AudioMedia - March 2009 - (Page 26) STEPHEN BENNETT finds how the gritty, raw sounds of Mumbai’s slums are perfected in the green British country setting of Pinewood; and talks to Glenn Freemantle about how sound traditions and real emotion have helped to create perhaps the biggest award winner of 2009. S lumdog Millionaire, the story of a teenager growing up in the slums of Mumbai who becomes a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has become one of the surprise hits of the year. Slumdog (as it shall be henceforth called), is based on the novel by Vikas Swarup and is directed by Danny Boyle. Boyle’s previous work includes Trainspotting and The Beach, and if you’ve ever seen any of his films, you’ll know that the innovative use of sound design and music permeate his work. The film has been nominated for numerous awards, and has already scooped several gongs at the 2008 BAFTAS, including Best Music and Best Sound, while the 2009 Oscar wins include Best Sound Mixing, Best Song, Best Musical Score, as well as Best Film, Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Film Editing. our cue to make the film as intense, vibrant, and colourful as we could,” says Freemantle. “Danny sets the vibe for the movie, but doesn’t bog you down with details.” Commonly in films, the sound design is used to describe and enhance exactly what you see on the screen, but with Boyle’s latest project, sound24 took quite a different approach. “Slumdog is ‘sound design with emotion’,” explains Freemantle. “To achieve this level of intimacy, he and his team started from a stripped-down dialogue track and then re-built the atmosphere around it. “Doing it this way meant that we could add every bit of atmosphere back in again – but now with complete control over its placement in the soundfield,” he says. “We ended up with thousands of little bits of pieces all patched together, and we collected material from everywhere – we even went through the rushes and outtakes to see if there was an interesting shout from someone, or a snippet The people behind the sound design and editing of this commercial and critical success are sound24, located at Pinewood Studios, England. Glenn Freemantle, head honcho and Supervising Sound Editor on Slumdog, started in the business at the tender age of sixteen and threaded his way through to his present position via the traditional route – as he explains. “I worked with the late Jim Shields on films such as Yentil and Legend, but I started as a complete trainee. These days, people tend to go to college to study film sound, but I think that working your way up from runner is the best way to learn the business.” Freemantle actually practices what he preaches, as his current team has been honed in a similar fashion. “Most of the guys have been with me for 13 years or so, and some of them are now top sound designers – such as coeditor Tom Sayers, who was nominated for a BAFTA on Slumdog – but they came to me as trainees and worked through the same route as I did.” Central to Freemantle’s way of working is the assembly of a team he can trust – including Ben Barker (Effects Editor), Lee Herrick (Dialogue Editor), and The Sound team, based at Pinewood: (standing L-R) Tom Sayers, Niv Adiri, Danny Freemantle (Assistant Sound Editor). Ben Barker, Lee Herrick (sat L-R) Gillian Dodders, Glenn Freemantle. “When you’re a tightly knit team, it becomes really easy to work, as you’re not always trying to get someone to understand your way of thinking,” he says. Freemantle has worked with Boyle since The Beach, and the ongoing partnership is something he’s extremely happy with. “We get on really well and he’s a great guy to work with,” he enthuses. “We know what he wants, and the type of films he makes. He doesn’t tell you exactly what to do – which is brilliant – he wants your input and your creativity and he doesn’t lay down any rules.” For Slumdog, Boyle was keen to make sure that the intense feelings he’d had when filming in Mumbai made their way into the movie. “This was with an unusual doppler’d car horn. We went to this place in Brighton that specialises in Indian cars and recorded all of those, while Gillian Dodders (supervising Dialogue Editor) went out to Mumbai and spent several days recording atmos and crowd.” Freemantle likens the construction on Slumdog to a sound collage, which gave the team unprecedented control to position the atmos and effects around the dialogue in an attempt to recreate the noise and madness of the Mumbai slums. Location recording was performed in India by Resul Pookutty, and Freemantle’s technique of separating out the dialogue early on made sure that the ADR, also recorded in India, was kept to a minimum – which in turn helped enormously when matching any ADR to the original dialogue. “There were a lot of challenging and noisy locations in this film, and Gillian Dodders did a brilliant job sorting out all the best microphone angles for each take and removing any unwanted noises from the tracks,” says Ian Tapp, Sound Re-recording Mixer. “This enabled us to get the maximum amount of original production dialogue into the film, thus preserving the energy and spontaneity of the actors’ performances.” As is common in post these days, Digidesign’s Pro Tools played a major role in the sound design, and being able to keep everything ‘in the box’ was a crucial factor in enabling the film’s complex audio design. Richard Pryke premixed the effects in Pinewood’s Pressburger Theatre using the Euphonix System 5’s Eucon DAW control software to write automation directly into the Pro Tools sessions. “This enabled us to keep the whole FX tracklay completely live at the Final Mix,” says Tapp. “It also meant we could cut all the sounds and automation data together in one operation when tracks had to be re-conformed for recuts.” “While many of the earlier films I worked on had great sound design, there’s nowhere near the kind of detail you get nowadays,” says Freemantle. “The technology is great, 26 AUDIO MEDIA MARCH 2009
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