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Belgrade - Sarajevo, and perhaps some other stops before it all ends at the Oscars in Los Angeles on Feb. 26.
2012 NAACP Image Award Film And TV Nominations
Nominees for THE 43RD NAACP IMAGE AWARDS were announced today. Winners will be announced during a live telecast on NBC Friday, February 17 beginning at 8 PM. The NAACP Image Awards celebrates the accomplishments of people of color in the fields of film, television, music and literature and honors individuals or groups who promote social justice through creative endeavors. Here are the nominees in films and television:
MOTION PICTURE
Outstanding Motion Picture
“Jumping the Broom” (TriStar Pictures) “Pariah” (Focus Features)
“The First Grader” (National Geographic Entertainment)
“The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
“Tower Heist” (Universal Pictures)
Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture
Eddie Murphy – “Tower Heist”(Universal Pictures)
Laurence Fishburne – “Contagion”(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Laz Alonso – “Jumping the Broom”(TriStar Pictures)
Oliver Litondo – “The First Grader” (National Geographic Entertainment)
Vin Diesel – “Fast Five” (Universal Pictures)
Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture
Adepero Oduye – “Pariah” (Focus Features)
Emma Stone – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
Paula Patton – “Jumping the Broom” (TriStar Pictures)
Viola Davis – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
Zoë Saldana – “Colombiana” (TriStar Pictures)
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture
Anthony Mackie – “The Adjustment Bureau” (Universal Pictures)
Charles Parnell – “Pariah” (Focus Features)
Don Cheadle – “The Guard” (Sony Pictures Classics)
Jeffrey Wright – “The Ides of March” (Columbia Pictures)
Mike Epps – “Jumping the Broom” (TriStar Pictures)
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture
Bryce Dallas Howard – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
Cicely Tyson – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
Kim Wayans – “Pariah” (Focus Features)
Maya Rudolph – “Bridesmaids” (Universal Pictures)
Octavia Spencer – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
Outstanding Independent Motion Picture
“I Will Follow” (AFFRM)
“Kinyarwanda” (AFFRM)
“MOOZ-lum” (AFFRM)
“Pariah” (Focus Features)
“The First Grader” (National Geographic Entertainment)
Outstanding Foreign Motion Picture
“A Separation” (Sony Pictures Classics)
“Attack the Block” (Screen Gems)
“In the Land of Blood and Honey” (FilmDistrict)
“Le Havre” (Janus Films)
“Life, Above All” (Sony Pictures Classics)
DOCUMENTARY
Outstanding Documentary – (Theatrical or Television)
“Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest” (Sony Pictures Classics)
“Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey” (Submarine Deluxe)
“Sing Your Song” (HBO Documentary Films)
“The Rescuers” (Michael King Productions)
“Thunder Soul” (Roadside Attractions)
WRITING
Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series
Arthur Harris – “Reed Between the Lines” – Let’s Talk About Ms. Helen’s Son Part 1 (BET)
Prentice Penny – “Happy Endings” – The Girl with the David Tattoo (ABC)
Salim Akil, Mara Brock Akil – “The Game” – Parachutes….Beach Chairs (BET)
Vali Chandrasekaran – “30 Rock” – It’s Never Too Late For Now (NBC)
Vince Cheung, Ben Montanio – “Wizards of Waverly Place” – Wizards vs. Angels (Disney Channel)
Outstanding Writing in a Dramatic Series
Cheo Hodari Coker – “SouthLAnd” – Punching Water (TNT)
Janine Sherman Barrois – “Criminal Minds” – The Bittersweet Science (CBS)
Lolis Eric Elie – “Treme” – Santa Claus, Do You Ever Get the Blues? (HBO)
Pam Veasey – “Ringer” – Oh Gawd, There’s Two of Them? (The CW)
Zoanne Clack – “Grey’s Anatomy” – I Will Survive (ABC)
Outstanding Writing in a Motion Picture – (Theatrical or Television)
Alrick Brown – “Kinyarwanda” (AFFRM)
Ann Peacock – “The First Grader” (National Geographic Entertainment)
Dee Rees – “Pariah” (Focus Features)
Elizabeth Hunter, Arlene Gibbs – “Jumping the Broom” (TriStar Pictures)
Tate Taylor – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
DIRECTING
Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series
Jay Chandrasekhar – “Happy Endings” – The Girl with the David Tattoo (ABC)
Kevin Hooks – “Drop Dead Diva” – Mother’s Day (Lifetime)
Leonard R. Garner Jr. – “Rules of Engagement” – The Set Up (CBS)
Miguel Arteta – “How to Make It in America” – Mofongo (HBO)
Salim Akil – “The Game” – Parachutes/Beach Chairs (BET)
Outstanding Directing in a Dramatic Series
Ernest Dickerson – “Treme” – Do Watcha Wanna (HBO)
Ken Whittingham – “Parenthood” – Opening Night (NBC)
Kevin Sullivan – “NCIS” – Tell-All (CBS)
Paris Barclay – “Sons of Anarchy” – Out (FX Network)
Seith Mann – “Dexter” – Get Gellar (Showtime)
Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture – (Theatrical or Television)
Alrick Brown – “Kinyarwanda” (AFFRM)
Angelina Jolie – “In the Land of Blood and Honey” (FilmDistrict)
Dee Rees – “Pariah” (Focus Features)
Salim Akil – “Jumping the Broom” (TriStar Pictures)
Tate Taylor – “The Help” (DreamWorks Pictures/Participant Media/Touchstone Pictures)
Sound Editors Give ‘Super 8′, ‘War Horse’, ‘Rise Of Planet Of Apes’ Most Nominations
| Friday January 20, 2012 @ 2:02am PSTThe Motion Picture Sound Editors today announced their 2012 MPSE Golden Reel Award nominations which acknowledge the year’s best work in sound and music editing in motion pictures and television in various categories: Dialogue & ADR, Effects & Foley, and Music. ”The significance of sound should not be underestimated,” said MPSE president Bobbi Banks. “The emotional intimacy of the sound experience is amplified by giving the audience the perception that they are encountering the same state of cognitive consciousness as the characters.” The MPSE is honoring producer Gale Anne Hurd for the 2012 MPSE Filmmaker Award and sound designer/editor George Watters II for the MPSE Career Achievement Award. The 59th Golden Reel Awards will be held February 19th at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA. Here are the 2012 nominations:
FEATURE FILMS CATEGORY
Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue, and ADR in an Animation Feature Film
The Adventures of Tintin
Cars 2
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango
Rio
The Smurfs
Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue, ADR and Music in a Feature Documentary
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey
Cave of the Forgotten Dreams
George Harrison: Living in the Material World
Lemmy
Pearl Jam Twenty
Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR in a Feature Foreign Language Film
1920. The World’s Most Important Battle
Circumstance
Tropa de Elite 2 (Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within)
The Flowers of War
In the Land of Blood and Honey
Sarah’s Key
The Skin I Live In
Friday, January 6, 2012
Toronto Star: Spending and Having control, Sound
Angelina Jolie: Taking a new role in the director’s chair with In the Land of Blood and Honey
But here’s Jolie on the phone, after several last-minute cancellations. It’s the end of the day and she sounds tired, but it demonstrates how passionate the 36-year-old actress is about the film she both wrote and directed about a Bosnian Serb soldier Danijel (Goran Kostic) and Muslim artist Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) who find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict in the Bosnian War in 1992. It opens here Jan. 20.
She is doggedly promoting In the Land of Blood and Honey not because she’s fulfilling a studio-mandated publicity contract, but because it means so much to her that people see it and learn from the experience.
“I never considered myself a writer or anything,” said Jolie, a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador who has been on field missions around the world, including Bosnia. She wrote the story in her journal as a kind of “homework” to learn about the area.
“I’d been travelling over two years going to and from conferences, seeing how society is damaged by war and lack of intervention, how people can cave to just how society is broken,” Jolie said. “I write sometimes in journals. I just decided to do it in different form, but it was going to be private. This would be good for me to have an excuse to finally understand what happened during the Bosnian war because I was 17 when it happened.”
The script explores the violence of war from women’s perspective, following Ajla and other captives in a female prison, most of whom are sexually brutalized by their captors. One of the guards, Danijel, was in a relationship with Ajla before the conflict and now she has been imprisoned and they must live in a new reality that changes everything between them.
Jolie’s spouse, Brad Pitt, was the one who convinced her to take her writing public.
“Brad had read it one day and said, ‘It’s kind of good,’” said Jolie, adding she thought the idea of making a movie from the story was crazy.
“I’m not a writer, but let’s send it to people from all sides of the conflict without my name on it and get a response,” Jolie suggested. “And if by some miracle, people are willing to do it and we can pull together people from this region and get them to help us to understand the (nature) of this conflict, it would be an extraordinary life lesson and I’d be compelled to do it.”
Funding was problematic, so Jolie and Pitt put up a large chunk of money toward the rumoured $13 million budget. She explained doing so and signing on as director gave her control of the movie and allowed her to use actors from the former Yugoslavia who had lived through the war, as well as being able to shoot two versions of the film: in English and in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BSN).
“I was happy to be that person only because I wanted to spend my money that way and I believed in the story with this kind of tone,” Jolie explained.
The film has faced controversy. Early on, there were erroneous reports it was the story of a Muslim woman who falls in love with her Serb rapist in a prison camp, which almost killed the project when female victims of war protested. More recently, writer James J. Braddock accused Jolie of plagiarizing his 2007 book The Soul Shattering. She has denied the claim.
“Like I said, it happens a lot,” Jolie said patiently, referring to claims of plagiarism, the weariness about having to answer the question for the hundredth time barely masked. “People like to report it.”
