We’ve been thinking about writing this blog post for about a year now, and the recent television debut on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network seems as good a time as any to get around to it.
First, if you have not seen this movie and you care at all about justice, please do yourself a favor: seek it out and watch it. Have tissues handy. It doesn’t really matter whether you bring your sense of social justice with you, because it’ll show up as you watch. We watched a rough cut before we started working on it, and after we’d wiped the tears from our eyes, Kat said to me “Hear Kitty has to do this movie.” Thus we did, and we’re grateful to Yoav Potash for the opportunity to help Debbie’s story get heard.
First, let me say that you should go to the official website of this movie to find out more. We’re not really going to talk about the really interesting stuff in the movie here, but they do there. For our purposes, let’s just say that a lot of the movie was filmed in a prison. You can imagine, and you’d be right, that acoustics is not a high priority in prison design. Furthermore, you can probably see how it might be difficult to get the air conditioning turned off because it’s too noisy–it’s hard enough to get your gear in and get clearance to shoot. Consequently, the lion’s share of work we did on this film was to clean up the audio recorded in these settings. We bought a few new tools for the job and used just about every dialog cleanup trick we’ve learned over the years in some way on this movie, often adding layers upon layers of noise reduction to gently remove the background noise without sacrificing the life and character of the speakers’ voices. Perhaps the most challenging scene was at a parole hearing, which sounded like this when we started:
Crime After Crime parole hearing BEFORE from Hear Kitty Studios on Vimeo.
It’s not the worst recording we’ve ever received–in fact, given the challenges of the room it’s pretty good, but those challenges were pretty great and you can easily hear the difficult task ahead of us. As though the degree of difficulty weren’t high enough, Yoav is a very new school documentarian (which is one of the things which makes this movie so very powerful) and, in this case, that means he wanted the film’s subjects to sound like new school feature film dialog. You may or may not have noticed, but dialog has gotten a lot cleaner in recent years. Part of this is the introduction of digital audio from set to theater, but that’s not all; there has also been a trend towards letting the dialog play more “naked” in recent years, in some extreme example leaving the dialog completely alone without any background sound or music to draw the ear away from the silence between words. A friend of ours was recently remarking on the different quality of that silence over the years–that he can hear the difference between a movie of the 40s and the 50s, for example, simply by listening to the quality of silence between words. To my mind, some of that is due to technology and how it has been applied and refined over the years, but some of it is also a creative choice in what additional sounds are added and what original sounds are enhanced or removed. The latest trend in dialog mixing, in my experience, is what you might call extreme digital silence between words. When used well, this leaves the words alone to have maximum impact. Yoav very much wanted to do just that, to remove any sound which might distract the audience from the power of the words spoken.
To that end, we used just about every tool in the book on this scene. It’s pretty easy to go too far with these tools, though, and to make the words themselves distracting from their meaning, so we had to use them judiciously and carefully, balancing one tools with the others so that the meaning of the scene is all the audience hears. We also broke a few “rules” of dialog restoration in the process. We think the results speak for themselves:
Crime After Crime parole hearing AFTER from Hear Kitty Studios on Vimeo.
On a side note, doing this scene in surround was both fun and deeply moving:
