Halo on Paramount+ is quickly establishing its own creative identity and becoming a worthy addition to the universe first established in the iconic 2001 video game. Despite a few slightly controversial changes to the source material, the new Halo series has successfully imagined the story of Master Chief into live-action. In fact, Halo season 2 has already been greenlit, promising viewers more time with John-117 and Cortana.
Of course, the image of a stoic Master Chief isn't the only part of Halo that has achieved legendary status. The villains, the music, and even the sounds of the game are just as embedded in the consciousness of anyone who's spent time wielding a battle rifle or magnum pistol. Sound designer Brennan Mercer and re-recording mixers Matthew Chan and Lou Solakofski, key members of the sound team for the Halo show, spoke with Screen Rant about incorporating the game's iconic sounds in the pursuit of creating something new.
Screen Rant: For those who don't know what a sound designer or a mixer does, can you just give a quick rundown of your jobs?
Brennan Mercer: I think most people's preconception when they watch a film is that everything that they hear is occurring at the time of filming. That everything is just recoded by some type of microphone, and maybe you added music later, but that's probably the extent of an addition.
But in all reality, the microphone that they're using is focused specifically on the voice of the actors, and everything else on set is trying to be minimized as much as possible. They'll stop traffic on the street, maybe they'll shoo some birds out of the trees, unplug the fridge if you're in an interior location, and you're just focusing on the clarity and quality of the voice. And after that fact, all of this natural sound, or augmented sound, is added in. That can be from the perspective of foley, which is the feet, the cloth moves, and the handling of objects, or that can be from sound effects, which is adding the ambience of natural or designed sounds; so, the birds in the trees, the wind in the air, the sound of an alien technology activating; and also music. The entire emotional context of the film or TV show.
So, the sound designer is specifically putting in sound effects, and the mixers are taking the different sound elements and mixing them in context.
Lou Solakofski: Yeah. In the mixing area, we deal with all the incoming elements that have been... There's a dialogue editing team, so they edit all that dialogue that was captured on the day. And there's an ADR and crowd team. Either for a line change or performance change, or just a location that looked wonderful but actually didn't have good sound, the ADR team will re-record the actors and add all the sounds of the background people.
We deal with the incoming dialogue and ADR crowd tracks, we deal with the incoming music score and song tracks, and we also incorporate all that foley and sound design and sound editing. So, Matt and I work as a team, and we wrangle all those elements and try to create a blend that goes with the picture and fulfills whatever the showrunner or director is trying to convey.
Screen Rant: Since you two work as a team, are you each tackling different elements of mixing? Are you passing things off to one another?
Matthew Chan: Lou is the lead mixer, so he's looking after the dialogue and the music. Typically, the more experienced mixer is looking after those things. And then I'm the second mixer, and I'm looking after the sound effects. I'm working on all the stuff that Brennan, and we have another wonderful sound effects editor named David Caporale, I'm working with their material. Also the foley that's coming in, which is recorded in a foley studio called Footsteps. And we work off of each other, and we work on a big console, and there's a transport, so we hit play and all the sound rolls with the movie. We're adjusting the levels, and determining how loud things are, how in the background things are, which speaker they're coming out of. That's mixing.
Screen Rant: And you've all three worked on a bunch of projects together before. Are you a package deal? And what's it like coming into a show like this when you already have a working relationship?
Lou Solakofski: Well Brennan and I have worked together on The Handmaid's Tale series, which was awesome, and Mat and I have worked together on a bunch of other things. But quite often, Matt is leading his own shows. But for a show like Halo, it's just very large and very complex and we really needed two experienced mixers, so we teamed up and, you know, we kind of did that division of labor. But there's no kind of package.
I think it's more our clients ask for a team that's suitable to the scale of the production. So if we had a lower-budget show, we might use a different set of people, but in the case of this show we kind of had to bring as many seasoned and experienced creatives as we could together.
Screen Rant: And how early did you get involved with Halo? How long have you been working on this?
Matthew Chan: *Laughs* This is a good question.
Lou Solakofski: This is a good question, because being brought on to understand what was going to happen, and... because they did start shooting quite a long time ago. We were brought on pretty early, a couple of years ago, and there were many things that were like, "Hey let's do a sound experiment with this or that," even while they were shooting. Before they had any actual episodes put together. And it's such a VFX-heavy show that sometimes you'd be trying to do some sound things based on voice instructions and no real images or anything like that. But truly, like, having it come together... [to Brennan] When did you come on?
Brennan Mercer: Well, I should mention there's another sound designer, a very accomplished sound designer named David Evans. He was the first, along with Lou, [one of] the first people to initiate the kind of relationship with the team. He went to Budapest, in Hungary, and he went to something called Halo Boot Camp, in which all of the - there's kind of a key creative team, and they needed to be initiated, essentially, into all of the lore and different elements, so a lot of that was the sound elements that came from the game. And I believe that was almost two and a half, three years ago.