Jolie steers the conversation back to the movie. She talks about the difficulty of working in another language when shooting in BSN. “It was really hard. But they were so prepared. I’d never known actors that prepared.” She also comes back repeatedly to the sense of stewardship she felt over the project. It was more than just a movie for her actors and Jolie respected that, feeling the pressure to get it right as she moved through the final editing process.
“You hope that you make the movie that everybody will have put their faith in,” she said.
“For them, it’s not just a film. For them, it’s something personal, it’s something at home for them; they’re still living it.” Jolie added. “There’s still hate, there’s still so much to recover from. There’s still so many fresh wounds in (their) own home.”
Jolie is less concerned with the commercial potential for the film than she is with its ability to educate and inform. And she’s not convinced she’ll direct again unless the script has meaning for her and a message for viewers.
“It’s all so new for me. I loved the experience, but I don’t know,” she said. “I think (if) I’m driven that will mean something to me, and more than just the craft of filmmaking. So that if that shows itself, then I might try. But right now, I still don’t understand how I ended up doing one,” she concluded with a chuckle.
I can’t resist observing that Jolie must find it refreshing to talk to a reporter for half an hour and not once be asked about Pitt, her kids, marriage or pregnancy.
“I’m just so used to it now. I find it all fine, but I’m very grateful that (I’m being asked about) what I’ve done,” Jolie allowed, adding she has spoken not just with movie beat writers, but also with reporters who covered the war in Bosnia who shared their stories with her. “I’ve had the most in-depth conversations with journalists that I’ve ever had in my career.
“It’s nice to have something else to focus on that we all know is more important than all these other things.”
Jan 6, 2012 7:19 PM
Post-production sound company Soundelux in Hollywood, Calif., reports that Supervising Sound Editor Becky Sullivan faced an unusual task in creating sound for In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie’s powerful, new film about the Bosnian War. Jolie produced two versions of the film, one in English, and the other in Serbo-Croatian; as a result, Sullivan and her crew needed to produce two complete soundtracks, one in a language that none of them spoke.
Marking Jolie’s debut as a writer and director, In the Land of Blood and Honey centers on a Bosnian Muslim woman and a Serbian soldier who fall in love even as both are swept up in the region’s terrible conflicts.
The film’s cast, which includes Zana Marjanovic, Goran Kostic and Rade Serbedzija, is entirely made up of local actors, many of whom lived through the war as youths. The same actors appear in both versions of the film, which were shot simultaneously.
Sullivan was presented with two edited versions of the film and two sets of dialog tracks. As neither she, nor any of the members of her crew, spoke Serbo-Croatian, a translator was brought in to help them with the language. “In the Serbo-Croatian version, we wanted to be sure that the actors were speaking the language correctly,” she explains, “because within that language, there are many dialects that relate to different ethnicities.”
Editing dialog for the English-language version film presented a different sort of challenge. “The actors were speaking in what was their second language,” Sullivan says. “And so, we had accent issues and interpretation issues.”
“We did a lot of ADR recording,” she adds. “We wanted to ensure that the accents weren’t too thick so that English-language audiences could understand their words.”
Goran Kostic (left) and Rade Serbedzija in a scene from In the Land of Blood and Honey.
Along with delivering clean dialog tracks, Sullivan and her crew (including Dialog Editor Glynna Grimala and Sound Effects Editor Ben Wilkins) produced sound effects to help tell the story. Given the grim nature of the film, and the fact that it is based on real events, the sound team aimed for realism. All of the gun and artillery sounds, for example, are accurate with regard to the weaponry used in the war. “It’s almost like a documentary,” Sullivan notes. “It’s definitely not a slick, Hollywood sound job.”
At certain points, however, the sound departs from strict realism in order to accent dramatic points. As an example, Sullivan cites a scene in which a group of Bosnian women are used as human shields by Serbian soldiers. “The women are distraught; they’ve almost lost their minds,” Sullivan explains. “And so, there, we went into something that is unrealistic, surreal—it’s all gunfire and laughing. They’ve ‘checked out’ mentally, because it’s so devastating.”
Sullivan also used sound to help capture the war’s pervasive atmosphere of fear. A number of scenes, for example, occur in a small room where Ajla, the film’s heroine, is confined by Serbian troops. “She is being held by the Serbian lieutenant, who’s in love with her, and so she is safe…or is she?” Sullivan says. “People are being raped and killed, and so there is a sense that she could be taken out at any minute. It’s a scary, insecure place.
“We kept the tones cold and the threat around her high by having the shoes of a guard walk by her door and by placing voices outside her window. Later, when the threat recedes, the tones in the room grow warmer and the exterior threats become less distinct.”
That sort of subtlety and restraint is typical of the film’s sound; the intensity of the subject matter required little augmentation. “We didn’t overdo it,” Sullivan notes. “We kept it sparse. It’s cold, brutal and real.”
Visit Soundelux at www.soundelux.com.
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