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MillimeterWartime Ambience
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley
Complex sound for a complicated era in Charlie Wilson's War.
Because much of Charlie Wilson's War takes place in Afghanistan, the sound team had to be mindful of filling walla tracks with the right languages. Supervising Sound Editor Ron Bochar also added subtle desert-air tones to the tracks. All Photos: Francois Duhamel. Copyright: © 2007 Universal Studio.
There's a lot more to the audio for Charlie Wilson's War than meets the ear. The Mike Nichols-directed film about America's first experience with Afghanistan was penned by Aaron Sorkin, whose rapid-fire dialogue style, honed on his television hit The West Wing, is reprised — and then some — in the film. Combine that with multiple sources of production dialogue and reams of sound effects and sound design, and you get an audio backstory almost as complicated as the politics the movie portrays.
“They used a lot of lavalier microphones on the production audio, as well as boom microphones,” says Lee Dichter, lead rerecording mixer for the movie, taking a break from the stage at Sound One in New York, where both he and Nichols live. “Lavalier microphones are great at catching the dialogue clearly and cleanly, but because they're positioned about 6in. from the actor's mouth, they have a kind of unnatural quality to the way they sound — everything takes on this sort of intimate chesty quality, and that's not the way most people hear most of the time. It's a struggle to sink [the dialogue] into the ambience of the rest of the scene.”
The issue is compounded by the need to intersperse lavalier recordings with production dialogue from the boom microphones, as well as with automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) tracks that were recorded six months after principal photography ended. “There's a hot-tub scene in the film, and you know they're not using lavaliers on that, so you have to live with the sound from the boom microphones. [Location recordist Petur Hliddal] did a great job recording the production sound, but the reconciling differences between lavaliers, boom microphones, and ADR is the hardest part of mixing film dialogue,” Dichter says.
The solutions reside in adroit application of reverbs. Dichter says he likes outboard hardware, using the Lexicon M480L and the TC Electronic System 6000 processors because they are multichannel and they can automate scene changes via timecode. Ron Bochar, supervising sound editor and co-mixer on Charlie Wilson's War, says he has become fond of plug-ins for Digidesign Pro Tools, such as Digidesign ReVibe, to recreate ambiences around both dialogue and effects. He also uses elements from Waves' Renaissance Maxx bundle and the Waves C4 multiband dynamics processor plug-in for dialogue.
In fact, Dichter says, sometimes the starkness of the lavalier's sound works in their favor, allowing Bochar to establish the ambiences artificially, thus making the process of recreating them when lines have to be cobbled together that much easier. And Dichter says that the lavalier microphones are well suited to Sorkin's snappy dialogue, noting that the film benefits from the sense of immediacy their sound conveys, as well as the fact that script rewrites even deep into postproduction are now almost a given. “A character's name was changed from ‘Howard Hart’ to ‘Harold Holt’ after the scenes had been shot,” Dichter says. “It happens in several places in the movie, and we would take the looped word and do some major EQ changes to make the tone fit or pitch-shift it to get the inflections to match. You really can get down to a fine level of detail.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.