AudioMedia - November 2008 - (Page 37)

C an you remember the first time you watched a Bond film? I can. It was in the Astra cinema at RAF Laarbruch in Germany at some point in the early 1970s, and I would have been about six. Hard to believe, given the age ratings on today’s movies, but I sat there in my short trousers and watched Goldfinger in all its glory: Aston Martin, giant laser, Pussy Galore and all. I might have found Disney’s Pinocchio scary, but James Bond had me enthralled. Most people, whether they’re film buffs or not, will have a Bond anecdote of some kind. To say the films are iconic is an understatement. So what’s it like to work on one? One man who knows is Production Sound Mixer Chris Munro: Quantum of Solace is the fifth Bond movie he’s worked on, carrying the responsibility for all the sound recorded during production. He ran a number of different audio teams, including the action unit that specialises in the car sequences and stunts (this is Bond, after all). His own team was responsible for the dialogue. “I started on the film in December 2007,” he said. “I did a lot of prep; scouting locations all over the world. This went on for a couple of weeks at the end of last year. We had the Director and DP with us on the recce trips. It wasn’t just to look at things from a sound perspective, but to see what preparations could be done to make the sound better when we came to shoot. My role was not to say ‘that location isn’t good for sound.’ My job was more to spot what difficulties we might find, and then work out a way round them.” You may imagine that working on a Bond movie would leave you with almost limitless resources, but that’s not the case, at least when it comes to the most precious commodity of all: time. The whole movie was turned around in less than a year, with less than four months post-production. When filming began in 2008, one of the first tasks facing Chris was the management of ambient sound. In Panama, that was a real problem. “We were in a run down area, and it was a fairly difficult location with a lot of background noise. But although these situations might be noisy, they would work well in film. So we looked at things like shooting the wide shots in one location, and going somewhere quieter to shoot the dialogue in close ups.” As well as Panama, the film was shot in the UK, Chile, Austria, and Italy. All of these provided different challenges, when it came to isolating the actors’ voices from the background noise. Chris said, “Another thing we might do, perhaps where we were working in an apartment, was to make the location better acoustically by putting in double glazing or by changing hard flooring to carpet. We looked at all these aspects to make things better for us.” O n-S et ADR This suggests that most of the location dialogue was kept in the film. “More and more directors hate ADR”, said Chris, “Particularly Marc Forster, so most of the location dialogue was kept. On Quantum of Solace we were faced with a possible actors’ strike after production, so ADR might not have been possible anyway. I’d worked on The Kite Runner with Marc, and on that movie we had no way of getting the young lead actors to the UK or USA to re-record lines, so I rigged up a portable ADR system on location in China, which Marc really liked. We adopted this process on Bond as well, but our aim was always to get as much location dialogue as possible.” The various locations threw up plenty more problems than poor acoustics. One aresa that Chris had to deal with was managing various radio frequencies. “These weren’t just for wireless mics, but for radio communication during the shoot,” he said. “In Panama it was chaos; a frequency free-for-all!” Bond is famous for his gadgets, but what equipment did Chris use on Quantum of Solace? For recording, he favours the Fostex range. “I’ve got a number of recording machines. One is a Fostex DT824 in a rack mount for when I’m in a fairly fixed position. I also use a PD606, which is a more portable version of that machine. It’s an eight track with a two track mix capability, and six isolated tracks. I put my mix on the two track and the components on the six, so my mix can be undone if need be. I also tend to use a Fostex PD204 stereo machine for sound effects recording.” “These are my key machines. The 824 is for fixed positions, while the 606 is a pick up and run piece of kit. It has an internal mixer and I can do everything in the machine with it over the shoulder.” JERRY IBBOTSON talks to Chris Munro about the challenges the sound team faced and overcame in recording dialogue for Quantum Of Solace. B O N D: O N LO C AT I O N WITH CHRIS MUNRO > AUDIO MEDIA NOVEMBER 2008 37

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AudioMedia - November 2008

AudioMedia - November 2008 Contents Recording News Post News Broadcast News Geofocus: Italy What's Up UK AES Review For the Record Studio Snapshot: Aquarium Abbey Road Plug-ins Brilliance Pack Neumann TLM67 Mercenary Audio KM-69 IZ Technology ADA Final Cut Special: Bond TC Powercore 6000 EP Productions Nagra VI Product Sampler: Location Tools Video Guide AMSR News Shure KSM9 Big Beach Boutique 4

AudioMedia - November 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.