AudioMedia - December 2008 - (Page 27) PRESENTED BY: Bringing Entertainment Alive! > want any score in the present day scenes of the film, but the directive was eventually “overruled by the thrust of the narrative and emotion,” explains Klyce. “By then, music was carrying that emotion. For the first two-thirds of the film, we did try to adhere to the initial rule on score. Then, creating contrast from present day to the past was part of the challenge in both sound design and, of course, the music.” For the period sequences, music was mainly environmental, yet all music was clearly divided into one of two realms – period music or supporting score. “When I first read the script, my biggest net was, ‘Well, there’s going to be a lot of music in this’ and David agreed,” Klyce offers. “There was no television and radio was just starting, so ‘live music’ was a sound – New Orleans jazz. Eric Roth’s script largely dictated those moments. What we found, and we all know, is that music in New Orleans is sound – it just all happens to be one sound.” Approaching The Music M ix Klyce had the opportunity to live with the original music for some time, thanks to his early involvement with the film’s Composer, Alexandre Desplat. This helped him later when his job title expanded to encompass Music Mixer, too. “Spotting the film with him along with David, and working with him intimately – starting with piano demos – helped me know it very well,” explain Klyce. “It seemed only natural that I should be the one holding the fader to control those moments; we had discussed them so closely. Having to start over with someone else [as music mixer] just seemed like it would take too long. Working with [mixers] David Parker and Michael Semanick is a musical experience in itself. When the three of us are working together, it is a great experience.” K nowing Where The M oments Are Regardless of the hats worn by Ren Klyce, he says assuredly that the job of Supervising Sound Designer is always on his mind. “I’m always trying to see the film as a whole, not a sum of its parts, but simultaneously being very aware of them,” he says, recalling the final stretch of audio work of Benjamin Button. “I know where all the special moments are in all the departments because I have been working with the editors who cut them – albeit in dialogue, Foley, ADR, or sound effects. I was also there for every moment of pre-dub. In these situations, everyone who contributes a sound, musical note, etc, wants it to be heard because there’s been a lot of effort that went into creating that sound. At the end of the day, however, something will prevail. We are fortunate that, because I was in both music and effects camps, it never became adversarial.” ∫ On ‘M ilk ing The Cow ’ Klyce terms playing with emotions via soundtrack as ‘milking the cow’, which is something that he and Fincher regularly try to avoid. However, in Benjamin Button, some amount of emotional leading via music was called for, yet it was always something approached with great care, offers Klyce. “The balance between doing too much and not having enough is the line walked in David’s films,” tells Klyce. “In the past, some have criticised David’s films for being cold, or heartless – and for good reason based on the subject matter in Se7en, Fight Club, and Panic Room: thrillertypes that he has made. We all made a marked change in terms of style while being true to whom we are as his supporting cast as a filmmaker. That was very challenging.” LO C AT I O N , LO C AT I O N , LO C AT I O N : Ren Klyce on working at Skywalker Sound: “We started off off-site. I have a studio in Sausalito, and that’s where we were; it’s fully capable, and I’ve produced a lot of work out of there. Yet I wanted to go to Skywalker for the very reason of efficiency. “At a certain point in a film of this scale, division of labour is very, very important. When you’re trying to tackle a project of this magnitude and keep it about the artistry and not about the management, it’s great to go to a facility like Skywalker. It is a well-oiled machine that is constantly modified and tweaked to be extremely efficient in delivering a mix, allowing people to work together, and getting something done as quickly as possible with the least amount of headache. When you go there, it’s all about the craft. You could probably produce what we did on a Pro Tools rig or two, but most of the focus would be on the technicality of how to do it, rather than the artistry of it. The result is affected. That’s why it is so important to have an institution like Skywalker.” D I R E C TO R D AV I D F I N C H E R : O N A U D I O F O R B e njam i n Bu t to n On working with his audio team: “I’ve worked with Ren [Klyce], Michael [Semanick], and David [Parker] for so long, it’s like, ‘Show me what you think.’ We sit down, discuss it, and that’s when we say, ‘We have to be careful because we’re losing this whole thing that we worked so hard to preserve, and it’s being glossed over by this other thing.’ You have a plan, and then you adjust that plan based on what the outcome ends up being. You have an idea of what the outcome will be, but you don’t really know. Experimentation is such a big part of finding it, whatever it is. On what Fincher wants from the audio department: “We always want people we like being around, whose input is going to be a part of it. You want what you want from everyone on a movie: to be making progress. You want people who aren’t going to look for problems just because they need attention; you want people who are going to contribute. I feel that the people that we’ve worked with can deliver whatever it is that we want to do. It’s just a question of, ‘what do we want to do?’ For me, that’s what we’re always struggling to do: it’s not trying to find the people to deliver, it’s finding the idea.” On finding the sound of Benjamin Button: “From the sound effects/design side of it, we’re sitting there, thinking, ‘Well, we’re not doing the urban sprawl thing. What are we doing? We’re doing period, and we don’t want it to be Masterpiece Theatre. We want it to be sort of sparse. One of the things we were intrigued by was the musicality of New Orleans and the moments of the period. People were raising chickens and slaughtering goats in the French Quarter, so we wanted to hear livestock. We made those kind of early and deliberate commitments to sound.” When the absence of sound is the sound: “That happens a lot. There are many times where you build something and you say, ‘there’s way too much going on.’ That’s probably, for us, more often than not. On this movie, we generally tried to make the lyrical work. As you get into a scene, there are best laid plans; a lot of times you’ll find out that something in the music seems to underline a different character. It ends up feeling more about this other character and that changes the balance. But that’s the stuff that you hope you’ll find: new, different, or weird ways of looking at it all.” AUDIO MEDIA DECEMBER 2008 27 http://www.dts.com
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