Photo: Richard Harbaugh / ©A.M.P.A.S.

Hollywood—Supervising Sound Editors Lon Bender and Victor Ray Ennis of Soundelux are among the nominees for Best Sound Editing in the 84^th Annual Academy Awards. This is the third Oscar nomination for Bender. He previously won the award, with Per Hallberg, in 1996 for Braveheart. This is the first Oscar nomination for Ennis. Winners will be announced February 26^th in Los Angeles.

“On behalf of everyone at CSS Studios, I would like to congratulate Lon, Victor and their team at Soundelux on this Oscar nomination,” said Robert C. Rosenthal, President of CSS Studios, Soundelux’s parent company. “I would also like to thank their peers in the Academy for recognizing their artistry. ‘Drive’ is a unique movie and one that makes truly innovative use of sound. It represents creativity in motion picture sound at its peak.”

Drive, from FilmDistrict and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, tells the story of a Hollywood stunt car driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a wheelman and discovers there is a contract out on him following a robbery gone bad. The movie is violent, yet stylish and emotionally gripping, and is being hailed by critics for its brashness and its brilliance.

For Bender, Ennis and the film’s sound team, which included Re-recording Mixers Roberto Fernandez and Dave Paterson of CSS Studios’ Sound One facility in New York, the film presented many unusual sonic challenges. Although tacitly an action tale, the film is also highly cerebral, alternating between moments of intense realism and surreality as the audience is drawn into the main character’s head.

“Although there are some exciting car chases in this movie, it’s not really a ‘car chase,’ movie,” Bender explains. “It’s about a character and his relationship to the world. And it’s about a car that transports him through life.”

“From a sound perspective, the film is sometimes soaring and intense and at other times, it forces you to lean forward and listen intently, but it all adds up to an experience you will never forget.”

Congratulations to Lon Bender and Victor Ray Ennis of Soundelux on their Oscar nomination for Sound Editing.

Artists from CSS Studios’ Todd-AO, Soundelux, Modern Music and Soundelux DMG are among the nominees for the 2012 Golden Reel Awards, sponsored by the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE).

Nominations include:

Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects and Foley in a Feature Film
FAST FIVE
DRIVE

Best Sound Editing: Dialogue and ADR in a Feature Film
THE WAY
ABDUCTION

Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR in a Feature Foreign Language Film
IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY
CIRCUMSTANCE

Best Sound Editing: Music in a Feature Film
TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

Best Sound Editing: Long Form Dialogue and ADR in Television
BIG LOVE

Best Sound Editing: Computer Interactive Entertainment
GEARS OF WAR
NEED FOR SPEED
SKYLANDERS SPYRO’S ADVENTURE CINEMATICS

“On behalf of CSS Studios, I wish to congratulate all of our nominees and thank the members of the MPSE for recognizing their work,” said Robert C. Rosenthal, President of CSS Studios. “We take great pride in the creativity and craftsmanship of our artists, who continue to lead the industry in their dedication to excellence in sound.”

Andy Koyama

Veteran Re-Recording Mixer Andy Koyama has joined independent sound company Todd-AO. Koyama will mix theatrical projects at Todd-AO’s Santa Monica facility. He arrives with more than 60 films to his credit, including the comedy Meet the Parents, the vampire tale New Moon and the summer blockbuster The Incredible Hulk. Most recently, he mixed The Grey, Director Joe Carnahan’sthriller set for release this month.

“Andy is an exceptionally talented artist as evidenced by his excellent body of work,” said Robert C. Rosenthal, President of CSS Studios, Todd-AO’s parent company. “He’s a great addition to the award-winning team at Todd-AO and we look forward to having a talent of Andy’s caliber available to filmmakers.”

Koyama began his career as a musician and recording engineer before moving into post production in Toronto.  In 2000, he moved to Los Angeles and proceeded to mix more than 40 films in the span of ten years. Koyama developed close relationships with several directors, including Jay Roach, for whom he has mixed three films.  In the past few years, Koyama mixed notable titles such as Burlesque, Soul Surfer and Battle Los Angeles, among others.

Koyama said that he was excited about the creative opportunities available at Todd-AO and the chance to collaborate with the sound editors at Soundelux, also a CSS Studios company. He noted that he has worked frequently with Soundelux’s  Supervising Sound Editors in the past, including, most recently, Mark Mangini on the 2011 comedy Mr. Popper’s Penguins.

Koyama added that the sound facilities at Todd-AO are second to none. “The dubbing stages are beautiful,” he said. “The stages are ideal in size, have excellent sound and are constantly being upgraded with the latest technology.”

 Soundelux

Marking Jolie’s debut as a writer and director, In the Land of Blood and Honey centers on a Bosnian Muslim woman and a Serbian soldier who fall in love even as both are swept up in the region’s terrible conflicts.

The film’s cast, who include Zana Marjanovic, Goran Kostic and Rade Serbedzija, is entirely made up of local actors, many of whom lived through the war as youths. The same actors appear in both versions of the film, which were shot simultaneously.

Sullivan was presented with two edited versions of the film and two sets of dialogue tracks. As neither she, nor any of the members of her crew, spoke Serbo-Croatian, a translator was brought in to help them with the language. “In the Serbo-Croatian version, we wanted to be sure that the actors were speaking the language correctly,” she explains, “because within that language, there are many dialects that relate to different ethnicities.”

Editing dialogue for the English-language version film presented a different sort of challenge. “The actors were speaking in what was their second language,” Sullivan says. “And so, we had accent issues and interpretation issues.”

 “We did a lot of ADR recording,” she adds. “We wanted to ensure that the accents weren’t too thick so that English-language audiences could understand their words.”

 “Becky and her team at Soundelux did a masterful job with shaping the sound design and paying meticulous attention to the dialogue in both versions of the film,” adds Jolie. “ In the Bosnian version, in particular, it was important to capture the nuances of the language so that native speakers accept it as real and authentic.”

Along with delivering clean dialogue tracks, Sullivan and her crew (including Dialogue Editor Glynna Grimala and Sound Effects Editor Ben Wilkins) produced sound effects to help tell the story. Given the grim nature of the film, and the fact that it is based on real events, the sound team aimed for realism. All of the gun and artillery sounds, for example, are accurate with regard to the weaponry used in the war. “It’s almost like a documentary,” Sullivan notes. “It’s definitely not a slick, Hollywood sound job.”

At certain points, however, the sound departs from strict realism in order to accent dramatic points. As an example, Sullivan cites a scene in which a group of Bosnian women are used as human shields by Serbian soldiers. “The women are distraught; they’ve almost lost their minds,” Sullivan explains. “And so, there, we went into something that is unrealistic, surreal—it’s all gunfire and laughing. They’ve ‘checked out’ mentally, because it’s so devastating.”

Sullivan also used sound to help capture the war’s pervasive atmosphere of fear. A number of scenes, for example, occur in a small room where Ajla, the film’s heroine, is confined by Serbian troops. “She is being held by the Serbian lieutenant, who’s in love with her, and so she is safe…or is she?” Sullivan says.

“People are being raped and killed, and so there is a sense that she could be taken out at any minute. It’s a scary, insecure place.

 “We kept the tones cold and the threat around her high by having the shoes of a guard walk by her door and by placing voices outside her window. Later, when the threat recedes, the tones in the room grow warmer and the exterior threats become less distinct.”

 That sort of subtlety and restraint is typical of the film’s sound; the intensity of the subject matter required little augmentation. “We didn’t overdo it,” Sullivan notes. “We kept it sparse. It’s cold, brutal and real.”

Re-Recording Mixer Marshall Garlington has joined Todd-AO. Garlington has more than 75 feature films to his credit, including two films in the Twilight series, Rambo, Blade, the recent remake of Conan the Barbarian, and also extensive credits in large format (IMAX) films. He will primarily be based at Todd-AO’s Hollywood facility and team with Re-Recording Mixer Joe Barnett.

“Marshall is a consummate professional who has produced a very impressive body of work, particularly in action movies,” said Robert C. Rosenthal, President of CSS Studios, Todd-AO’s parent company. “We are thrilled to welcome him into the Todd-AO family.”

In explaining his move to Todd-AO, Garlington cited the company’s unparalleled resources and the quality of its staff. “I look forward to working with the Todd-AO team and the opportunity to work on high caliber, creatively challenging projects,” he said.

Barnett, who has worked with Garlington on several projects, including the 2009 film Shrink, starring Kevin Spacey, looks forward to expanding their collaboration. “Marshall is a prodigious talent whose skills dovetail beautifully with mine,” Barnett said.

Garlington has recently been working as a freelancer. His recent film credits include Hesher, Traitor, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas and Delta Farce. His television credits include Lie to Me, The Inside and Las Vegas. He received an Emmy nomination in 2002 for the television movie The Lost Battalion.

Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers

Soundelux Supervising Sound Editors Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers won an HPA Award last night for Best Sound, Feature Film, for their work on Warner Bros. Pictures’ Green Lantern. They shared the award with Re-Recording Mixers John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Rick Kline.

Presented by the Hollywood Post Alliance, the HPA Awards recognize the achievements of individuals who work behind the scenes with ingenuity and creativity to create motion pictures, commercials and television programming.

“On behalf of CSS Studios, I congratulate Per and Karen, along with their team at Soundelux, who continually seek higher levels of excellence and innovation in feature film sound,” said CSS Studios President Robert C. Rosenthal. “The HPA Awards are particularly meaningful as they originate with our peers in the post production community and we are sincerely grateful to the HPA for this recognition.”

 The 2011 HPA Awards were held November 10^th in Los Angeles.

Greg Hedgepath

In Footloose, Paramount Pictures’ energetic remake of the 1984 classic film about a dance craze in a small Texas town, co-writer/director Craig Brewer achieves a very enjoyable balance: recreating the charismatic charm that made the original film one of the most popular of its era, while filtering it through a modern lens to make the story fresh and engaging to contemporary audiences.

In creating sound for the film, Supervising Sound Editors Greg Hedgepath and Frank Smathers of Soundelux, walked a similarly fine line. Their aim was to recreate the atmosphere of the original film, especially in dance scenes, while applying current sensibilities and recording techniques to create a new experience. “People have very fond memories of this movie, so we knew we couldn’t do anything that was too far out,” Hedgepath says. “We had to meet their expectations, and then exceed them.”

One instance where the sound team’s balancing act is apparent is in the film’s “cowboy bar scene” which includes a country line dance set to Big & Rich’s rousing Fake I.D. “There is a lot of focus on the dance steps,” recalls Hedgepath. “The camera dollies across the floor and there are also a lot of high angle shots of people dancing. The director really wanted to capture the sense of being in a cowboy bar, and one thing that you always hear in the cacophony of such bars is the sound of feet.”

Hedgepath, Smathers and their crew went to considerable lengths to accurately recreate the sound of the dancers’ footsteps, including conducting Foley sessions wherein they recorded a variety of cowboy boots. Additionally, dancers from the film were brought in to reproduce the dance on the Foley stage. For that session, Hedgepath had a dance floor brought into the stage and assembled upside down to produce a more dynamic sound.

While the dancers had no difficulty in recreating the dance routine, they were not able to perfectly match individual footsteps captured on film. The sound team overcame that issue with some editorial tricks. “We cut some things out, time-compressed others and used elements from several takes,” Hedgepath notes. “When you see it on film, it looks perfect. The audience assumes it is production sound.”

 One of the most dramatic uses of sound occurs in a scene where Ariel (Julianne Hough) plays chicken on a railroad track to demonstrate her wild side to Ren (Kenny Wormald). The sense of impending danger in the scene is even greater than in its counterpart in the original, in part, due to the way the sound of an approaching train is introduced.

 “It starts out as a distant horn, something you often hear in the movie,” Hedgepath says. “As the scene progresses, the train gets closer and closer until it rumbles right by camera.”

Building from a soft start to a near ear-shattering crescendo was challenging. “As the train goes by, you can see the tracks bending under the weight of the wheels,” Hedgepath observes. “We follow the wheels as they go by—you hear the squeak and the clack. We hear the banging of the train cars and the straining of the engine—the front of the engine and the rear of the engine.”

Music, obviously, plays a big role in the film, and in many instances songs are woven directly into the environment, such as the barroom scenes. The sound editorial team worked closely with Re-Recording Mixers Mike Prestwood Smith and Daniel J. Leahy from Todd-AO Hollywood, to weave the music, sound and dialogue into a seamless environment. One of the more interesting examples of this involves Jana Kramer’s updated version of Let’s Hear It for the Boy (sung by Deniece Williams in the 1984 original). As Hedgepath explains, the song is first heard through the speaker of a transistor radio.

 “The music starts out mono, static-y and tinny, but then grows wider and wider until all you hear is music,” Hedgepath says. “The musical transition parallels a tonal, emotional shift in the film,” Hedgepath adds; during the course of the song Ren’s friend Willard (Miles Teller) learns to dance. “The building music adds to the emotional power of the scene,” he states. “By the end, you’re cheering for Willard.”

Hedgepath notes that one of the sound elements he enjoyed most was the aging Volkswagen that Ren drives and works on over the course of the film. “At the beginning of the film, the car frequently misfires,” Hedgepath recalls. “We play that up in a scene where Ren is pulled over by a cop for disturbing the peace. The car sputters and winds to a stop. It plays low, but inevitably, the audience chuckles.”

Gradually, the car’s performance improves, its resurrection paralleling a change in Ren’s fortunes. By the end, both are hitting on all cylinders. “The car gets better and better,” Hedgepath says. “The mirror is on, the headlights are all there, the antenna is back in place.  Slowly improving the sound of the car throughout the film was challenging, but also a lot of fun.”