Lou Solakofski: Actually it's good that you bring it up. It was a super important job, because as they were acquiring footage, they had picture cutting rooms going in Budapest. David was flown there so he could actually feed the editing room sounds, and the ideas of sounds. As they were putting scenes together, they would ask him to create, like, "What do you think the Spartan uniform would sound like?" and all of that kind of stuff. So he was involved at a very early stage, before post-production really got rolling in the sound area, but just to keep the scene assemblies and the early picture edits going.
Screen Rant: Are you getting files from 343 Industries? Are they working with you on the sounds, or do you have to create everything?
Brennan Mercer: Yes. We've been very connected with their team because the sound of the game is so iconic and epic, and we needed to do that a great service to be able to be kind of consistent with that. So they've been very helpful in terms of... Any time a new weapon comes up, a new technology that exists in the game, or even if it doesn't, we always speak to the 343 team first. They give us feedback about something that already exists, or what it could potentially be related to, and then we receive both the final sounds as well as the source elements that make that final sound so that we can take those and re-mix them in a way that better suits the perspective of the show or the scene.
It's been a really great relationship, they've been very open about everything. It's been really awesome to hear the finished product, but also to find all the little secrets of what went into the sounds as well. Which I don't think I can speak too much about, but is very interesting.
Matthew Chan: It's generally been really cool. We've been on the calls during the mix with Kiki Wolfkill and Frank O'Conner, and it's really funny when a question about something canon comes up, and you get this really incredible encyclopedic explanation that goes all the way to like, how that thing was manufactured and out of what materials, or what space ship material is driving something. It's really great.
Screen Rant: So what's the process of making new sounds that are going to fit in this already pretty established universe? Are you building off what they send you, or are you going off and field recording things like Ben Burtt? What's your process like?
Brennan Mercer: It's a big mixture of all those things. I think any sound designer tries to create their own original recordings for a new show. Given the scope of this show, you also have to use a combination of library sounds, and anything that's iconic, you have to reference the game sound. Use those sounds either identically, or the ingredients that make them up. But when it comes to creating new stuff... Like Matt talked about, Kenneth Peters, Kiki Wolfkill, and Frank O'Conner were the three people who were giving us the advice on either physics of the thing, like the technology in the game, or the philosophy behind it. And then you kind of have to build off that. So...
Lou Solakofski: Talking about the Spartan uniform, there's a certain mass to it, and you can't just say "Make this sound heavy." They're in a position to say, "Well, a typical Spartan weighs this many hundred pounds because of all the physical enhancements they've had, and then the suit weighs like another thousand pounds on top of that. So when a Spartan moves, you've got to be able to have this sense of mass, but also they're enhanced, so they need to move quickly." And so they would advise on all those kinds of things so then, you know, Brennan would have to come up with something that sounds like a big heavy metal suit that moves very quickly.
Matthew Chan: And effortlessly.
Screen Rant: In researching you, obviously you've done these massive high-profile shows, but I didn't see a ton of science fiction. Are there unique challenges in doing this genre, even aside from it just being Halo?
Screen Rant: I know you can't give anything away, but is there any part of the show that has been particularly exciting to work on? Whether it's a moment, or a character, or just some aspect of the universe?
Lou Solakofski: I think everything.
Matthew Chan: I mean, as the FX mixer I'm like a kid in a candy store, because Brennan does all the hard work of creating the sounds with David. It's been really satisfying just to see all of that stuff show up on the stage and be like, "Holy crow." Especially when you [Brennan] came up with the Spartan moves, I remember Lou and I were just like... you gave us a bunch of layers, and we found the one layer that we really loved and were like, "What is this?" And it was just sort of magical. In that regard, it's been really cool. I mean, there's a huge battle in the middle of the season I think we're all pretty blow away by.
Lou Solakofski: Yeah. Super exciting. People will want to see that for sure.
Screen Rant: Are you on to another project now, or the next season of Halo? What are you up to now?
Lou Solakofski: We're all going to do different things. I'm moving on to a movie called Women Talking, which is going to, like - we're running a little bit late because of VFX, so as soon as I jump off Halo I'm going straight to that movie.
Matthew Chan: I'm doing a Netflix show, which is a dramatization of the Thai cave rescue.
Brennan Mercer: I'll be doing Handmaid's Tale with Lou in May.
Check out more Halo interviews - such as with stars Pablo Schreiber, Natascha McElhone and Olive Gray - on our site.
New episodes of Halo drop Thursdays on Paramount+.
"sound" - Google News
April 10, 2022 at 12:49AM
https://ift.tt/5DKsFqb
Halo: Sound Team Interview - Screen Rant
"sound" - Google News
https://ift.tt/7Vvue8E
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment